Category Archives: Opinion

The top 10 wastes of clients’ money (#2)

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James Moeskops reflects on how technology and costs, if not practice, have changed since the early days of e-Discovery. This is the second in the series “Top 10 Ways in which lawyers are wasting their clients’ money” 

Waste #2 Reviewing Electronic Documents in ‘Native Form’

It is surprisingly common to find that lawyers who receive relatively large volumes of electronic documents (often on a memory ‘stick’ CD, DVD or even via email) opt to review these documents in their ‘native’ form (i.e. original form as they are received) without the assistance of electronic disclosure expertise or technology. Typically, this will include using Outlook to open email files (generally in PST form) Windows Explorer to search and navigate folder structures and the relevant MS Office programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and Adobe Acrobat to open pdf files.

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Old Macdonald had a farm

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One of the oldest Cistercian monasteries in Europe, founded in 1118, by St Bernard, sits in a marshy valley near the small town of Montbard in Burgundy. It was here in the medicine garden of Fontenay Abbey that I found myself on a gloriously sunny day at the end of last month. I must confess that despite the glorious setting and the outstanding architecture of the ancient church and monastic dormitory with its original wooden ceiling, my immediate thoughts were elsewhere. My return journey to the little hamlet where I was staying, with its 16th century bridge over the river Armancon alongside the Burgundy canal,  would take me via the village of Epoisses famous for its exquisite cheese. If I am honest I was looking forward to a little light collation and an accompanying glass of chilled Chablis to keep me going during the afternoon.

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Top 10 Ways in which lawyers are wasting their clients’ money

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James Moeskops reflects on how technology and costs, if not practice, have changed since the early days of e-Discovery.

In the early days of electronic disclosure/discovery, addressing the requirement to review and disclose large volumes of electronic documents was time consuming and the technologies available at the time were of marginal assistance to lawyers.

To illustrate how far the technology has advanced and costs fallen, I will use the example of one of Millnet’s earliest large scale electronic disclosure engagements, which was assisting a law firm client on one of the largest matters then seen. We were initially engaged in 2002 to process approximately 100GB of predominantly email data and to present the processed data in an online review platform. We took approximately 12 months to complete the document collection, processing and loading phase and the lawyers took a further 2-3 years to review everything. Millnet’s fees were upwards of £1 million over a 3 year period (with most of the earliest electronic processing being completed on a per page basis because everyone was used to paying for photocopying on this basis).

Fast forward to 2011. Were we to be engaged on an identical project today, we would have the entire 100GB of data processed in a matter of hours and available in a far more efficient and sophisticated online review database within 48 hours at a cost of circa £50K.

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The Aha moment

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In which Kanga and baby Roo come to the forest, and Piglet has a bath

In an effort to avoid the increasingly tiresome subject of super injunctions leading to a spat between the judiciary in the stern figure of the Lord Chief Justice no less and that well known tribune of the people in the slightly less forbidding figure of John Hemming (Lib Dem Member of Parliament for Birmingham Yardley), I found solace in a busy few days for news of a less elevated kind.

I have never hidden my dislike of the so called super injunction. In my old fashioned way, just as justice delayed is often justice denied, I have always believed that it is all but impossible to do justice on the basis of a secret, one-sided hearing based on affidavit as opposed to oral evidence. Injunctions are sometimes necessary to ensure that one party is not put at so much of a disadvantage in a dispute that no amount of damages can ever put right the hurt caused by the other. Sometimes, the only way is to stop something from happening in an attempt to preserve the status quo while the court has time to hear the parties and decide on their dispute.

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A leap into the unknown

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We push the youngest member of our team Bridie Sheldon into writing a blog… about blogging.

Imagine you have just thrown yourself off a bridge. You are plummeting ever nearer and nearer to the ground and then, in a split second, the free falling feeling turns into a stomach churning rebound up into the stratosphere, or so it feels. This is because you have a piece of stretchy cord tightly strapped around your ankles.

Yes, I’m talking about bungee jumping. For some, including myself, the idea sounds exhilarating. The feeling of free falling is undeniably unbeatable, giving you the chance to let go of everything… and fly.

Why would anyone not? Well I have to admit, I remember standing at the top of the ragged gorge and, as I looked down, I began to think of the risks involved. What happens if they didn’t calculate my weight correctly or what if the bungee snaps…? I could end up with a serious headache.

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Misquoted

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My favourite misquotation is “money is the root of all evil” or for those of you with a Latin bent, “radix malorum est cupiditas.” The correct quotation of the words from the King James Bible, 400 years old almost to the day, is in 1 Timothy 6.10. “For the love of money is the root of all evil;…..” The addition of the concept of the love of money completely alters the usual misquotation.

Now I would not want my reader to think that references in the rest of this piece to the Bribery Act 2010 are all about a failure to quote correctly or accurately. Much has been written about this piece of legislation since it was first passed last year not least because of the furore over the inability of the MoJ to publish the guidance promised by section 9 which in turn has led to the postponement of the date when the Act comes into effect. In fact more nonsense has been written about the Act than on almost any other topic I can currently think of. There are of course honourable exceptions to this broad criticism but when you realise that US business has had to deal with the Foreign  Corrupt Practices Act for over 30 years it is difficult to understand what the fuss is all about.

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A pointless waste of time

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One of the wonders of the Internet is that almost anything you care to look for is there, somewhere! Not just historical facts, political articles, scientific treatises and the like but almost anything you care to think about.

Has anyone noticed how many people were away from the office in the past few days? The prospect of the last few days of the skiing season, the start of spring, consecutive four day weekends looming and the start of school holidays must mean that Britain’s productivity will fall by a measureable amount in April.

I have resisted the temptation to look and see if there are statistics about this on the internet but if they are not there now I bet they will be before too long. But while engaged in these ruminations, I have come across the most pointless waste of time, namely a website dedicated to pointless websites.  If you are stuck for things to do you can pass the time by playing with the website which swaps dads’ and babies’ heads around, or forget that time exists at all by spending time on the site which allows you to think about beards – yours and those adorning the faces of other people!

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Dines with dinosaurs

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On 12th March 1829 undergraduates at the University of Cambridge sent a challenge to their counterparts at Oxford and started a tradition which continues in more or less the same form to this day.

If you missed it last Saturday, imagine 16 heavy athletic men, plus a smaller man and a girl, afloat on the Thames in two boats so flimsy that the slightest mistake will result in thousands of pounds worth of boat having a large hole in the hull and everyone getting rather wetter than they had hoped or in the case of the winning crew’s cox, as wet as he knew he would become once the race was over.

The 157th Oxford v Cambridge Boat Race was rowed in near perfect conditions and Oxford’s impressive win means that they have now won 76 times to Cambridge’s 80 (one race was a dead heat). This is significant, because if you are an Oxford man, as I am, you have spent all your life seeing Cambridge’s once commanding lead in the overall statistics dwindle to almost parity. Dare I dream that in the not too distant future Oxford will overtake their rivals in the total number of wins? If so, I will have to make a real effort to attend a Dinosaurs’ Dinner again; for those unfamiliar with the Dinosaurs it has nothing to do with prehistoric times and everything to do with eating and drinking too much at my old college where the rowers’ dining club is called the Dinosaurs!

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Bribery, corruption and the free lunch

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It is nigh on impossible to open a serious newspaper or magazine these days without finding an article on the Bribery Act 2010 which was supposed to come into force in April 2011, after publication of the guidance promised by the Government. I recall that such guidance was to be published three months before the legislation comes into force and now we learn that it will not see the light of day any time soon and it will  be much later in the year before the Act  takes effect, if ever.

There has been so much commentary on the Act and its likely effects that I hesitate even to mention it. Many organisations, and not surprisingly a number of law firms, have posted articles and commentaries on the internet.  These firms include Allen & Overy, Freshfields and Norton Rose and you can access their views by clicking the appropriate link above.

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Pistols at dawn

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In 1807 England was at war with Napoleon.

In the graveyard of St Laurence’s Parish Church in Stroud, Gloucestershire a plain stone carries the inscription:

Here lie the remains of Lieutenant Joseph Francis Delmont, of His Majesty’s 82nd Regiment, born November 25, 1785, died August 18, 1807.

On August 14th 1807 Delmont and Lieutenant Benjamin Heazle fought the last recorded pistol duel in England. A (relatively) recent article in Stroud’s local paper by Dave King describes the duel and the events leading up to it: Stroud – the venue for England’s last pistol duel, [Stroud News & Journal, 21 Nov, 2009]

The article makes for fascinating reading about events more than 200 years ago. Whether or not it was in fact the last pistol duel in England, duelling of any sort eventually died out and the last duel fought on English soil is believed to have been in 1852.

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