Disclosure of Electronic Documents (e-mails etc in Litigation)

Disclosure today is increasingly electronic. At the listing stage, the clients’ sources include e-mails and drafts; at Disclosure, the solicitors increasingly exchange data and images rather than paper. Computers increase the volumes and encourage the proliferation of multiple copies in both electronic and paper form; the Courts expect relevance and the elimination of duplicates. How can one reconcile these conflicts in a timely and cost-effective way?

The practical course is to index the whole collection, electronic and paper, in one database and to capture electronically or enter manually the minimum information necessary for the lawyers to make their first pass through the documents.

Electronic files such as WP documents, spreadsheets and e-mails can be retrieved direct from the computer. As sometimes can electronic versions of documents that have been deliberately or inadvertently deleted – as is alleged to have happened at Enron.

 Where possible, information is extracted from these electronic files (e.g. sender, recipient, date and subject can be read from e-mails, and electronic attachments can be detached and indexed themselves) and cards are created for them in the database. The user can immediately start viewing them in their native format and starting to classify them – perhaps no more than a single click to indicate relevance or priority.

Click here if you would like us to e-mail you our notes on Electronic Documents and Disclosure

Click here if you would like to see an article we wrote on Electronic Discovery for the Society of Computers & Law Magazine (Summer 2002) [Publications/Magazine/Volume 13 Issue 2]

Meanwhile, the paper documents can be scanned. This can be done by a specialist service provider but increasingly firms are bringing this work in-house with central and departmental scanner/copiers. We have barcode printing and reading software that can take the administrative burden out of bulk scanning for litigation - whether you are working in-house or at a specialist service provider (click for more details).  Anyone who can use a copier can make a scanned image of a document and add it to the database; large volumes can be added by interpolating bar-coded sheets between documents and simply dropping the bundles in the scanner. The system then delivers the scanned documents to the database.

The mixed population of electronic and paper documents is thus collected in a form which allows easy review. Informed preliminary advice can be given quickly and if the action proceeds, detail can be added to create a Disclosure List and prepare for trial.

So there is little point in printing and scanning e-mails and letters when copies of the electronic documents can be used in their native formats.

This applies whether it is your own data, your clients' data, or Disclosure information from other parties.

Click the link below for some typical examples of other situations where our data conversion services are relevant, whether or not you are already an Openlaw user. 

Exchanging Data in Litigation - Examples of Data Conversion

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