FTI webinar: financial, transactional and operational databases in e-disclosure

FTI Consulting are presenting a webinar on structured data on Thursday 19 November at 1300 GMT. The subject is perceived by some as too difficult to talk about, but it cannot be ignored.

Elephants have provided a recurring theme throughout this blog. They are large, hard to get your arms around and difficult to describe to someone who is not familiar with them – which makes them the perfect model for the structured databases in which a very high proportion of company information resides.

E-mail, and user files like Word documents and Excel spreadsheets spring readily to the mind of a lawyer required to disclose “documents”. Sources such as HR and financial databases tend to be overlooked, largely because they usually bear little relationship to the conventional idea of a “document”.

FTI webinar – Controlling E-Discovery Costs

FTI Technology are presenting a web seminar on November 5 (that’s today) at 2pm Eastern | 11.00am Pacific | 19.00 GMT. Called Advice from Counsel: In-House Pros on E-Discovery Costs Containment, it is presented by Ari Kaplan, who will present the results of a survey of in-house counsel and senior IT people.

Although the survey was of US companies only, the results are universal – this is not about FRCP or sanctions but about the expectation that in-house legal teams will achieve the same or more with lower budgets and fewer resources, including the spend on outside lawyers. This is happening everywhere and the conclusions are as valid in countries beyond the US. We have gone way beyond shaving down charging rates and other minor economies, and into fundamental reassessments of what is really necessary to achieve the objective.

The answers inevitably lie in a mixture of process, people and technology. The perfect model, viewed in the abstract, is that companies reserve their external lawyers for the things which they do supremely well, and keep control of as much as possible of the rest by a mixture of in-house teams and technology and by direct relationships with providers of software and services.

The primary target is to cut the cost of review by minimising the amount of data sent to the lawyers – there is much more money to be saved by reducing the lawyer hours than by trimming the charging rates. The newer generations of clustering and visualisation tools are not merely more easily understood and accurate, but deliver results which can be audited and, if necessary, re-run with different parameters. The word “repeatable” means more than being able to validate the results – if the first-pass processes are routinely done in-house, then conclusions reached last time can be re-used when similar ground has to be covered for a different case.

I have written a fair amount about this shift – lawyers must either embrace it and learn to fit into the clients’ processes, or do without the work. It will be good to have some statistical backing for what is known to be happening, and Ari Kaplan’s overview and analysis will, like the results themselves, be relevant beyond the US.

Registration is here.

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LexisNexis eDiscovery conference in Singapore

As you might infer from its name, the e-Disclosure Information Project set out with purely national ambitions. England and Wales is the only jurisdiction in the world to give the name e-Disclosure to the process of identifying, preserving, collecting and exchanging documents for litigation. If I had known that two years later I would be speaking in Brussels, Washington and Singapore within three weeks of each other, I would not have picked a name with so narrow a jurisdictional scope.

The wider I cast my net, the more it becomes clear that the jurisdictions which require discovery of documents (principally England and Wales, the US, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore) have more similarities than differences in their approaches to the problems and the solutions raised by electronic documents. At one level this is obvious – all of these jurisdictions give pre-eminence to contemporaneous documents as the primary source of evidence, they have all seen a vast growth in volumes of evidence, and there are a limited number of ways in which court rules and procedures could develop to take account of mass documentation in adversarial proceedings in which justice is only accessible if it can be afforded. If you were to describe the problem to someone who, although suitably skilled and intelligent, had no knowledge of the developed law and procedures, you would end up with a solution whose essentials were broadly similar to those which obtain in the jurisdictions which I have named.

Where does a wise man hide a leaf?

What connects Father Brown’s deduction that a trusted old soldier had been a villain with Autonomy’s tracing of Jérôme Kerviel’s activities at Société Générale? Both stories involved not just hiding leaves in forests but making a forest in which to hide the leaves. Companies need to get a grip on their data.

The Times has been running a rather good series of supplements on matters relevant to business. Last week’s was on Corporate Fraud, and I and other e-Disclosure commentators were interviewed for an article called Finding a hidden leaf in a forest.

The heading is a misquotation. What I actually said in my interview was “Where does a wise man hide a leaf?”. This expression was used by Lord Justice Jacob in Nichia v Argos in his discussion about mass disclosure as opposed to the consideration of documents “with some care to decide whether they should be disclosed”. His paragraph 47 says this:

“…it is the downstream costs caused by the disclosure which so often are so substantial and so pointless. It can even be said, in cases of massive disclosure, that there is a real risk that the really important documents will get overlooked. Where does a wise man hide a leaf?”

Earles v Barclays Bank reported in the Times

Earles v Barclays Bank was reported in The Times today with the heading Disclosing electronic data.

I have already written about this (see Costs penalty for non-compliance with e-disclosure obligations). It is significant at several levels: unlike Digicel it is a fairly ordinary case; it is firmly grounded in authorities about evidence and not merely about disclosure or electronic disclosure; it covers the use of disproportionately expensive lawyers as well as procedural defects; perhaps most importantly, it is a case where documentary evidence would have proved immediately what it took much oral evidence to show, possibly allowing the case to be dealt with on a summary basis. The disclosure defects did actually cost time,  money and court time.

Spitting on the deck of the CPR

Unintended consequences are not necessarily unforeseeable. It was wholly predictable that the pre-issue obligations of the 1999 Civil Procedure Rules would shift the battleground to the front end of the litigation, and with obvious consequences in costs. As with the notoriously hard-fought US discovery process, if the rules give a weapon to the lawyers, then their duty is to use it. Lord Woolf seems a bit miffed, but has more to contribute to the debate than his reported attacks imply.

When Stanley Baldwin retired as Prime Minister and handed over to Neville Chamberlain, he promised “not to spit on the deck nor speak to the man at the wheel”. If Lord Woolf’s only contribution to the current debate were to come down from his lair every often and attack those who follow in his footsteps, then he would do better to stay at home. He has more to offer us than that.

Woolf recently attacked lawyers, judges and the government at a meeting of the London Solicitors Litigation Association, saying that they are all to blame for the fact that we have not seen the hoped-for reduction in litigation costs. Costs have in fact risen, putting litigation beyond the reach of all but the richest.

Costs penalty for non-compliance with e-disclosure obligations

A judgment given yesterday by His Honour Judge Simon Brown QC sitting as an Additional High Court Judge in the Birmingham Mercantile Court, will focus minds on the need to comply with the requirements of Part 31 CPR and the Practice Direction to Part 31 CPR when giving disclosure.

The case is Earles v Barclays Bank Plc in which the successful Defendant was penalised in its costs recovery after failing to observe the requirements of the disclosure rules. The judge was at pains to stress that there was no intent to conceal documents and that the omissions were the result of incorrect decisions as to the proportionality of the scope of search. The focus is not on the rules for their own sake but on the fact that if the Defendant’s disclosure had been conducted properly, then not only would much time have been saved at trial but a summary judgment application might have been successful.

How was ILTA for you?

There are two halves to the question “How was ILTA for you?”. One is the personal reaction. Did I learn something and see some interesting technology? Did I meet interesting people? Did I have fun? The answer to all these questions is Yes, as I expected. The more serious question concerns the state of the industry, by which I mean the lawyers who are involved in e-discovery for litigation and regulation and their clients as well as those who provide software and services to them. Let’s take the easy bit first.

I am luckier than most at ILTA. I have no responsibilities apart from talking to pleasant people about a subject in which I am interested. I have no stands to put up and man; I do not have to do any hard selling or make any buying decisions; such formal meetings as I have are a pleasure rather than a burden; I do not have projects running back in the office and anxious clients to keep contact with; I have no staff to be responsible for nor is anyone responsible for me. My sole “duty” is to see people I know and like, to meet people I do not know, and to write about some of it afterwards.

On that basis, I am easily pleased. The venue was just fine, the organisation impeccable, the sessions and booths interesting, and I was in conversation with agreeable people from arrival to departure except when I chose to sit quietly writing. A lawyer from the US, the UK, or anywhere else where documents are collected for civil proceedings could have informed him or herself at any level – those new to the subject get a gentle immersion which they can take at their own pace, whether in sessions, by going round the stands or by just talking to others; those who want a higher level of learning, technology or discussion can easily find it.

Judicial College gives hope of e-disclosure training

Today’s Times reports on the launch of a new Judicial College which will give judges the opportunity to top up their skills and keep up to date with developments in the law, practice and procedure. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, introducing the new scheme, makes the point that judges work alone and that “one judge very rarely sees how another judge sets about his or her work”.

The prospectus for the new college will be published next week. It will be interesting to see if case management, and in particular the handling of electronic disclosure, will feature in the prospectus as a stand alone topic.

Disclosure is one of the biggest components in a civil litigation case. Its costs have grown in proportion to the volume of documents which exist, and out of all proportion to the sums at issue. Judicial control of electronic disclosure or, rather, the lack of control, was highlighted in a report by KPMG in October 2007. Many of those who made representations to Lord Justice Jackson’s Civil Litigation Costs Review emphasised the importance of helping the judges with this, and he so recorded in Part 8 of his Preliminary Report (see pages 381 and 382).

EDiscovery certification bars new entrants

I said in an earlier article (Recruiting one’s strength for post-recession litigation support) that I would come back to the difficult subject of e- discovery certification. The context in which it came up was that of the individual skills of litigation support professionals, and that is what this article is about. It is worth observing, however, that the assessment of e-disclosure / e-disclosure ability comes up also in other settings, including:

• The competence of services providers to render the services which they advertise.
• The fitness of a lawyer or firm of lawyers to practice in litigation in a world dominated by electronic documents, and of judges to manage cases.
• Specific technical skills acquired by following a curriculum and taking an exam, such as those required to use Guidance Software’s EnCase products.
• Training in the use of a particular application.

Whilst some or all of these link into my subject, I mention them mainly to emphasise that they are not my primary concern here. I am concerned with the question whether individuals employed within a firm or company ought to follow a course of study leading to a piece of paper which demonstrates their aptitude. I will say straight off that I am dead against this, but the arguments to the contrary are not to be lightly dismissed in a single sentence.

E-discovery double-act on video

A few days after advocating the use of YouTube videos to promote new ediscovery understanding, I found myself in one with Browning Marean of DLA. Appearing soon at a cinema near you – well, on PivotalDiscovery.com anyway.

If you put a labrador, like my dog Saxon, down almost anywhere – the Moon, say – it does not take him long to find a stick or tennis ball. He does not look for them, particularly, but they just turn up. Much the same is true of me at an e- discovery conference – I wander around, confident that I will soon come across somebody I know or total strangers who seem to know me (which is one up on Saxon who does not generally get hailed by passing tennis balls).

I was walking around the opening party at ILTA 09 having, as I thought, spoken to everyone I knew, when a figure detached herself from a crowd and introduced herself. It was Kina Kim of PivotalDiscovery. com which describes itself as “the community for ediscovery and litigation professionals”. PivotalDiscovery has links to other sites and articles (including, as it turned out, one of mine), a career portal, and an index of events. It also has videos, including some on YouTube, and can be followed on Twitter.

Collaborating to avoid the end of lawyers

I am not going to give you a full report of Richard Susskind’s talk to ILTA last week. Its basic premise is well-known to anyone interested in this area; I have written about it before; if you are interested, you would have read the book; and anyway, recording a Susskind speech is like trying to catch Niagara in a bucket. If you are not interested in what he says, then you will be dead commercially within five years anyway, whether you are in-house counsel responsible to the board, or a law firm hoping to receive instructions. This does not mean that you have to agree either with Susskind’s premises or his conclusions, but you do need to know what the arguments are.

Richard is not, it seems, much taken by my comparison between him and Private Frazer (see Richard Susskind End of Lawyers resources. Of course, (and as I acknowledged) a précis which characterises his message simply as one simply of doom ignores the fact that the title of his book The End of Lawyers? ends in a question mark. Even that chap who used to wander along Oxford Street with a banner proclaiming the imminent end of the world offered redemption to those who repented, and Susskind does the same. Redemption however, whether in business terms or in the wider spiritual context, lacks a simple road-map. We do not even have a destination, just the certainty that where we are is not the place to be. Recognising that much is a good start.

Instead of summarising the lot, I will pick one or two of the points which Richard Susskind made which seemed to me to have particular relevance in the litigation support context.

Bigger in America

It is obvious why American discovery must necessarily be bigger than discovery anywhere else. Everything else is bigger here and it is perhaps a point of honour – there would be a sense of failure if any other country had bigger discovery exercises than America.

Take the rain, for example. It was pouring down when I last left the US, after CEIC in Orlando in May. We could barely see the car in front as we drove to the airport. That same storm seemed to have reached Washington today, as Nigel Murray of Trilantic and I drove towards the Gaylord National Resort in Washington, the venue for ILTA09.

Like its twin in Dallas which was ILTA’s venue last year, this place is enormous. I spent the first hour or so exploring its vastness. It is not that there is nobody here. As its name implies, the Gaylord is a resort, and, for the weekend least, there are a lot of families here. There are two wedding parties going on – I can guess that they are separate parties because their respective guests are stunningly turned out in what appear to be themed uniforms, pale green silk for one and deep red and white for the other. Do only beautiful people go to weddings here or is there something about weddings which makes everyone look attractive? This is another of these “which came first” questions, rather like the ones which arise about the size of document populations – did the technology for document creation and storage develop to meet a need for more documents, or do we create more documents because the technology exists?

Detailed assessments of litigation costs

Everything was a mystery when I became an articled clerk in the late 1970s, not least that label “articled clerk”. Your articles were a period of apprenticeship, and the name also of the document which you and your principal signed by which he was bound to instruct you in the mysteries of legal practice. Of all the mysteries, the darkest was the job of the costs draftsmen. Literally darkest in fact, since these two elderly gentlemen shared a large gloomy room in the basement of the firm’s Georgian building in Gray’s Inn. My visits to them were rare, probably to deliver a file found to be missing from the huge piles which surrounded them. I never saw them anywhere else in the office. From time to time, a pile of files would return from its (always prolonged) stint in the basement, accompanied by pages of narrative and figures on stiff, strangely ruled, paper.

Firms of that size had not, until recently, had litigation partners. The client partner fronted the case, with the unglamorous parts falling to a managing clerk. The managing clerk’s office, also in the basement, had been turned into a stationery cupboard by my day, which gives some idea of his status.

In due course, the two old gentlemen disappeared and their role was contracted out. I recall taking part in only one formal dispute over the costs payable by the loser to the winner. My recollection is that my opponent was as ignorant as I was about the procedure, the principles and the components of the bill.

The costs of arguing about costs were a powerful disincentive to agree them, and it was usually possible to lump the costs in with the settlement figure or agree a rough and ready percentage of the fees actually paid by the winning party. Nothing much changes, I suspect, except that the amounts now are much larger, both absolutely and as a proportion of the sums in issue. Many cases are fought on, long after the parties have lost interest in the issues, because the sunk costs are so high.

How can we do this differently?

I am sent a fair number of press releases, although many of those who know I am interested in them seem to think that I acquire my information by some kind of intuition. Many of the PRs I do get add little to the sum of human knowledge. Many more, themselves worth following up, join a queue whose head they never reach. It is all a matter of timing. The upside to my refusal to do copy-paste journalism may be more reflective comment, but there are only seven working days in the week and a press release needs a wider context than merely its own news.

As I mentioned in a post last week (The right combination of skills at the best possible price) H5 dropped a press release into my InBox as I was writing an article about litigation lawyers dividing up cases and passing on the functions which they either do not do very well or cannot do cost effectively (or “cheaply” as the client would put it). I had in mind the marketing collateral, as well as the working benefits, of an approach which shifted the focus away from charging rates and towards placing tasks where they could be done best. The immediate context was outsourcing, for example of litigation coding and first-pass review, but I made the point that such a division of labour may be a marriage of equals rather than merely lawyers hiving off the unprofitable stuff and sending it down the food-chain. The H5 press release related to just such a marriage of equals, in this case between H5 and O’Melveny & Myers.

Electronic Disclosure – Jackson by numbers

I have some heavyweight writing in hand at the moment involving, amongst other things, an analysis of the costs figures which Lord Justice Jackson set out in his Preliminary Report on Litigation Costs. Most of my articles come from my head, fortified by occasional references to other sources. These heavier papers are rather different, with lots of cross-referring between, in this case, the Preliminary Report, its Appendix 19 and the Civil Procedure Rules.

With that section done, something made me look back through my as-yet unfiled InBox to the week before I went on holiday. I had a vague recollection that I had not followed up a message from Laurence Eastham, editor of the Society for Computers and Law’s excellent magazine and website. I found it eventually – a recommendation that I look at an e-disclosure article on the Computers and Law site. Remorsefully, I looked it up – to find that it was all about the costs figures which Lord Justice Jackson set out in his preliminary report. I could have saved myself some research.

The right combination of skills at the best possible price

“Outsourcing” is just a label for the distribution of functions into the hands best equipped to perform them at the lowest cost. Both the functions and the relative costs change over time and need constant re-evaluation. Cost reduction involves more than the lowest rates, and the right marriage of skills does not necessarily require foreign adventures.

I wonder if it was wise of me to write about outsourcing (Do two outsourcing stories in one week presage a trend?). Every mom and pop coding shop from the Himalayas to Kanyakuman has been ringing me up – well, two of them anyway and that is two too many – trying to press their services on me. I had thought that I had seen them off last year.

I object to these calls on so many levels, none of which stems directly from the fact that they emanate from India. One is their grapeshot nature – the fact that the word “litigation” appears on my website seems to warrant picking up the phone to me, without any attempt to determine whether my role is likely to involve outsourcing coding work (it does not). Another is the lack of any attempt by the caller to distinguish his company’s services from the hundreds of others offering similar services; each of them recites some basic litigation support functions as if they had just invented the concept, and if you ask the for something, anything, which makes the caller’s company better than (or even just different from) any other, this is taken as an invitation to start from the top again with the recital of basic functions. I resent the repeated calls – either they are not bothering to record the answer I gave last time or they hope to batter me into submission; perhaps they hope to catch me out in an unguarded moment so that I inadvertently send them a big job. Above all, I reckon that if you are ringing up somebody in England, you should choose someone with a basic grasp of English to make the call. If the salesmen cannot speak English clearly, what might I expect from the technicians if I sent them a job to do?

Jackson Litigation Costs Review consultation ends

A few seconds before midnight on Friday, an e-mail arrived from Abigail Pilkington, the Clerk to the Review of Civil Litigation Costs. It was a bit eerie, really. The East Wing of the Royal Courts of Justice is a cavernous, Gothic place at the best of times, like Hogwarts without the wizards. I got locked into an upper corridor one evening, many years ago (accidentally, I should say, looking for a judge to grant an injunction) and found it a disquieting experience. I pictured Abigail on her own in the gloom, conscientiously sending out acknowledgements to late submissions like mine. Closer inspection showed firstly that the e-mail was an autoreply, and secondly that it had actually been sent within a few moments of me sending my e-mail earlier that day. Perhaps the RCJ needs some wizards to look at it is e-mail system.

The message included a reminder that submissions must also be sent as hard copy. Fortunately (since the 31 July deadline was due to expire 30 seconds later), I had finished my submission with a day in hand and had noticed the requirement to send a hard copy in the nick of time. That took me back a bit – I don’t think I have sent out a hard copy of anything this century. I blew dust off the printer, and found one of those plastic spines which had fortunately survived my recent cull of office equipment which I don’t use any more. After lots of faffing about with envelopes and Sellotape, I set off to find a post office. Gordon Brown’s commitment to public services has included closing many of these essential local services, and our nearest one, some way off, is run with that surly inattentiveness which results from having a monopoly. You can’t drive to it – there is usually a queue, and the traffic wardens are the only competent and efficient representatives of our local authorities here in Oxford. So I waited for a gap in the rain, and walked to the post office, queued by the notices warning of all the services which post offices do not provide any more, had my package weighed, paid for the stamp, and trudged back to my desk.

Once bitten is twice shy – but you may find that things have changed

My experience of trying voice recognition software again after a failed experiment some years ago, has messages for those who have not caught up with developments in litigation support software.

I have come back to voice recognition software after many years of assuming that it was an unwieldy and inaccurate method of transferring words from head to screen. I am immediately hooked and regret all those years spent crouched over a keyboard. Or do I? Is it possible that I have come back to it just at the point where it has reached a level of accuracy which is adequate for my needs, and just when those needs are greatest?

The e-disclosure context here is all those potential users of litigation support applications who dip their toes into the water once and retreat vowing never to try again. Some inadequacy, ranging from an outright system failure which lost their case through to a minor annoyance which became too tiresome to tolerate put them off, often with cries of “I told you so” ringing in their ears.

Lord Neuberger to be Master of the Rolls

It is good news that Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury is to be the new Master of the Rolls from 1 October (see the Times story here). The Master of the Rolls is the Head of Civil Justice and therefore the one who will be in charge of implementing the litigation costs recommendations to be made by Lord Justice Jackson at the end of this year.

His past roles include a stint as Judge in Charge of Modernisation which is a useful piece of background to bring to a civil justice system which desperately needs bringing up to date, both in its own systems and in the attitudes which the judiciary bring to court and should expect of parties.

I sat next to him at a Judicial Studies Board meeting last year when HHJ Simon Brown QC and I went with Mike Brown of Epiq Systems to talk about electronic disclosure and to show what modern litigation support systems were capable of doing. It would fair to say that not everyone in the audience got the point. Lord Neuberger certainly did.

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Preserving the old ways, protecting the new ways

This column, as you may have noticed, is deeply attached to the old principles of discovery of documents as a means of bringing evidence before the court. It is also a determined advocate of new ways of managing it. The US has tended to look on our rules and practice as rather quaint. As the gloss comes off the American way, however, there is a new appreciation of the British approach.

My title comes from a 1968 song by the Kinks. The Village Green Preservation Society included the lines

Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do?

The Kinks were past their prime by 1968, with Waterloo Sunset and Sunny Afternoon behind them. It was the year in which Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple were new, and the nostalgia and sentiment of The Village Green Preservation Society were deliberately out of the mainstream, championing old virtues in a style redolent of an older (and perhaps non-existent) past. The previous year’s Summer of Love and flowers in your hair may in truth have been pretty unsophisticated concepts, but they seemed very modern compared with Ray Davies’s plea for “little shops, china cups and virginity”.

US-UK cross-fertilisation for discovery

Vince Neicho, litigation support expert at Allen & Overy in London, has an interesting article in Legal Week about the increasing amount of discussion and shared ideas between those interested in e-discovery / eDisclosure in the US and the UK.

The heading, The same, only different, and the graphic which merges the flags of the two countries, presage the points which Vince makes. There are a mass of differences between the way the courts of the two countries approach the obligations which the parties have to disclose documents. In many ways, the perception amongst UK lawyers and judges that the whole business is just very expensive stems from these outward differences.

What the article does, however, is to emphasise that there are also core similarities, and that these are likely to increase as each side learns more about the rules and practices in the others’ jurisdiction.

Do two outsourcing stories in one week presage a trend?

The decision by Rio Tinto to send some legal work to India comes at the same time as Pinsent Masons announces its plans to send first-pass litigation review work to South Africa. Once you strip out the protectionist reactions of those who do this work now and those who make money from their work, you see the next obvious step towards globalization, and opportunities for those – lawyers and their firms – who ride the wave.

I picture Professor Richard Susskind as having a big wall chart on which he traces the progress of his various predictions over the years. Perhaps they are colour-coded according to the amount of derision they faced as he rolled them out – bright red, for example, for the idea that lawyers might communicate by e-mail or put legal information up on publicly-available web sites. I see him putting a big red tick beside them as the world catches up, or perhaps – since the adoption tends to be incremental – a graph showing the rate of adoption. This would almost always start with a gradually-rising line and then shoot upwards as the herd follows the early-adopters.

Two stories last week will have added to one of his graph lines – the idea that lawyers will distribute some of their work outside the firm to places where it can be done more cheaply. On 19 June, the Times reported (Rio Tinto’s legal switch puts pressure on London) that Rio Tinto has hired a team of lawyers in India to try to reduce its annual £60 million legal bill by 20 per cent, recruiting 12 lawyers in Delhi to work for it on tasks such as reviewing documents and drafting contracts. On 22 June, The Lawyer wrote about Pinsent Masons’ decision to outsource some of its litigation work to South Africa, becoming, the Lawyer said, the first UK firm to offshore the work of qualified lawyers (Pinsents – first firm to offshore work of qualified UK lawyers)

Australia at the centre of the discovery world

The default map of the world shows Britain in the middle and near the top, with Alaska at top left and New Zealand at bottom right. Perhaps that is because Europe invented the Greenwich Meridian; maybe it is a legacy of Empire or a conspiracy of cartographers (the phrase is Tom Stoppard’s);  possibly the maps in Australia are centred on Canberra, with Iceland and Cape Horn as their left and right extremes. By any measure, anywhere else is a long way from Australia. Its influence in the world of electronic discovery is disproportionately large.

Jackson conference challenge to litigation support providers

Lord Justice Jackson laid down a challenge to litigation support providers at the Ark Group e-Disclosure 2009 conference in London last week. They must, he said, find a way to bring down the cost of e-disclosure; if they cannot, then the basis of disclosure will have to be changed. Other jurisdictions provide a disputes forum which does not require the parties to undertake the vast exercises which are needed for compliance with the existing disclosure regime. The implication was that the old and treasured principle that all the evidence must be rigorously examined is threatened by the brute fact that the cost of conducting that examination is too high.

There is much more to say about this than can be fitted into an account of a two day conference, so I will settle for a bullet point summary of the other elements which contribute more to the costs than most suppliers do:

Birmingham Post reports on costs management trial

The litigation costs management trial on which I reported a few days ago (Jackson launches costs management trial in Birmingham) has been covered by the Birmingham Post.

Their article of 3 June is headed City will be test case for costs rules and includes a photograph of Lord Justice Jackson, three of the judges from the Birmingham Civil Justice Centre who will be running the trial, and Martino Giaquinto of Mills & Reeve who hosted the event at which the trial was launched.

It is no accident that the e-Disclosure Information Project was also launched in Birmingham. The modern, forward-thinking civil courts are representative of a thriving commercial and professional centre which seems to have a more cohesive feel to its business community than many other places.

Remember to seek disclosure of telephone recordings

A “document” is defined in Rule 31.4 CPR as “anything on which information of any kind is recorded”. Lawyers brought up in the days of paper disclosure, even those who have adjusted to electronic versions of those paper documents such as the source Word file, may overlook other things “on which information of any kind is recorded”.

At the top of the list comes recordings of telephone conversations. These days, our most mundane calls are preceded by a message warning us that our call may be recorded “for training purposes”. If that was indeed its only purpose, then the warning is little more than aural clutter to make us hate the company even more than we do already – most of us come across these messages when dealing with our ISP, utilities provider or similar organisation whose institutional incompetence extends to the erection of barriers against the customer. The added delay whilst some Estuary-accented trollop warns you about recordings certainly succeeds in putting me off making any call which is not vital, as is doubtless intended.

Graphical display of thesaurus terms

The graphical display of discovery / disclosure information has been one of the most interesting developments in software designed for search of all kinds. It is specifically so for litigation document review purposes and, perhaps even more so, for early case assessments when you are trying to find out just what the scope is of your document universe.

One of the distinguishing features of such a task is that the searcher often has no real idea of what the search will turn up. In most areas of research, you have a broad idea of the parameters of the hunt – I have been looking up flights and hotels recently, for example, and had the advantage of knowing that I was after a particular kind of information (a hotel, say) in a particular place (or places, given the particularly daft schedule which faces me over the next few days). Ranging shots in Google brought me to specialised databases which had fields to search in which corresponded with obvious inputs – dates, room-type, number of nights and so on – which are standard across most such resources.

Litigation is often not like that. You will, of course, have got from your clients some clues – names, date ranges, commonly-used words and so on – but whilst they may narrow the field, they are not conclusive as to what you might turn up, not least because you (if you are a lawyer) are an officer of the court as well as the client’s gladiator, and it is your practising certificate and insurance policy which is on the line.

Labour’s fall may be matched by litigation’s recovery

I have just sent off my slides for my keynote speech at the Ark Group’s e-disclosure conference on Monday 9 June. Its title is The Empty Bear Garden, and it is about the decline of litigation since the CPR of 1999 and what we can do to stem that. My conclusion is that we are in a position to turn the tide and will do so if we pay more attention to the balance between rules and discretion, focus more on what really matters and what clients want, and be willing to challenge some of the existing orthodoxies.

Roughly the same period, since New Labour’s election in 1997, has seen the rise of what the Institute for Public Policy Research recently called “intolerant centralism”. The state has become ever more intrusive into our lives at several levels: vast databases record every aspect of our lives; cameras watch our every move; faceless bureaucrats have acquired powers way beyond their abilities; widely-drawn (and badly-drawn) laws give policemen and others in uniform the purported right to exercise a discretion unintended by Parliament; highways officers at the bottom of life’s intellectual pile clutter our roads with notices and urge us to “think”; ministers who appear on the surface to have been merely useless (Jacquie Smith) or deeply stupid (Caroline Flint) emerge as sinister, assuming powers over our lives thanks to their party’s majority which we would never grant them as individuals; MPs behave as if the norms of society do not apply to them, relying on the letter, but forgetting the spirit, of the law; rules multiply, each one having the effect of  nullifying our scope and ability to think for ourselves.

Recommind recommends recognising risks of e-disclosure unreadiness

I do not take a great deal of notice of press releases. If they are interesting, everyone else will gamely recycle their contents, and who wants to be like everyone else? If they are not…. you don’t need me to finish the sentence. And when I say “recycle their contents”, I mean just that – a quick copy and paste and they are done – instant journalism. It has its place but it is not what I like to do.

I do, however, like to be sent PRs, so that I can decide if they are worth the trouble of translating from their native Marketing Crap into English. All those tri-partite, polysyllabic, hyperbolic exaggerations (like that one) which someone has laboured over so assiduously have to be stripped out to try and divine what actually matters (try it: look at most PRs in this business and you will find that every verb has three long adverbs and every noun has three adjectives  – “rapidly, accurately and defensibly” or  “innovative, cost-effective and user-friendly”; once or twice is fine, but by the time you get to the end of a piece in which every word has multiple qualifiers you are gasping for breath).

Jackson launches costs management trial in Birmingham

Lord Justice Jackson went to Birmingham on Tuesday to encourage its litigation solicitors to take part in a costs management trial in the specialist courts. The details are interesting, but less so than the policy considerations which underlay Sir Rupert’s approach to the business sector – the Small and Medium Enterprises or SMEs – which is one of his (many) particular concerns. I went to hear him – my interest in the rules and the technology of e-disclosure is infinite, but it is servant to a wider interest in making litigation accessible. “Accessible” means that it is affordable to the clients and still profitable to the lawyers.

I gave up marking the key passages as Sir Rupert outlined the scope of this part of his investigation – it was all important. For those with short attention-spans, I will leap to the end and report that the upshot was that the majority of the assembled company were willing to support a voluntary trial during which judges in the Mercantile Court and the Technology & Construction Court would supplement their case management role by managing costs in tandem with (or, strictly, as part of) their close attention to the other aspects of bringing a case to trial. Not everyone supported the idea, but no-one opposed it. Sir Rupert’s gentle lucidity barely concealed the implication that if this approach did not work then something more drastic will be needed. If it does not work in Birmingham, it would not work anywhere.

Making a play to sugar the e-disclosure pill

In a previous post (The discovery of disclosure commonality with a trans-Atlantic judicial panel)  I told how IQPC had, at my suggestion,  invited US Magistrate Judge John Facciola and Chief US Magistrate Judge Paul Grimm to come to their Information Retention and E-Discovery Management Conference last week and then asked me how I would like to make use of their talents.

One answer was the trans-Atlantic judicial panel which I described in that post, with Senior Master Whitaker, HHJ Simon Brown QC, Judge Grimm, Judge Facciola and me, moderated by Patrick Burke of Guidance Software. I have long wanted to do a mock e-disclosure hearing and this seemed a perfect opportunity. I saw one a couple of years ago in London in which Judge Facciola played – naturally – a judge. That had aimed at both US and UK procedures simultaneously and had, I thought, fallen between two stools in doing so. I wanted to do one under the English rules. We have had three cases recently – Digicel v Cable & Wireless, Abela v Hammond Suddards and Hedrich v Standard Bank London which had shown the downsides of not following the co-operation obligations under the Practice Direction to Part 31 CPR. Judge Grimm and Judge Facciola have been eloquent in their criticism of those who do not co-operate to reduce costs and who do not display the level of competence required of those who practice litigation. Why not cast them as the judge hearing an application by advocates who fell short of those standards, using facts similar to those of the English cases?

The discovery of disclosure commonality with a trans-Atlantic judicial panel

If I were to define a perfect working day it would go something like this: wake up in a comfortable hotel and take a five minute stroll to Piccadilly; sit on a platform with the two leading US and the two leading UK e-discovery judges and discuss developments in the two jurisdictions; go and see Lord Justice Jackson to discuss the e-disclosure parts of his report; take part in the premiere of your first play, a courtroom drama in which the judges are played by judges and the advocates by people whose life has been spent at the bar; then dine at Rules before going home with the sense, which others seem to share, that the disclosure world has moved on a bit that day.

It sounds all right as a way of passing the time, does it not? So that is what I did on Thursday, on Day 2 of IQPC’s Information Retention and E-Discovery Management Conference. I am but the Boswell to the distinguished set of Dr Johnsons who took part in all this and my main contribution was made months ago. I am on the Advisory Board for the conference, and Sarah Haynes of IQPC rang me up and asked which US judge should be asked to take part in the judicial panel which Guidance Software were intending to run. “Ask Grimm or Facciola” I said, much as one might say “Get Kidman or Jolie” for a film, or “Ask Rooney or Ferdinand” round to play football. Sarah rang back a few days later and said “They are coming – what would you like them to do?”

Everything and everyone at the IQPC Information Retention and E-Discovery Management Conference

I reached IQPC’s Information Retention and E-Discovery Management  Conference 2009 just as the first speaker stood up on Wednesday morning, feeling rather like Phileas Fogg as he burst into the Reform Club with seconds to spare. Although I had not been round the world in 80 days, it felt like it after the 4336 miles overnight from Orlando (see posts here and here as to why I was in Orlando). At least it was warm and sunny in London, unlike damp, dank Florida.

The IQPC e-discovery conference is one of the best in the London calendar, as much for the people one meets there as for the content. At my first, two years ago, I was introduced to three people on one day who have directly contributed to what I do now. Victor Limongelli, now CEO of Guidance Software, gave the first talk I had heard which drew attention to the similarities and differences between US and UK procedure and practice. Master Whitaker spoke rather pessimistically about the difficulties of persuading judges and practitioners that the proper court management of electronic documents was vital to control litigation costs. Mark Surguy of Pinsent Masons talked about the need for lawyers to understand technology and to get to know some providers of software and services who could help them.

Clyde & Co selects Epiq Systems and Trilantic as preferred e-disclosure providers

Although the business of the e-Disclosure Information Project involves telling law firms and corporations about electronic disclosure technology suppliers, I avoid discussions about pending competitive tenders in the e-disclosure market. Given the range of people with whom I am in contact, the chances of hearing twice about the same contract from rival bidders are too high and, metaphorically at least, I put my fingers in my ears if I fear I might learn more than I want to know.

No-one, however, could avoid knowing that Clyde & Co has been working to identify preferred suppliers of electronic disclosure services. It seems ages ago that I first heard about it, in a remote country pub (life is not all glossy conferences and airports, you know) and it became clear that Kevin Butterill, Clyde’s litigation support manager, was extremely keen to get it right. The tender became the Moby Dick of the e-disclosure seas, each provider his own Captain Ahab on a mission to hunt it down.

Something for everyone in the Jackson litigation costs report

Lord Justice Jackson’s interim report on civil litigation costs weighed in at 650 pages, not the 1,000 pages which rumour anticipated. It is as well that I am commentator not a newshound journalist, because I missed the big day and was on-air myself at a rather more nuts-and-bolts level (giving a live e-Disclosure broadcast) as Sir Rupert Jackson was being interviewed by the BBC on the more momentous subject-matter of his report.

That there was something for everyone in the report is evidenced by the range of things which others picked up on in reporting the launch. LegalWeek headed its report Jackson to review complex commercial disputes and picked up on Sir Rupert’s expressed determination to cover complex multi-party disputes as well as cases in lower courts. It quoted him as saying “I have come to the conclusion that the Commercial Court is not a sacred territory, which falls outside the terms of reference set for me by the Master of the Rolls……The recommendations in my final report must encompass all civil courts, including the Commercial Court.”

The untapped potential of YouTube as a promotional medium

You can launch political policies, bands and brands on YouTube, but perhaps not 1,000 page interim reports on litigation costs. Lord Justice Jackson will do his launch tomorrow with an old-fashioned press conference. Other things, however, bring the marketing and educational value of video to mind.

Lord Justice Jackson’s initial report on the reform of civil litigation costs is due to be launched at a press conference tomorrow, 8 May. There is an article in Times Online today by Neil Rose headed What will the Jackson report say? which summarises some of the things we might expect to see from what is rumoured to be 1,000 pages long – and that is just the interim report.

The article’s most important point comes at the end – this not a government-commissioned report. It was the Master of the Rolls, Sir Anthony Clarke, who asked Sir Rupert Jackson to undertake what was always going to be a vast and important task. The role of judges is central to any planned reforms and, one hopes, something which is immune from political pressures.

I will not be there, unfortunately. I long ago agreed to do an e-disclosure live video presentation for CLT Onlne which goes out at 1.00 tomorrow.  The bare reference in my slides to the Jackson Litigation Costs Review will be outdated by the time I get to it.

Richard Susskind webcast on the End of Lawyers?

Professor Richard Susskind caused a stir at the ABA TechShow in Chicago in April with his thoughts on the way the future looks for the legal profession. The context was the launch of his latest book, The End of Lawyers?, that comforting question mark flagging the possibility that the profession may survive in some form if it adapts.

I wrote about Susskind’s book when parts of it were trailed in the Times (see Richard Susskind and the End of Lawyers) and I will not repeat what I said there about the potential for change in the litigation support market. Nor will I attempt an overview of Susskind’s wider propositions, which are readily available elsewhere.

I have been listening to a webcast of a discussion between Richard Susskind and Mark Harding, Group General Counsel of Barclays, and focusing on a couple of points which seem to me to both imminent as opposed to speculative (although Susskind’s speculations tend to become the norm rather quickly), and relevant to the management of litigation and other areas which involve the handling of electronic documents. Litigation is the one area which (as I noted in my earlier article) has defied Susskind’s original predictions because (he told me when I asked him three years ago) the clients had not put pressure on the lawyers to adopt technology.

E-Disclosure in the £50,000 case

The article to which I am about to refer you is in fact called E-Discovery in the $50,000 Case by Conrad Jacoby and not as my heading shows it. We in the UK renamed the ancient process known as discovery of documents ten years ago and called it disclosure, as part of the frankly stupid idea that if you give something a trendy new name you somehow make it better. Sterling is now so debased as against the Dollar that the difference between 50,000 of the one and 50,000 of the other does not matter much in the context of which Jacoby writes.

How can you handle electronic documents cost-effectively in cases whose value is disproportionate to the work involved in strict compliance with the rules of discovery / disclosure? Many in the UK blame the advocates of litigation support technology, as if we are somehow responsible for creating all this stuff. It exists. It has to be dealt with if you are to comply with the rules. Pretending that your clients and their opponents do not have electronic documents has two outcomes – breach of professional duty, and unexpected costs down the line. Better, surely, to square up to the facts and develop a strategy to handle the documents efficiently.

LexisNexis debate marks ten years of the CPR

LexisNexis, publishers of the Civil Court Practice 2009 “The Green Book” marked the tenth anniversary of the Civil Procedure Rules with a debate chaired by Lord Neuberger which considered the impact of the CPR and assessed its strengths and weaknesses.

The panel members were:

* Sir Anthony Clarke, Master of the Rolls
* Simon Davis – Clifford Chance
* District Judge Michael Walker
* Professor Michael Zander QC – London School of Economics

The debate was recorded on video and can be found on the LexisNexis web site. It comes in convenient chunks – two sets of short excerpts, some highlights, and the full version (for which user details are required). I have so far watched only the highlights but will certainly go back to the full version.

Irish discovery rules embrace electronic documents

By happy chance, the discovery rules in Ireland have the same number as those in the Civil Procedure Rules of England & Wales. Order 31 of the Rules of the Superior Courts give the court the power to order discovery of documents between parties. You will spot even from that much that there is a difference from the CPR, under which standard disclosure (as we, stupidly, and alone in the world, call it) is the default in the absence of an agreement or order dispensing with it. In Ireland, a case must be made for it – not difficult in principle in most cases, I imagine, but an interesting and subtle difference of approach.

Informed comment in the Times adds to the Woolf rules debate

No sooner had I published my post Have the Woolf reforms worked? yesterday when Jonathan Maas flicked me a link to an article in Times Online on the same subject. It is called Sad and unsatisfactory – but not destroyed and is written in his personal capacity by His Honour Judge Charles Harris QC, the Designated Civil Judge for Oxford. Like me, Judge Harris was reacting to an article in the Times of 9 April by Lawrence West QC.

Judge Harris is chairman of the civil committee of the Council of Circuit Judges. I came across him when he was the able convenor at a kind of judicial boot camp last Summer. HHJ Simon Brown QC and I were invited to speak there about electronic disclosure to an audience which included the Master of the Rolls.

The focus in Judge Harris’s article is on the greatly increased complexity seen in the last decade, much of it not merely unnecessary but counter-productive. We have not only seen a great deal of new law, but statute draftsmen seem to have lost the ability to write succinct unambiguous law. The CPR and their Practice Directions have grown in volume (that is, pages), in detail, in prolixity and in their implications for practitioners. The remedy, Judge Harris says, is “greater simplicity, with less prescription and preparatory paperwork”.

Zander sees his Woolf CPR predictions justified

Michael Zander QC, now Emeritus Professor at the LSE, was a forthright and eloquent critic of the Woolf reforms which led to the Civil Procedure Rules in 1999. Few took much notice of his predictions, least of all Lord Woolf. I was amongst the vast majority who ignored him, won over I think in retrospect, by Woolf’s eloquence and industrious decency in tackling the twin evils of delay and cost.

It was a shock to open the rather large new rule book and discover that all Woolf’s emphasis on the role of technology – particularly in respect of disclosure – had been reduced to a single reference to the word in the overriding objective. I also recall a sense of growing unease on seeing the sum total of the new burdens which fell on practitioners at the early stages of a case – each of them had been widely debated in the run-up to the final version of the rules, but seeing them altogether simply did not square with the fact that relatively few cases went to trial anyway. How could it be right to impose on every party to every case a set of duties and obligations designed to reduce a burden which was irrelevant to most cases even under the old rules?

The growing importance of metadata preservation in eDiscovery

If UK lawyers do not share the US enthusiasm about the preservation, collection and use of metadata, that is in part because they are not clear what it is and how it might be used. A forthcoming webinar will be a painless way to find out.

Guidance Software is hosting a webinar on Tuesday 24 March called The growing importance of metadata preservation in eDiscovery. As the developers of EnCase eDiscovery, whose function is the collection across corporate networks of discoverable documents and data, Guidance has an obvious interest in the metadata – data about data – which lies in and around the documents which may become evidence.

How TREC can help you evaluate e-discovery investments

H5 and Clearwell Systems are giving a webinar on 19 March about TREC Legal Track’s practical application in evaluating and assessing search and review methods. Why should we in the UK pay attention?

There is a danger in talking to UK audiences about the higher end of US thinking on information retrieval as it applies to litigation. That word “discovery” (which we abandoned ten years ago for no obvious – or, at least, for no good – reason) serves as a flag which says to UK litigators that it is about someone else’s problem. Other assumptions follow – that the output of such thinking will be academic rather than relevant to everyday life, the volumes will be beyond imagining, the language will be impenetrable and so on.

Certainly, there are some more basic problems for UK practitioners. What is this Practice Direction to Part 31 which the judge in Digicel (St Lucia) v Cable & Wireless banged on about? Oh, I see, they say: big case, foreign business, two counsel on each side instructed by major firms – nothing to do with me then. Now, tell me how I get all these e-mails printed quickly so I can start reading them?

Nevertheless, it is no bad thing to make yourself aware of the thinking in US circles. It is not that we will be in two years where they are now, but that if we watch what they do, we may avoid altogether the worst excesses of US electronic discovery.

Ark Group Conference 8-9 June 2009

The brochure came out today for Ark Group’s e-Disclosure conference taking place in the Ibis Hotel, Earls Court, London on 8-9 June.

The main attraction is Lord Justice Jackson who will be presenting a review of the litigation costs working paper which he is spending 2009 working on. He will be talking about his investigation into cases of all sizes, looking at the costs in all the Specialist Courts (that is, the Commercial Court, Technology & Construction Court, the Mercantile Courts etc) and discussing the limitations in the present system which have been raised by others in the course of his review.

Autonomy panel at LegalTech points to proactive clients – and lawyers

Panel sessions at LegalTech and other conferences combine the best of all worlds so far as I am concerned. The burden is distributed – the moderator has to have a plan and the ability to herd the speakers through it, and those on the panel have to have an agreement as to who is going to cover what, but you don’t have to prepare slides a month in advance nor stand alone under the spotlight hoping that the words sound as good live as they did four weeks ago in the seclusion of your office.

There is enough structure but also room for spontaneity as the discussion takes turns which were not on the formal agenda and, as long as the moderator is good enough to haul you back to the advertised programme, they can be fun to do – assuming, of course, that your fellow-panellists  have something useful to say.

There was no problem on that score with the two panels which I did for Autonomy at LegalTech in New York earlier this month. The programme was the same for both of them. Carter Hopkins, in-house counsel at McAfee, and I were on both of them, but the third player in one was Florinda Baldridge, Global head of Litigation Support at Fulbright & Jaworski and at the other was Laurie Weiss, co-head of Fulbright’s E-Discovery and Information Management Practice Group. Deborah Baron, VP Legal & Compliance at Autonomy, Inc. was the able moderator.

E-Disclosure Taster Menu in Bristol

I went down to Bristol last week with a group of electronic disclosure suppliers at the invitation of the Western Chancery & Commercial Bar Association. The aim, as in Birmingham last year, was not just to talk about electronic disclosure, but to illustrate it by showing and describing a range of applications and services

Bristol used to be Britain’s second city. In the 18th Century it grew prosperous on the triangular trade which took cloth and iron goods to Africa, slaves to America and tobacco, and sugar and rum back to Bristol. In 1841 the Great Western Railway connected it to London and, in an early example of joined-up commerce, you could travel on GWR trains and GWR ships from London to New York. Its relative prosperity declined as other places boomed and as different industries – ship-building, tobacco, cotton – had their heyday and fell away. There is more industry in the region than one sees from the M4 – I flew over the Severn Estuary on my way in from New York at dawn a couple of weeks ago and noted the miles of industrial zones from Avonmouth Docks down towards Bristol.

All that industry, together with property-related work from the West – Bristol is the first place of any size as you come up from Cornwall or out of Wales – has supported the growth of a strong legal and professional services business. Every other legal magazine in the late 1980s seemed to profile Bristol. Its population of around 400,000 makes it now Britain’s tenth city preceded by London, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield, Bradford, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Manchester. It can take as little as 90 minutes to get to London by train.  There are some large barristers’ chambers in Bristol and one does not get the impression that work is in short supply. Bristol is one of ten cities in Britain with a Mercantile Court, that is, a court with a specialist commercial list and judge or judges ticketed to hear mercantile cases.

All very interesting you may say, but this site is meant to be an information resource on electronic disclosure, not a local history, travel guide or Chamber of Commerce directory. Indeed, but disclosure comes with litigation; litigation follows industry and business; and the ability to win commercial litigation work from any region depends on the quality of local law firms and chambers, and on their ability to stop the work from heading to London. It ought to be possible, in fact, for the combination of legal skills, good transport links and an efficient Mercantile Court not just to stem the flow to London but to reverse it. The sixty or so barristers and solicitors who turned out to listen to us presumably want to draw work into their region.

Mediation – not about just settlement but just about settlement

Professor Dame Hazel Genn QC has launched a stinging attack on the downgrading of civil justice and the promotion of mediation at the expense of the civil litigation system. ADR is a worthy parallel remedy but government promoted it more as a means of saving money than as an extension of access to justice. The courts system has been run down and some of the rules changes have succeeded only in driving litigants out of the system

The original and primary purpose of this Commentary is to draw attention to the formal obligations of parties and judges in respect of disclosure under the Civil Procedure Rules, to the problems it causes, and to the solutions available to meet it. Important though that is as a component of cost in litigation, you cannot really look at one such element in isolation. The management of disclosure is a sub-set of case management generally. Case management is a component of what makes justice accessible. Access to justice is a fundamental right in society and it is amongst the primary duties of government to provide and foster it. One of the reasons why I watch and report on what is said by US Magistrate Judge John Facciola, both in his court and outside it, is that he has the same strong sense that his specialist subject – which is the same as mine – is but a part of a wider set of issues.

Dame Hazel Genn QC is professor of socio-legal studies at UCL. Her December speech attacking the decline of civil justice is pithily written up by Joshua Rozenberg in his article Dame Hazel Genn warns of downgrading of civil justice. I see no point in repeating him when you can read for yourself his summary of what has been said (by others as well as Dame Hazel) about the role of government, the implications of Halsey and the retrospective views of Lord Woolf’s reforms.

Judge Facciola LegalTech messages are for UK as well as US lawyers

There was something almost surreal about the discovery that the LegalTech organisers had failed to record US Magistrate Judge John Facciola’s keynote speech, given that Facciola regularly delivers Opinions castigating parties either for faulty decisions about technology or for technological incompetence. Did someone decide “Nah. It’s only that Italian guy – let’s not bother” or did someone press the wrong button on the tape recorder? Whatever the cause, it is a pity. The speech, like many of John Facciola’s Opinions, should be compulsory listening for lawyers and judges, and as much on the UK side of the Atlantic as on his.

The speech was introduced by Neil Aresty of Legal Computer Solutions, Inc. Aresty made reference to the “Christmas Eve decision” in Covad Communications v Revonet. A paragraph from that decision will suffice to set the scene and to show why Judge Facciola strikes a chord in the UK. Speaking of an archaic form of document request which ignored the last 40 years of technological development, he said:

“While I have considered a similar provision in depth once before, I see no need to repeat that metaphysical exercise here because it is a waste of judicial resources to continue to split hairs on an issue that should disappear when lawyers start abiding by their obligations under the amended Federal Rules and talk to each other about the form of production. I would much prefer to carry out my duties in accordance with Rule 1, which provides that the rules “should be construed and administered to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding.”

LegalTech lessons for lawyers from extinct species

Only one practising UK commercial lawyer came to LegalTech in New York. Recession hit the litigation support industry before our eyes. One of the recurring themes there was that the clients are taking discovery in house.  Down the road we saw some other extinct species

As if LegalTech itself were not enough, Sunday, my first full day back from New York, lasted for 24 hours, thanks to disrupted sleep patterns, a full InBox and a five hour meeting discussing potential discovery developments in Australia and AsiaPac.

You know better by now, I think, than to expect a dutiful account of LegalTech. You get from me little in the way of faithful reports of worthy sessions, no deep market analysis, no breathless interviews with industry leaders. Others, I know, sit on the special pews reserved for bloggers and have their reports filed before the speaker has made it to the bar. I got to few sessions, although I did turn up, I think, to all those I was booked to speak at. There is no shortage of industry leaders to talk to – you bump into CEOs in corridors or go up to their eyries above cloud level at the Warwick Hotel – but journalistic scoops are not really my style and I am content to wait for the press releases. I am into broader sweeps than the last big sale or the next major release.

Discovery Practice Note issued in Australia

The Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Australia yesterday gave effect to the long-awaited Practice Note No 17 – The use of technology in the management of discovery and the conduct of litigation.

Those of us involved in drafting the proposed new Technology Questionnaire and draft Practice Direction in the UK have been keen to keep up with parallel initiatives in the Common Law jurisdictions. and particularly Australia and Canada.

The timing of its final release is good and bad from my point of view – good in that I am due to speak on a panel at LegalTech in New York next week about international initiatives in electronic discovery, and bad in that I have enough to do to be ready for tomorrow’s flight without exciting new developments to read up.

Fortunately, one of my co-speakers on that panel is Jo Sherman who was heavily involved in the drafting of the Practice Note, so I can leave it to her to cover it. I will read it on the plane and cover it in more detail shortly.

My thanks to Geoffrey Lambert of KordaMentha in Melbourne and to Seamus Byrne who each sent me a link to the Practice Note within hours of its promulgation.

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Welcome to Equivio as new Project sponsor

I am delighted to welcome Equivio as a new sponsor of the e-Disclosure Information Project. As I wrote in November (see New integration and new web site for Equivio) I met CEO Amir Milo at the Masters Conference in Washington. Equivio’s name was already a familiar one, but that meeting and a subsequent read-through of Equivio’s web site emphasised why Equivio is subliminally omnipresent in the data management world.

If, as I do, you spend your time explaining to lawyers, judges and corporates why technology must be used to reduce vast volumes of data and documents to manageable proportions, you learn three basic propositions – rely on illuminating snapshots not lengthy explanations, focus on the things which equate directly to the user’s own functions, and emphasise the benefits of using technology and not just the risks of not doing so. Equivio’s web site does just that, crisply and clearly.

Jackson sets out some litigation costs issues

A thoughtful article by Simon Davis and Simon James of Clifford Chance has appeared on the Lexology site. A purist might quibble about its title – Jackson’s dilemma – or how to cut the cost of litigation – on the grounds that Lord Justice Jackson faces nothing so simple as a choice between one alternative and another, as the article itself makes clear.

It touches on several of the factors which Jackson will want to cover. On the pure costs side, the “loser pays” principle, costs-shifting, contingency fees and CFAs, and champerty (or “trafficking in litigation” as the article puts it)  will have to be considered.

Plenty to write about but no time to write

I had a patch recently when I had no time to write for a few days. Someone sent me a message, not exactly complaining, but making it clear that my apparent dereliction of duty had been noticed. It is not in fact a duty, or does not feel like one, and there is no shortage of things to write about. There is plenty else going on as well, however, and I cannot simultaneously do things and write about them.

Besides, the subject-matter of the article which sat at the top of the blog for a few days warranted the extra exposure before the next one took its place. It is called Fannie Mae – be careful what you agree to with e-discovery orders and concerned the lawyer in the US Fannie Mae litigation who agreed on behalf of his clients to discovery obligations which cost them $6 million (9% of their turnover). His clients were not even a party to the litigation. The outcome ought to suggest to any lawyer involved in disclosure applications that it might be helpful to scope a project before committing your clients to it. It is a suggestion as useful in the Birmingham Mercantile Court as in Washington D.C.

Fannie Mae – be careful what you agree to with e-discovery orders

The American Fannie Mae case shows what can happen if a lawyer unskilled in electronic disclosure agrees to something which is beyond his skills and knowledge. UK judges may baulk at questioning an advocate’s expertise, but they have an absolute right to ensure that all the facts are in front of them before endorsing agreements which may affect the case as a whole

American cases involving large sums of money tend to be ignored in the UK on both those grounds – being American and seeming always to involve millions. We can hope that the outcome of the recent decision of the US Court of Appeals for the District for Columbia in In re Fannie Mae Securities Litigation will never be paralleled here (indeed one hopes much the same for America), but it does nevertheless have warnings for lawyers engaged in discovery disputes in the UK.

Welcome to LDSI as sponsor

You will have noticed a new logo on these pages as LDSI joins the list of sponsors of the e-Disclosure Information Project.

LDSI is a full-service provider of a wide range of solutions for handling documents for litigation, regulatory and similar purposes. It has featured before in these pages following my visits to its New York and London operations, both of which impressed with their attention to the secure progress of documents from first arrival through to delivery to the client, and to the support on offer thereafter.

SCL meeting – Civil Litigation Costs Review

Lord Justice Jackson is conducting a year-long review into the costs of civil litigation at the request of the Master of the Rolls. His terms of reference require him to undertake a fundamental review of the rules and principles governing the costs of civil litigation and to make recommendations in order to promote access to justice at proportionate cost.

There is an open meeting of the Society for Computers & Law on Tuesday 13 January at Lovells to discuss the SCL’s submission to the review – see the background and event details on the SCL web site.

The review is intended to be wide-ranging and a correspondingly broad range of views is hoped-for.

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SCL Summary of Digicel v Cable & Wireless

I have written much about the Digicel case Digicel (St. Lucia) Ltd v Cable & Wireless Plc [2008] EWHC 2522 (Ch) but delayed writing a summary of the actual judgment because I knew that barrister Clive Freedman was doing so. His article appears on the SCL web site with the title One Search or Two? and I commend it as a succinct report by a knowledgeable commentator.

Clive refers to a working party which is preparing a Technology Questionnaire but modestly omits to mention that he is a member of it, as I am. Our remit extends beyond the Questionnaire and on to a new Practice Direction which, when added to Digicel and the yet more recent Abela judgment, will ensure that judges and practitioners will no longer be able to ignore the disclosure rules as they relate to electronic documents.

Why is electronic disclosure like ice-hockey?

Like ice-hockey, e-disclosure requires some equipment and some skills. You don’t need to be a genius, merely competent, and you can delegate the technical skills to others. You are on thin ice if you approach litigation in 2009 without the resources to play the game properly

Those who come and see me here in Oxford generally get taken on a route-march round Port Meadow with the dog. Ideas and thinking seem to come more easily out there than around tables, in conferences or at bars, which are the more conventional venues for discussion.

The Meadow varies with the climate: sometimes it is a green, grassy field, sometimes a dusty prairie, often a large inland sea. Today it is an ice-rink, with people playing ice-hockey on it.

Identify early and co-operate in 2009

As I sign off for Christmas, I would like to thank all those who have sponsored, supported or in any other way encouraged the e-Disclosure Information Project in 2008 and wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

It is only a month since I did a round up to cover the Project’s first birthday. Since then, we have had yet a third new e-disclosure case in the UK, Abela v Hammonds, and LDSI has joined the sponsors.

There is already a great deal planned for next year: the conference diary is filling up; my Law Society seminar tour will take up again; there should be a good UK showing at LegalTech in New York; there are plans afoot for co-operation with US, Australian and Canadian judges, rule makers and thought leaders with, I hope; a visit to each of these countries in March/April; there is a Technology Questionnaire to launch and a Practice Direction to draft; I hope to repeat in other UK cities the talk we gave in Birmingham at which we showed judges, barristers and solicitors some of the applications which are used in electronic disclosure; Vince Neicho of Allen & Overy and I are plotting an e-disclosure conference on our own model; with the Project format now established, I am looking forward to yet more interaction with its sponsors; as well as going to see and speak to people on their own patches in the UK and abroad, I hope to entice more visitors to come to Oxford and kick ideas around on Port Meadow, as I have done several times this year.

Mancia: interest in US being interested in them

A growing theme on this site which will get more important in 2009 is that electronic discovery in the US is getting to be of more interest to us in the UK. This is not because the English courts are getting more involved in e-disclosure (they are, but that is not why we are paying more attention to the US). The new interest derives from US Opinions which have wider and more universal messages than hitherto.

Americans can pound each other to bits over “spoliation” and “defensibility” and we could not be more bored. Nor do we really want to be told how to do it at a judicial level (but we love the technology, thanks). That is in part because there is a growing appreciation that we have some pretty good rules of our own if only anyone would use them, as judges are beginning to – see Digicel, and Abela ( the links are to articles of mine about these English cases).

Audio recordings of SCL e-disclosure seminar

My article Electronic Disclosure: Meeting the Challenge was a report of a seminar presented by the Society for Computers & Law in October. Janet Lambert, Christine Gabitass and I were the speakers under the chairmanship of Clive Freedman.

The sessions were recorded and are available on the SCL web site. Listening to them entitles you to 2.30 CPD hours provided that you can answer some questions at the end.

Given that the Hedrich, Digicel and Abela cases have all been reported since then, some of you may find this a painless way of finding out what the courts expect from you.

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Mancia – US discovery lessons for UK lawyers

Many UK lawyers and judges affect disdain for the American way of litigating and, in particular, for the way US lawyers handle electronic documents. The UK lawyers’ perception that e-disclosure is all very expensive not only confuses cause and effect – it is the existence of the documents which is the primary problem – but blinds them to the constructive criticism which many US lawyers and judges make of their own practice. The problems and most of the (largely US) technical solutions are the same. A look at the similarities in current US thinking might inform our own approach.

The recurring theme in this area in the UK at the moment is the need for two things – getting more and better information about one’s own clients’ documents and a more co-operative approach to working out how to manage disclosure so that the pursuit of justice is not buried by the costs of trying to achieve it. The main stumbling block here is ignorance – there is plenty of expensive gamesmanship being played, but much of the money thrown away is wasted because practitioners know little about the rules and less about the technology.

Getting expert search evidence in front of the court

Yet another important new UK case on electronic disclosure, Abela v Hammonds, reaches me whilst I am listening to a US webinar about searching. The theme of both is knowledge, understanding and expertise – and co-operation to arrive at a proportionate solution

Men famously do not multitask well, but there is too much going on in e-disclosure at the moment to do things in neat sequential steps. I found myself this morning listening to a US webinar on the courts’ requirements for searches for electronic evidence whilst simultaneously reading a new 70 page English judgment on the same topic. This article is not a deeply considered report of either of them, but the coincidence and commonality is worth capturing.

Is Hedrich more important than Digicel for e-disclosure?

A cigarette packet carries the warning that smoking can kill you. Solicitors’ standard terms of business should carry a warning that litigation can cost you. For litigation is an inherently risky business: there are no certain winners; and very often even the fruits of success are never recovered. This is just such a case. The moral is caveat litigator.

This is the opening paragraph of Lord Justice Ward’s judgment in Hedrich v Standard Bank London Ltd [2008] EWCA Civ 905. It is not only the litigating parties who get a strong caveat from this case. Solicitors may conclude that the hairs-breadth which preserved the Claimant’s solicitors from a large wasted costs order in that case might justify a closer understanding of their obligations as to electronic disclosure.

I have not seen it, but the current edition of Civil Procedure News, which comes with the White Book Service, apparently has four headings on the front. One is “Standard disclosure of electronic documents”. The Hedrich and Digicel cases are reported in the “In brief” section, and Digicel is covered in the detail section. I wonder if we might come to see, over time, that Hedrich is the more significant of the two cases.

Webinar: Benchmarking E-Discovery Methods

The webinar anticipated in this post has now taken place. My report on it, and its fortuitous coincidence with a new UK case,  can be found in my post Getting expert evidence in front of the court which also includes a link to the recorded webinar.

H5, the San Francisco company specialising in information retrieval for litigation, investigations and related information management, are giving a webinar on Wednesday 10 December at 1-2 p.m Eastern / 10-11 a.m Pacific time. The full title is Finding a better way to search: Benchmarking E-Discovery Methods.

The premise for the webinar is that lawyers are looking for ways to meet their discovery obligations quickly, cost-effectively and with minimal risk, whilst judges are attaching increasing importance to the way in which searches are conducted – not just the technology but the related sciences of e.g. linguistics and statistics. The perceived importance of this lies in the often-quoted assertion by US Magistrate Judge John Facciola in US v O’Keefe that Given this complexity, for lawyers and judges to dare opine that a certain search term or terms would be more likely to produce information than the terms that were used is truly to go where angels fear to tread.

Reviewing the Commercial Court Recommendations

The risk that contentious work might shift to arbitration or to other jurisdictions such as Germany is reason enough for us to fight to keep it here. The Commercial Court Long Trials Recommendations may have had too wide a focus. Attention to the costs of disclosure, with help from a new generation of Early Case Assessment tools and a pooling of ideas with Australia and Canada may be the next step

On 2 December, the City of London Law Society considered the impact of the Commercial Court Long Trials Recommendations at an open meeting held at Freshfields. I usually go to any such events but had not picked up that it was happening – not the only thing I was in the dark about on that day, since someone drilled through a mains cable at breakfast-time and I was without power till far into the night. I would at least have kept warm if I had gone to the meeting. I am grateful to Mark Surguy of Pinsent Masons in Birmingham for a summary of what was said.

Ignorance of mainstream technology may cost you

Internet telephony, like litigation technology, is now accessible and affordable. Ignoring VOIP merely passes up the chance to cut your telephone bill. Ignoring litigation technology may cost you rather more. The problems, and the solutions, are the same everywhere

A male who bought his first PC shortly after they first came on the market and who has been a software developer might be regarded with some suspicion when he tries to induce others to use technology. You could look at it the other way, of course, and reckon that if someone imbued with office computer technology since its infancy still finds some of it near-magical in its power, then it might be worth a look.

This was brought to mind by two phone calls I received in close succession across midnight on Saturday. At that time of night it is the middle of the day in West Coast America and early morning in Victoria, Australia. My first call was from Browning Marean of DLA Piper US LLP in San Diego and the second was from Geoffrey Lambert of KordaMentha in Melbourne. Both were by VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and the total of two hours’ crystal-clear conversation with opposite corners of the world cost none of us anything.

The revolutionary consequences of Digicel

The importance of Digicel v Cable & Wireless lies not in any new law and still less in allocating blame for the outcome. We cannot predict its consequences but what matters is that everyone now knows about the Practice Direction to Part 31 CPR

Zhou Enlai, first Premier of the People’s Republic of China, when asked to assess the importance of the French Revolution, famously replied that it was “too early to say”. Similarly, I do not feel in any great rush to say what the long-term effect will be of Digicel (St Lucia) Ltd v Cable and Wireless plc [2008] EWHC 2522 (Ch), [2008] All ER (D) 226 (Oct), Chancery Division, Morgan J., 23 October 2008 (thanks to ignorant politicians and the damage caused by trendy educationalists, it is probably necessary to explain for the benefit of anyone under 40 that the French Revolution began in 1789 and that Zhou Enlai died in 1976).

E-Disclosure Information Project first birthday

November marks the first anniversary of what became the E-Disclosure Information Project. It did not have that name when I ran a half-day training session for judges in Birmingham last November but it was effectively launched with that event. This Commentary began a year or so earlier.

That first session was made possible by generous support from forensic collections expert FoxData whose Ian Manning has continued to back what I do, by turning out to speak and with useful information and introductions as well as financially. Tyrone Edward, now at Ernst & Young Forensic Technology & Discovery Services, made the suggestion for a business model which has allowed me to spend substantially all my time on spreading information about electronic disclosure. The Project is sponsored by the companies whose logos appear here, but on the basis that it is independent and product-agnostic.

The main outputs from the e-Disclosure Information Project are what I write here and on my website, and conferences. There are 228 posts on this site. None of them are simple regurgitations of press releases – PRs are invaluable sources of hard information, but I am more interested in the context and the implications of a software or services initiative than in the bare words of a press release.

What exactly is it that you do?

A career devoted to court rules and electronic documents is not an instant turn-on for dinner party conversation. The subjects are, however, important ones for businesses beyond those which actually work in litigation, and the rate of change is increasing

What exactly is it that you do? Like all of us, I get asked this question from time to time by people who are outside the world of law and technology. It is much easier for those of you who read this. If, whatever your gender, you say you are a litigation solicitor, then doubtless people gaze on you with that same awestruck admiration which was formerly reserved for chaps on leave from the trenches. If you are a supplier and say that you work at the cutting edge of information technology then you are up there with rocket scientists – they do not understand, but they know it matters. Barristers are assumed to have mighty brains and Ciceronian eloquence. If you are a judge, then you are met with equal deference whether you are a part-time Deputy Recorder or sit in the Court of Appeal.

When they ask me, my answer usually elicits a perfectly understandable look of blank incomprehension. “I speak and write about the disclosure of electronic documents for litigation” I say. “Will you excuse me?” they reply. “I’ve got to go and see a man about a dog” or some such transparent excuse to get away.

Autonomy Early Case Assessment at the Ritz

Most of my speaking engagements are of the nuts-and-bolts, cradle-to-grave variety where I speak for a couple of hours about the issues raised by electronic documents and about how proper use of the Civil Procedure Rules, coupled with an understanding of the available technology solutions, should give parties and the courts the means to arrive at answers which are proportionate to the case.

People can read the rules for themselves once pointed in the right direction. The technology, and the problems which it addresses, need a more visual approach, and I am increasingly getting the opportunity to use snippets of visual displays from specific products to illustrate generic points. The aim is not to try and display the whole range of solutions from the left hand side of the EDRM diagram to the right, but to use a picture to say a thousand words about a sub-set of it, to shine a torch into a previously dark corner in the hope that it illuminates the wider picture.

As a change from these points of detail, I am sometimes asked to speak about the broader context, to give a kind of “state of the nation” talk which pulls together some of the threads. One such opportunity arose last week when Autonomy invited me to be the guest speaker at a lunch at the Ritz.

Job cuts at the Legal Services Commission

The Government’s commitment to access to justice is so important that it even warrants capital letters – it is Access to Justice, no less, which, as I noted in another post recently, must mean that it is an “initiative” (or possibly even an Initiative).

New Labour Initiatives come in two flavours – those whose life-span is the time it takes to publish the press release, and those on which vast sums are lavished before they are quietly ditched a few months later. We can expect to see few of the latter in these hard times but plenty of the former – look at the Department of Health web site, for example, whose Recent Stories page begins with the proud assertion that “A week rarely passes by without the Department making a major announcement”. Can we have some health care as well? we might ask.

Companies in dark over litigation costs

Companies in dark over litigation costs is the title of an article on the Financial Times web site today (login required). It tells of an Ipsos Mori survey commissioned by Addleshaw Goddard.

The survey’s subject-matter was more specific than the title implies. The state of unawareness refers not to the costs themselves but to the litigation funding tools available to help, such as after the event insurance.

76% identified costs as their top concern (what bothered the rest, one wonders?) but only 10% seemed to know about the possibility of third party funding and only 2% had actually used it.

Jackson and CJC focus on costs models

Lord Justice Jackson’s review of litigation costs will presumably cover a wide range of subjects from rules and procedures, to the actual practice in the courts, to the better use of technology, to training matters and beyond.

One of the most important and complex areas will be the various ways by which litigation is funded – contingency fees, costs-capping, and costs-shifting all have policy implications beyond the specifics of the actual arrangements made with parties. An interesting development is after-the-event insurance which is attracting interest and which raises issues of its own.

An article on the Lawyer web site this morning Jackson LJ drafted in to investigate litigation costs 10 years after Woolf mainly concerns this aspect, reporting that Lord Justice Jackson has already been to see Bob Musgrove, Chief Executive of the Civil Justice Council. The CJC has a strong focus on the subject, with a report on the contingency fees model due out shortly.

The Lawyer article includes a summary of other reviews and studies on the broad topic of litigation fees and costs.

My thanks to Jonathan Maas of DLA Piper UK LLP for drawing my attention to this article within two hours of its publication. It is extremely helpful to be tipped off about wider sources.

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Terms of reference of litigation costs review

The Terms of Reference for Lord Justice Jackson’s review of costs have now been published. The stated objective – “To carry out an independent review of the rules and principles governing the costs of civil litigation and to make recommendations in order to promote access to justice at proportionate cost” is as wide as one could hope for.

See my article on the review Lord Justice Jackson to head litigation costs review.

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Judgment in Digicel (St Lucia) v Cable & Wireless

I wrote about this case on the basis of a short summary of the judgment – see Case law at last on scope of reasonable search. In summary, I described it as important not because it made any new law or clarified any rule, but because it showed judicial involvement in applying a perfectly clear set of rules to the practical problems of assessing proportionality.

The full judgment is now on BAILLII. I am grateful to Peg Duncan, a member of the Steering Committee and the Editorial Board of Sedona Conference Working Group 7 (Sedona Canada), for spotting it before I did and drawing it to my attention. We are, I think, seeing a new phase of international co-operation on this subject as we all face the same concerns about the costs of electronic discovery / disclosure. Canada has been one of the more forward sources of thinking on the subject.

The terms of reference of Lord Justice Jackson’s review of civil costs specifically include comparing the costs regime in England & Wales with those of other jurisdictions. Canada is likely to be one of them.

A glance at the Digicel judgment shows that it covers more aspects than the brief summary which I used for my first report. More will follow on this.

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