Strategic alliance allows 7Safe to host Anacomp’s CaseLogistix

What is the seating etiquette if you go to a wedding knowing both parties? Do you have to make an invidious choice between one side of the church and the other? Perhaps you sit in the aisle or hang from the rafters.

I was set musing on this by the announcement that two of the sponsors of the e-Disclosure Information Project, Anacomp and 7Safe, have announced a new strategic alliance. Under the terms of the agreement, 7Safe provide the hosted version of Anacomp’s review application CaseLogistix, and will serve as a preferred provider of data processing and other e-disclosure services in the UK as an Anacomp Connected Partner Program Certified Services Provider. The press releases (7Safe’s here and Anacomp’s here) are necessarily in similar terms.

Parallel and cross-border developments in handling electronically stored information

The second session at the Thomson Reuters Fifth Annual e-Disclosure Forum in London on 13 November was called Parallel and cross-border developments in handling electronically stored information. I was the moderator, although if Air Miles were the qualification for talking about international subjects, Browning Marean of DLA outstrips even me by a wide margin.

The panel comprised Senior Master Whitaker, Mark Surguy of Pinsent Masons in Birmingham, and Josh Ellis, Chief Information Officer at the Serious Fraud Office. I suspect that Master Whitaker has a wider range of knowledge on international case management matters than any other judge in the world; I opened by saying that, in the last six weeks, I have been in Brussels, Washington, Singapore, and in front of the UK Civil Procedure Rule Committee and the only other person present on all these occasions was Master Whitaker. In addition he is, as Senior Master, the channel through which requests under the Hague Convention are made. Mark Surguy was the only practicing commercial lawyer from the UK at LegalTech in New York this year. Josh Ellis, quite apart from his present role at the SFO, was responsible for international collections at PricewaterhouseCoopers for years and was thus able to bring a practical and hands on dimension to the discussion.

Welcome to Stratify as new Project sponsor

I am very pleased to welcome electronic discovery software company Stratify as a sponsor of the e-Disclosure Information Project. Their addition to the list of sponsors coincides with the opening of their London office and data centre, as well as Stephen Whetstone’s welcome appearance as a panellist at the Thomson Reuters conference last week.

Stratify is a subsidiary of Iron Mountain, Inc., the information protection and storage services giant. Iron Mountain has long-standing facilities and clients in the UK and EU (see the Iron Mountain UK site) as well as elsewhere in the world. There is no technical reason why the data must be close at hand, but EU clients want not only to have personal contact with their discovery suppliers but must be able to house their data within the EU for data protection and privacy reasons. Iron Mountain’s storage and data security infrastructure and experience will be comforting factors. The Iron Mountain press release sets out the business proposition for potential clients.

The Continuing Challenges of Preservation, Collection and Exchange

The first session at the Thomson Reuters e-Disclosure Conference in London last week was called The Continuing Challenges of Preservation, Collection and Exchange. George Socha’s panel included a solicitor, a software provider and a judge – Matthew Davis of Lovells, Stephen Whetstone of Stratify and HHJ Simon Brown QC.

Judge Brown said that the court is interested in the material, and only the material, needed for a decision. The point at issue in Earles v Barclays Bank Plc [2009] EWHC 2500 (Mercantile) (08 October 2009), on which he recently gave judgment, was not a difficult one. The judge is the end user of the disclosure process and needs contemporaneous documents. He had been given many documents which were not relevant to the issues which he had to decide, but not the ones which actually mattered. Witness statements drawn up by lawyers are often not worth the paper they are written on relative to the contemporaneous documents, in this case the records of telephone conversations.

Master Whitaker addresses London Solicitors Litigation Association on e-Disclosure

I went to listen to Senior Master Whitaker speak last night to the London Solicitors Litigation Association about electronic disclosure. I was not expecting to hear much that was new to me – I have heard him speak five times in four countries in three continents in the last six weeks, so the anticipation of novelty was not why I flogged up to London. I go to anything I hear about where lawyers assemble with an interest in electronic disclosure.

It has to be said that, for a group which self-selected on this basis, the level of basic knowledge was not high. Although most claimed to know the difference between the pre-1999 Peruvian Guano test of “relevance” and the CPR definition of a disclosable document (one which is supportive of or adverse to the case of the giver or any other party), few knew of the co-operation and discussion requirements in section 2A of the Practice Direction to Part 31 CPR. Fewer had heard of Digicel (St. Lucia) Ltd & Ors v Cable & Wireless Plc & Ors [2008] EWHC 2522 (Ch) (23 October 2008)
or last month’s judgment in Earles v Barclays Bank Plc [2009] EWHC 2500 (Mercantile) (08 October 2009) or knew of Lord Justice Jacobs’ thoughtful encapsulation of the problems in Nichia Corp v Argos Ltd [2007] EWCA Civ 741 (19 July 2007).

Discovery explorers need a map

You can kill an analogy with overuse, just as every cliché was once a clever new phrase. Describing e-discovery / e-Disclosure in terms of explorers and maps, however, does not become hackneyed, because exploration itself continues to excite and because it works very well as a parallel.

Each nation has its own stirring examples, and they come from all over the place. What do I get if I take the first ones which come to mind? Mallory and Tenzing climbing Everest in the year I was born. Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in Tutankhamen’s tomb. Sir Walter Raleigh in Virginia and South America. Scott, Shackleton and the others in the snowy wastes of Antarctica (I have a soft spot for Sir Vivian Fuchs, leader of the first overland crossing of Antarctica in 1958, if only for the newspaper headline “Vivian Fuchs off to Antarctica”). Doctor Livingstone greeted by HM Stanley in an African clearing. The use of maps necessarily implies that someone else has been there first, but is no less interesting – I have just bought a large-scale ordnance survey map of England in digital form so that I can scroll across it as we drive (as my wife drives, I should say), so interested am I in the landscape through which we pass.

If you are American, you do not need to go abroad to find stirring examples of exploration, and many of them are more or less in your own backyard. The names which come to mind are those of Lewis and Clark, whose expedition of 1804 to 1806 was the first overland exploration to the Pacific coast and back. That had a political and commercial purpose going beyond mere exploration for its own sake, since the US was in the process of undertaking the Louisiana Purchase, and neither it nor the French who were selling it, knew how big the acquisition was. We now know that it comprises about 23% of the modern US.

I am brought to this apparently random line of thought by a reference in Tom O’Connor’s recently published Top 10 EDD Tips for General Counsel, which can be found on the Law Technology News website (the second article on that page) and were the subject of Tom’s Masters Conference webcast. One which caught my eye was Point 5 which reads:

Talk to your IT department. They know how to make the map. You are Lewis and Clark, they are Sacajawea. You absolutely cannot navigate without them.

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.

Packed programme for Masters Conference

The 2009 Masters Conference takes place in Washington on 12 and 13 October. Its title, Global Corporate Change – Navigating Discovery, Risk and Security covers only a fraction of the subjects covered in two days.

The best part for me last year, and the main reason I went, was a keynote speech by US Magistrate Judge John Facciola which I reported at length (see Leadership in Litigation). This took the debate beyond court rules and litigation technology and up into the importance of the court as a component of society. There is a direct line between competence and the efficient use of technology (on the one hand) and access to justice (on the other). Lawyers, judges, and governments which do not to make the courts accessible to everybody are not just failing their clients, the parties appearing before them or those whom they govern. Judge Facciola has the knack of making these things sound not just worthy sentiments but objectives directly related to our daily work.

What makes this job interesting is the breadth, from the minutiae of data handling to matters of state policy. There is almost no corner of the field which is not touched on in the course of the two day conference. If I pick out just the sessions from the program on the entirely random basis that I know the speakers, that is enough to give you the flavour of it.

Reaching informed agreement that e-disclosure is not needed

Having just published an article about whether electronic disclosure is needed in all cases, I turned to Ralph Losey’s blog to discover that he had just published an article about whether electronic discovery is needed in all cases. We do have fun on our Sundays, don’t we?

My article is called How would Bray & Gillespie play in the UK?. The references in it to the propriety of making informed decisions against e-disclosure are a mantra which I often include to make it clear that electronic discovery / disclosure is not the inevitable outcome; the target is the right decision and the proportionate decision, and such a decision cannot be made without weighing and costing all the options. Ralph Losey’s article is called Paper or Plastic? The Wisdom of Supermarket Bag Boys and the Need for Local Rules which explores, amongst other things, the extent to which the obligation to discuss e-discovery at a Rule 26(f) conference can properly be discharged by a cursory agreement to opt for paper; the alternative, plastic, is seen as being:

where you waste a ton of money paying vendors to chase down unimportant ESI and pay young lawyers to read emails about what people had for lunch, which are then produced to each other on plastic CDs.

Ralph asks “Is there a conspiracy among attorneys, officers of the court, to disobey the very rules that they have sworn to uphold?” and concludes that he is not willing to go quite that far – yet. There are others in the US who would say that, and I used almost exactly the same words, mutatis mutandis, on my first outing before British judges two years ago, with the tactful rider that judges often made themselves silent co-conspirators by not making sure that the right questions had been asked. Ralph puts the same point this way:

[Judges] approve by their silent acquiescence. Not all do, of course, a few e-discovery oriented judges speak out, and speak loudly, but they are a small minority. Most judges just look the other way.

Outsource edisclosure and share the load

The outsourcing of legal functions is suddenly topical as a result of Rio Tinto’s decision to set up an outsourced legal resource in India and Pinsent Masons’ plan to have first pass litigation review done in South Africa – see Do two outsourcing stories in one week presage a trend?

Those who think that this is taking outsourcing too far, as it were, should bear in mind that the principles, the potential savings and the ability to add e-disclosure skills and resources to their litigation armoury are available much closer to home. Furthermore, they need make no upfront investment beyond a little training, and can get started tomorrow.

The first generations of litigation support applications generally required that a law firm purchased the software for in-house use and that they employed staff to administer it. The world has moved on since then, and those tools and resources and are more usually brought on board by having the documents data hosted by a third party, usually the software provider. This has many advantages, not least the fact that someone else incurs the capital outlay and takes responsibility keeping the data available 24/7. The law firm simply gets a bill for the rental of the server space, the provision of the software and any consultancy or data services which are required. The bill can be passed on to the client as a disbursement.

Cooperative hands across the sea

My post about the increasing exchange of ideas between the US and UK on matters of electronic discovery (Preserving the old ways, protecting the new ways) followed a spate of references in US e-discovery commentaries to what is happening in the UK. I observed that “The UK’s apparently quaint approach to disclosure conceals some workmanlike rules which deserve better use and serious consideration by others as well as ourselves”. An English audience may be interested to see some of what is said about us in the US.

The sources referred to below are amongst those to which I pay regular visits anyway, but their common element last week was that they all linked to articles of mine (and therefore turned up on my visitor statistics list). The point of the observation is not so much pride in the quality of my audience as evidence that what happens in the UK is now of interest in the US, which you would not have found a year or so ago.

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”.

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.

Ark Group e-Disclosure Conference 2009

You can generate a lot of notes in six conference days in three countries in nine days and have little time to transcribe them. I am quite good at actually recording what people say, less so at the small but telling details like headings and page-numbering. I can generally rely on my memory to fill the gaps in my notes (and the bits I cannot read) but that is a tall order when information has rolled at me continuously for days like infantry at the Somme. Ark Group’s e-disclosure conference of the beginning of last week seems a distant memory on a cold, wet dawn in Sydney ten days later when I started writing it all up, still more in the dark aeroplane cabin surrounded by snoring travellers on the way home when I finished it off. There was lots of good stuff said at the conference, but I doubt you would read a verbatim account even if I could set it down. What follows is a summary.

The chairman on Day 1 was Lee Gluyas of DLA Piper UK LLP who, as in previous years, was well up to the challenge of keeping speakers to time. Lee’s opening comments identified a positive shift over the time he had been filling this role, a greater awareness of the issues and the need to grapple with them.

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?

Keyword searching for e-disclosure documents is not like using Google

There is no one-size-fits-all answer when deciding what keywords (and what else apart from keywords) to use to arrive at the “right” set of documents for disclosure. You have to educate yourself to know what the court expects. There is more to it than finding Paris Hilton with Google.

It comes as a surprise to many that the UK Civil Procedure Rules include a reference to anything so sophisticated as keyword searches. Paragraph 2A.5 of the Practice Direction to Part 31 CPR says this:

It may be reasonable to search some or all of the parties’ electronic storage systems. In some circumstances, it may be reasonable to search for electronic documents by means of keyword searches (agreed as far as possible between the parties) even where a full review of each and every document would be unreasonable. There may be other forms of electronic search that may be appropriate in particular circumstances.

We were discussing this paragraph last night at a meeting of Master Whitaker’s drafting group, in the context of the proposed new e-Disclosure Practice Direction. The point at issue (or one of the points from a meeting lasting four and a half hours) was the need to sanction – indeed, to require in an appropriate case – the use of technology, whilst not implying that technology is all you need.   One issue is that the use of keywords is only one of the many technology solutions which may be applied to the task of finding the “right” set of documents – “right” being a neutral term which I use deliberately here (as we cannot do in the rules) to connote compliance with the definition of a disclosable document in a way which is proportionate.  Our wording must cover developments in search technology which are as yet unknown. Another issue is that technology alone, however sophisticated, is rarely, if ever, enough. You need a brain and the instructions for using it in this context.

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.

Catching up with KPMG

Part of the function of the e-Disclosure Information Project is to keep up with what the providers of software and services are doing. Given my emphasis on the human aspects of this business (which recurs in this blog and elsewhere in the form of questions like “Would you trust them with your client’s data? Do you like them?”) it is important to keep in touch by going in to see providers or welcoming them out here in Oxford. Since I neither buy nor directly recommend anything, these sessions are free of sales pitches, save in the subliminal and low-key sense that there is a mutual interest in sharing information.

I always seem to have a backlog, both of outstanding invitations and of writing about them. That reflects the balance between things I do directly for the Project’s sponsors, the wider objective informational aspects, the range of material which has to be read from the various jurisdictions in which discovery takes place, and the fact that there is always a conference organiser bullying for a set of slides.

KPMG comes to mind every day for the wholly obscure reason that my coffee cup sits on a tile which was the 1993 Christmas present from KPMG Forensic Accounting. It is functional as a mat, albeit that it shows a 1994 calendar. Like KPMG itself, it can claim longevity in a market which is full of new companies, staffed by people who were still at school in 1994, and in which corporate freebies have a marketing life of about ten minutes. I must have been on their mailing list on the strength of accounting negligence claims which I had run as a litigation partner (including JEB Fasteners v Marks Bloom in 1984 and Al Saudi Banque v Clarke Pixley in 1990, both still cited).

Explaining the Procrustean Bed

My post Zander sees his Woolf CPR predictions fulfilled refers you to an article by Michael Zander QC.

As an aside, a generation deprived of a classical education may be puzzled by Zander’s reference to a “Procrustean bed”, as I admit I was when I first saw it in a footnote to the old Rules of the Supreme Court. Lord Donaldson had used the expression in relation to the size of appeal bundles. I have to say I assumed in my ignorance that this was a geological metaphor. What he meant was that it was not necessary to pad out the bundles to the recommended size, nor omit necessary pages to meet the suggested size. The reference was to the apparently genial host Procrustes, who would invite passers-by to lie on his bed. He would then stretch them or amputate their limbs as required to fulfill his boast that his bed was just the right size for everyone.

One commentator refers to Procrustes drily as “the ancient champion of enforced conformity”. We do not, of course, want such precise conformity from our judges, ancient or not, but some degree of consistency would be nice, at least in respect of disclosure orders. We do not need the same answer every time, but the right answer, a proportionate answer, based on information provided by the parties “at the earliest practical date, if possible at the first Case Management Conference”.

The quotation comes from Paragraph 2A.2 of the Practice Direction to Part 31 CPR. That involves the exercise of informed discretion. Reading the damn thing and applying its provisions is not, however, discretionary.

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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?

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.

Law Society Disclosure Seminar in London

I am presenting a two hour seminar in London next Monday 9 March under the auspices of the Law Society.

Sponsored by Legal Inc and Millnet, both well-known suppliers of electronic disclosure solutions, this is a nuts-and-bolts review of everything from cases to rules, from a survey of the problems to a look at solutions, from points of detail to a review of the wider context. It includes a look at some applications.

The title of the seminar is Disclosure – the risks after Hedrich. Most of it is about electronic disclosure, but that is because most documents now in existence were created electronically, still exist electronically and therefore ought to be disclosed electronically – that is, their electronic existence should be disclosed even if it is not practical or cost-effective to handle or exchange them electronically.

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

LexisNexis and LDM joint venture

LexisNexis and LDM Global were hosts at a party on 6 November at the Andaz Hotel at Liverpool Street. The occasion was a link-up between them which brings together LDM’s role as a provider of a wide range of legal technology services and LexisNexis’ Hosted FYI.

The Andaz Hotel proved to be the former Great Eastern Hotel, which I remembered as a place of decaying plasterwork and dark corridors, selling curled sandwiches from under plastic domes or board-like plaice and soggy chips. It is now a cool destination, with dark walls hung with eye-catching pictures, glass tables and some extremely decent food and drink. My recollection of it, I realised, dates back to 1962, so a few changes might have been expected.

There are no marks for originality when describing a supplier’s products, and unless their own descriptions are top-heavy with hyperbole (in which case I remove it) it is easiest simply to pass on what they say about themselves. LexisNexis’ own description of Hosted FYI is as straight up-and-down as you can want – it delivers comprehensive data management know-how, online review and disaster recovery for law firms, corporations and government agencies. Hosted FYI is a secure, centralised, multi-user web review solution for processing, storing, retrieving, analysing, reviewing, redacting and sharing disclosure documents and Concordance databases quickly and easily.

Birmingham Law Society e-disclosure seminar

A collections expert, a data archive specialist, a commercial barrister and a judge took a Birmingham audience – the second audience there in three weeks – through the stages of data handling, from organising it on the clients’ server, through its collection, and on to its use in court. I was the warm-up act

Freshly returned (well, reasonably fresh, anyway) from electronic discovery conferences in Australia and the US, I was back in Birmingham on 23 October for an e-disclosure seminar organised by Birmingham Law Society. One of the speakers in Sydney, Geoffrey Lambert of KordaMentha, had referred in his session to the “Birmingham initiative” which suggests that we are making some impression. This was the second well-attended seminar in the city in three weeks, following the one at St Philips Chambers at the beginning of October.

How to build and validate effective keyword filters

The use of keywords to cut through large volumes of data is a vital skill. A webcast next week focuses on how time and costs can be saved by the effective use of keywords.

If I had a couple of hours to spare to write it, and thought that you had time to read it, I could do an essay on the value of an informed and intelligent use of keywords as a tool to find the documents which matter and (just as importantly) to cull those which do not. I could refer to the express mandate for their use in the UK Civil Procedure Rules (Practice Direction to Rule 31 CPR, Paragraph 2A.5) which may surprise many UK lawyers (as indeed does the very existence of the Practice Direction in some cases). I might refer to Lord Justice Jackson’s forthcoming inquiry into litigation costs and to the need to acquire skills to reduce them. I could recite the recent US cases in which keywords were critical. I could cover some of the arguments which are deployed for and against keywords as a means of targeting data.

I have a train to catch, so I will leave all that for another day. Fortunately, there is an opportunity next week to hear about some at least of these subjects from an expert.

Guidance Software launches Real eDiscovery

Guidance Software has produced the first edition of a new quarterly magazine called Real eDiscovery. The costs and risks of compliance with the demands of litigation discovery and regulatory investigations were going up the corporate agenda even before the recession struck, and Guidance is well-placed to help large organisations take some of that cost in house as they – government departments, corporates and law enforcement agencies alike – struggle make or repel the claims and investigations which recession brings.

EnCase eDiscovery is a platform used within organisations to collect data across the network in a systematised, repeatable way. If, as seems almost certain, demands for evidence increase several-fold over the coming months, the argument for taking this process in house increases correspondingly – put simply, the investment in the software and the skills will be recovered more quickly if there are more demands for data to be collected.

Getting disclosure information out of SharePoint

I was interviewed last week by one of the big computer magazines about the ever more ubiquitous Sharepoint – Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) to give it its full name. The context, unsurprisingly given my own area of practice, was the implications for SharePoint users of the need to produce documents and data from SharePoint to meet the demands of litigation or of regulators.

It is some time since I used SharePoint. My experience, however, is enough to tell me that it is superb at ingesting and distributing information, and substantially less so for finding it and getting it out again.

I do not mean, of course that you cannot find material in SharePoint – that is very much part of its function. Its indexing and retrieval tools, however, are geared to its primary function of production, sharing and distribution of information about set topics, often across multiple servers and jurisdictions. The very ease with which data can be distributed widely militates against the strict control which is expected – or which ought to be expected – of a document retention policy and all the other ideals of information governance within organisations.

Betting on certainties in the information war

The odds on gaining improved information management from the recession are better than those on offer for Peter Mandelson’s resignation before the next election. The war to tame the information needed for litigation and regulation, like other wars, will breed new tactics and technologies

My article What will recession do for civil justice?, which I published last Friday, brought together subjects as diverse as the agricultural depression of the 1870s and Peter Mandelson’s attachment to rich foreigners, in the context of leadership and the role of judges in the recovery which will come from the attrition of recession. My theme was that as lawyers and judges sort through the wreckage of the old economy, there may be an opportunity for business practices to take a leap forward. Specifically, I suggested that the time and expense of handling the litigation which has suddenly become a non-optional part of corporate strategy might prompt companies to reappraise how they manage the information whose volumes will prove the biggest single source of expense in litigation. The courts will have a hand in shaping how important that seems next time round.

Birmingham barristers see e-disclosure applications

A seminar in Birmingham allowed an audience of lawyers to see some of the applications used to handle electronic disclosure topped and tailed by some explanation of the litigation context. It was not just a trade show but a visual way to convey that the solutions are gaining on the problem

The e-Disclosure Information Project originated in Birmingham when Mark Surguy of Pinsent Masons introduced me last summer to HHJ Simon Brown QC, a designated Mercantile Judge at the Birmingham Civil Justice Centre. We brought it back there at the beginning of October when Edward Pepperall, a commercial barrister at St Philips Chambers, arranged for the Midland Chancery & Commercial Bar Association to invite us to give a reprise of a talk he had heard us give to solicitors a few months ago.

Ed Pepperall’s reasoning was that barristers are increasingly getting involved in the procedural aspects of Case Management Conferences. Birmingham may be ahead of other places because the judges there are known to practice the “active management” which the overriding objective requires and in which the parties are expected to take their part. The Commercial Court Guide, on which the Mercantile Court Guides are based, emphasises that the CMC is not just the old summons for directions. Judge Brown says of the CMC that is a “business meeting”.

If barristers are engaged at the CMC then they need to be aware – preferably well before they go in, and not just in the corridor outside – what the court will expect them to cover. Hands up all those who know about the obligation to discuss electronic sources of documents in Paragraph 2A.2 of the Practice Direction to Part 31 CPR. I thought not. What about Digicel (St Lucia) v Cable & Wireless? We did not mention that, because it had not been heard then. It has now, and we can expect many more orders requiring parties to discuss their sources and to take difficulties or disagreements to the judge.

Discovery of Australian and US connections

The purpose of the e-Disclosure Information Project is to assimilate and disseminate information about electronic discovery / disclosure. As you may conclude from my silence on this site for a fortnight, I have been doing more assimilating and less dissemination recently. Apart from one article part-drafted on the floor at dawn between flights at Kuala Lumpur airport, my output has been zero. The inputs, however, are considerable, and it will take a while to record them all. This article is a summary which will be followed by more specific articles. Its theme is collaboration between the thought-leaders in those common law jurisdictions which rely on the exchange of electronic documents in the search for justice.

KL was a staging-post en route for Sydney, where I was booked to speak at the Ark Group conference Preparing your Organisation for eDiscovery. From there I flew to Washington for the Masters Conference. My subject in Sydney was Responsibility for electronic disclosure, which surveyed every level from the state’s duty to provide an efficient forum for commercial disputes down to the individual duties of lawyers, clients and judges to manage cases and the documents needed as evidence in them. The main draw in Washington was a keynote speech by US Magistrate Judge John Facciola which took the same theme to a very much higher level, as I will report separately.

Take the best and discard the worst from US litigation

The Vikings brought with them some habits which were deplored by their hosts, but they also brought technology which we turned to our advantage. We do not much like some of the practices in US civil courts, but we can certainly use the technology which has been honed in them

On 8 June 793, the first Viking long-ships appeared off the coast of Britain – “ravages of heathen men” said the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, which had recently predicted some such cataclysm. The Vikings did a bit of raping and pillaging and pushed off home. The next year they were back, but were beaten off, retiring hurt with their leader dead, many drowned in a storm and others killed on landing.

Their technology, particularly in ship-building, was way ahead of its time, and improved rapidly to reflect the experience of the sailors and as an aid to the rough and tumble of their work. Not only were the ships able to face the roughest storms, but they had shallow draughts and were light enough to carry, both useful developments which were enhanced to cope with their raids. Nor were their victims an uncivilised and impoverished race – the visitors would hardly have bothered to keep coming back if they had not hoped to profit from it and, however attractive the ladies of the North-East, their charms hardly warranted a risky annual journey.

Practical Guidelines for e-Disclosure Management

Litigation solicitors in private practice and in-house lawyers would have done well to be at the Ark Group conference last week. Run over two days within spitting distance of the Tower, it had the title Adopting Practical Guidelines to e-Disclosure Management for the Legal Profession. Practical it was, as well as conveniently located.

Its supplier sponsors included FoxData, Autonomy, CaseLogistix by Anacomp, Guidance Software and LexisNexis, all of whom are also sponsors of the e-Disclosure Information Project which I run. Part of the Project’s aim is to make connections between suppliers whose service or software offerings are in different parts of the wood – between them, these suppliers and their applications collect data, process it, host it for review, help with analysis and make it available for exchange with others. There is overlap and competition between them, but also a common interest in helping practitioners – and judges – understand what is available to tackle the problems of e-disclosure. Part of my role is to help the would-be buyers see both the wood and the trees.

Meeting FoxData properly at last

Nearly a year after FoxData agreed to be the first sponsor of the e-Disclosure Information Project, I have at last been to see the company’s premises and met Ian Manning properly

The order in which logos appear beside these pages reflects the sequence in which companies agreed to sponsor the e-Disclosure Information Project. For those new to this site, the Project’s purpose is to increase awareness about electronic disclosure by bringing together all those with an interest in what is often the biggest single expense in civil litigation. Of all the players – courts, practitioners, corporate clients and suppliers – the group which is most remote from the practicalities is the one which has to make the decisions about case management, the judges.

Meeting people is right

Before you entrust your clients’ disclosure documents to a litigation support provider, it is worth getting to know a few, and that means real human contact, not just reading up about them. Meetings do not have to involve sitting round a table in an office.

The week in which the EU has purported to abolish the acre is a good time to mention the 450 acre field in which I hold meetings when people come and see me. It is called Port Meadow and lies a couple of minutes from my front door. The most recent such visitor, last week, was Andrew Sieja, CEO of KCura, whose Relativity document review application is making its mark.

More on Relativity in a moment. What is the value to me of meeting CEOs of litigation support providers and software companies? Why do they want to meet me? What is the best context for these getting-to-know-you conversations? And why does it matter in a business which, stripped of its fripperies, comes down to applying some technology to a pile of data so that lawyers can fight about it?

Catching up will have to wait

I had hoped by now to have written up the talks which HHJ Simon Brown QC and I gave to two groups of judges in the last two weeks, but time is against me and a short summary will have to do for now.

The audiences were first the Designated Civil Judges and then the Specialist Judges. The e-Disclosure Information Project, of which this site is the most obvious tangible output, began as an exercise in helping judges at the junction of two technical subjects – the CPR and technology. The first of these has been unchanged since 2005, but remains shrouded in a mystery which it does not deserve. The second changes all the time. My role is to try and unshroud the rules and to help introduce the technology to those who need it or who need to know about it if proportionate orders are to be made about disclosure.

E-Disclosure conferences give plenty to think about

Those who expect a daily addition to this collection of notes and essays (and I know there are a few such) may have wondered if I have run out of things to say from the paucity of posts recently.

Far from it, but I have been preparing for or attending three conferences this week, each of which has generated more than enough potential copy without leaving time to write it. What follows is a taster which I will follow over the next few days with more detailed reports.

At the Lawyer conference E-Disclosure – Beyond the Rules, I spoke with HHJ Simon Brown QC on the Commercial Court Recommendations and what the courts expect from you. We picked out the parts and the principles which apply to disclosure, and emphasised that everything we talked about applied as much in other courts as in the Commercial Court in cases where the volumes of documents made it proportionate.

The Court of Appeal on the scope of disclosure

Nichia Corporation v Argos may have been a patent case, but the sum involved was not very big and the principles as to proportionate disclosure and judicial case management are applicable everywhere

The ideal in legal commentary is that you know what the Court of Appeal said yesterday and report it. It is no less satisfying, however, to have been asserting publicly what you think the CA would say in certain circumstances – and then discover that it actually did so nearly a year ago in more or less the same terms.

No Court of Appeal judgment is needed to support my primary assertion that the scope of standard disclosure under Part 31.6 and Part 31.7 CPR is narrower, and may be very much narrower, than that of discovery under the old O24. RSC – see Relevant is irrelevant for standard disclosure where I quote from Lord Woolf’s 1995 Access to Justice Report as the best source for understanding the difference (as opposed to merely knowing that there is a difference) between the old regime and the new one.