The SCL website is again collecting predictions for the coming year. There is always a good crop relating to eDisclosure / eDiscovery – mine usually arrive just after the print edition has gone to press, and I suspect that will happen again this year.
The first round of contributions relating to eDiscovery / eDisclosure (you will see in the moment why I am emphasising these two labels), from Mike Taylor of i-Lit, Andrew Haslam of Allvision, and Charles Holloway of Millnet. You can read them for yourself, so I will not recite them here. The one which catches my eye, however, is number 6 on Mike Taylor’s list. It reads:
Despite the UK not having a ‘discovery’ process any more many well-known commentators will continue to insist on referring to UK e-disclosure as e-discovery, fuelling the perception that what we do in the UK is identical to that which is done in the US. It is not.
Hmm. The only two commentators who refer to “eDiscovery” as a matter of choice rather than ignorance are me and Jonathan Maas of Ernst & Young (the link, you will note, is to E&Y’s eDisclosure page), and we are both careful to distinguish between references to the Civil Procedure Rules and discussion about the process. I refer to this quite often, most recently in the opening paragraphs of this article which I will not repeat here.
Let’s dismember Mike’s short sentence bit by bit, starting with “many well-known commentators”, and perhaps substituting “commentators of whom you may have heard”, since “well-known” rather over-states it if applied to any of us in this small patch. I wish there were “many” of us – we need much more discussion and, most of all, more anecdotal evidence of what actually happens in correspondence and in case management conferences around the country. One of the many positive things about US eDiscovery is the breadth and depth of the informed discussion about it which goes on. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Chris Dale 
