I suspect that the owners of Kodak are ruefully aware of this today as I read that the company has filed for Chapter 11 protection from bankruptcy in the US with liabilities exceeding assets by a staggering $1.65 billion. This does not necessarily mean the end of Kodak as a business but it is a sad day when the inventor of that ubiquitous camera, the box Brownie, loses its way so dramatically. Millions of people will remember the Brownie and I am told that even Neil Armstrong took photos on the moon with one.

Kodak almost got it right, as it astutely anticipated the advent of digital photography but then failed to foresee the rise of the likes of Facebook and other sites where photos can be viewed and shared resulting in the collapse of the market for printing photographs. Effectively Kodak was lost once someone worked out how to plug a camera into a computer and share and display photographs without the need to print them off and stick them in an album.

Despite the fact that I bought a roll of film in the past week (24 exposure and black and white, if you must know) and can look forward to slotting the capsule into a camera and pulling the bit of film hanging out of the end across the aperture to fix onto the roller on the other side just like we used to do, I have to accept that this procedure is not the way of the future. No more snapping the back of the camera shut and checking that the number of exposures appears in the counter before pointing and clicking and winding on. No more keen anticipation while you wait for the pictures to be developed and returned (but possibly also no more disappointment when you find that the film was over exposed or did not take the pictures at all!)

The world of handling disclosure has been going through the same game changing process for some time now. It is rare now to come across a litigation lawyer with no appreciation that life has changed and that expensive and time consuming linear human review is no longer the gold standard for modern document review. Just as photography has changed and digital is now the name of the game, so it is now imperative that lawyers at least consider ways in which technology may be able to assist in the disclosure process. There is a lot of technology out there, and its use or possibly the way in which it is used will not always be appropriate, but not to have an understanding of what can be done and what is available and not to consider how the technology may help is today as inappropriate as it was for the army commanders Lucan, Raglan and Cardigan to expect the Light Brigade to charge the Russian guns in Tennyson’s “Valley of Death” at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854.

Life has changed. Whether it is for the better, we will have to wait and see but there is a growing body of evidence and case law which suggests that it is and hard evidence exists that time and money is being saved in the process.

What would our wise Brown Owl make of all this? Though I tend to think of little brown chocolate biscuit cakes when people talk about brownies, of course the real Brownies are little girls who troop off to meet their leader Brown Owl one night of the week as a precursor to becoming Girl Guides. They used to wear brown uniforms festooned with badges gained as a result of different achievements and had a great fun time by all accounts. But Brown Owl would be the first to recognise that times have changed in that the main uniform now appears to be bright yellow according to the brownie website.  It cannot be long before someone demands that the Brownies be known by another name; my guess is though that, being a wise bird, Brown Owl will take it all in her stride. Her advice to her charges, to the likes of Kodak and to any reluctant lawyers out there cleaving to the old ways of paper review, is obviously “adapt or die.”

It could not be simpler than that!

Photo: Brown owl on Public Domain Images

My starting assumption is that most lawyers are reviewing documents in a linear, document by document basis. Another key fact/assumption is that it is not faster or otherwise more efficient to review documents onscreen versus those in hard-copy form. This may sound contentious but our clients generally report that it is faster to review hard copy than it is to review onscreen – although this is somewhat dependent on the personal preferences and IT skills of the reviewer.

Then, there is the cost of acquisition, which can be justifiable deterrent to electronic review where the source documents to be reviewed are in paper format. The costs of scanning and coding hard copy documents are typically in the range of £0.40-£0.50 per page compared to £0.01 per page for the equivalent electronic documents – i.e. 40 to 50 times the cost! So, the benefits are lower and the costs higher where the documents are hard-copy as opposed to electronic and it therefore comes down to weighing up all of the benefits of using e-discovery, versus the costs.However, I’m not seriously trying to make a case for sticking to the old ways, as in most instances the benefits rapidly begin to outweigh the costs – and here are a few of them:

• Search – e.g. where there are large volumes of documents, and the objective is to identify documents responsive to keywords, date ranges, file types etc.
• Collaboration – e.g. complex multi-party matters where the benefits arise from collaboration and avoiding the need to make multiple hard-copies.
• Online access – e.g. for matters where parties requiring access are geographically separated such as working across different offices, with counsel, experts, clients etc.
• List production – e.g. for electronic documents, especially emails, the cost of producing a disclosure list is a fraction of the cost of doing so manually.

In addition to the features noted above, there  is what you can call “the productivity argument”. The use of advanced software, including the latest ‘expert led’ software, will eliminate the need for examining each and every document in the first place. In all but the simplest of cases, document review will be faster in an electronic system compared to hard copy review. These are some of the productivity benefits that are simply not available to paper reviewers -

• Near-duplicate detection enables grouping of similar documents together for review.
• Hard copy and online print productions with unique ID – more time/cost efficient than the equivalent manual process.
• Ability to organise documents in many different ways e.g. by issue, chronology, custodian/source etc whereas hard-copy would require multiple copies of documents to be created
• Where certain types/classes of documents are identified that can be ‘bulk tagged’ as relevant/not relevant as opposed to wading through lever arch files coming across the same/similar documents.
• Optional ‘propagation’ of tagging to document ‘families’ and/or duplicates.
• Use of advanced review batching techniques such as clustering (grouping of documents together based on textual similarity).
• Use of advanced ‘predictive coding’ techniques. These essentially involve a senior reviewer undertaking a review of batches of documents and the software then scoring / categorising the entire population of documents using advanced statistical and textual analysis algorithms.

It is worth bearing in mind that it is not an ‘all or nothing’ decision. Most law firms adopt a mix and match approach whereby either external or internal litigation support software is used depending on the circumstances of the case.

So to sum up, the factors that indicate that use of e-discovery will be more efficient and save costs are:

1. Where there is a mix of electronic and hard copy docs
2. Where the volume of documents to review is substantial
3. Where there is an expectation that a matter will grow in size and/or complexity over time.
4. When reviewing electronic documents for which the lawyer doesn’t have the software for viewing certain types of documents such as Lotus Notes emails, Visio diagrams, CAD drawings etc.
5. Where there are multiple people involved in the reviewing of documents and they are spread across different geographic locations.
6. Where there is a need to restrict access to different classes of documents across different users/reviewers.
7. When the opponents on a matter are using e-disclosure techniques.
8. When the matter is governed by rules requiring electronic documents and disclosure techniques to be considered and used, if doing so will reduce costs e.g. CPR Part 31B
9. When there are many complex issues and it will therefore be beneficial to use technology for categorisation as opposed to using ‘sticky notes’ and/or multiple lever arch files.
10. When there are large volumes of ‘false positive’ documents (i.e. that are responsive to keyword or other search criteria but are not relevant to the matter) in which case advanced search and sophisticated review techniques such as ‘predictive coding’ may greatly accelerate the review and reduce costs.

If you are anything like me, you will not immediately understand where the donor is coming from. Indeed, I had to look up the words in the very same book (The Superior Person’s Book of Words by Peter Bowler, first published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury in 2002) before I got the joke.

If you want to know the meaning of zzxjoanw, nepheligenous or thaumaturge you will need to refer to Mr Bowler’s entertaining book, available on Amazon and in good bookshops everywhere. I know what you will be thinking! He has lost his marbles, spent too much time overindulging or is suffering from sunstroke (on the Sussex coast, in October?) The weather was blistering but…

No, I may have succumbed to all these things but the point I want to make is that lawyers are not always at fault when they appear not to want to become familiar with the technology available in the e-disclosure space. I know I spend some time blogging the suggestion that some lawyers could do better in relation, for example, to e-disclosure but really and truly how is it their fault if they cannot understand what the technologists say?

And it is not only the technologists who are at fault. Reading recently about the very sad events at Kiwayu on the Kenyan coast where Mr Tebbutt was shot and killed and his wife taken hostage, I was irritated to find that my newspaper of choice had decided to mangle the language and refer to piracy having “metastasised into an enterprise with one aim…extortion.”

Now I have heard of metastasis in the sense of a cancer spreading from one organ to another and I suppose you might say that the use of the noun in the form of a verb is a clever way of describing the way in which piracy has changed over the years. Frankly I found it ridiculous. What on earth is wrong with saying that piracy has become an enterprise with one aim, namely extortion? We would all have understood immediately what was being said.

This is my point! Too often people in the technology industry use words and phrases which are to all intents and purposes alien to the rest of humanity and I find it hard to blame a lawyer who refuses to engage with someone who does not explain in clear and unambiguous language how the services offered may be of assistance to the lawyer in solving the problem he/she currently faces.

Unintelligible? Well, before you go, there was one other noteworthy piece of news while I was away. Did you see that Twitter now “predicts the stock market”?

Apparently a hedge fund called Derwent Capital Markets finished its first month of trading in July with a return of 1.85% despite recent market falls and turbulence. The report claimed it used Twitter to track global emotions and then “uses complex algorithms to predict the stock market.”

I told you it was all aeaeae (magic, to those in the know)! But we in the business of e-discovery/disclosure could all help to spread a little magic if we thought carefully how to explain to our actual and potential clients how we can help them with the problems of collection, analysis, review and hosting, in a language they readily understand.

And in the spirit of explaining to my audience exactly what I am talking about here is a short list of vocabulary:

• Afflatus: a sudden rush of poetic or divine inspiration.
• Zzxjoanw: a Maori drum.
• Nepheligenous: Producing clouds of smoke.
• Thaumaturge: A miracle-man
• Aeaeae; Magic (and claimed to be the only all vowel six letter word known to Mr Bowler).
• Winchester Goose: This is a family blog. Suffice to say the phrase is an Elizabethan euphemism used by Shakespeare to mean a swelling in the groin caused by venereal disease. As Mr Bowler says, the interest is in the derivation as the brothels in Southwark were then under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester.

I have no idea whether any of this is correct but I hope I have explained it clearly!

Illustration: ‘Man with Goose’ by Lowell Herrero

She is also Mrs Michael Gove, wife of the Education Secretary.

Normally I would find it difficult to justify blogging about the wife of a politician who, as far as I am aware, has absolutely nothing to do with, and quite possibly no interest in, the world of e-discovery.

However, it so happens that The Times of September 21st published an article written by Education Editor Greg Hurst entitled “Gove intrigue over ‘official use of private e-mails’.” In his piece Mr Hurst refers to a controversy which has arisen over the Education Secretary’s relations with his civil servants, some of whom appear to have been bypassed as a result of the alleged use of private emails by the department’s special advisers and possibly also by Mr Gove himself.

Other claims have emerged that an official may have used a Hotmail account to send an email putting pressure on a school governing body to convert to academy status, that a special adviser asked another to use his gmail address and not his official Department e-mail account and personal email accounts had been used to discuss government business and personnel changes.

Serious enough, you may think, but worse was to come. It now appears that there have been a number of leaks from the department over recent weeks and that concern had been raised that use of personal email accounts would not only cut civil servants out of discussions to which they would normally be a party but could also lead to emails from personal accounts escaping requests for publication under the Freedom of Information Act.

According to the report the Education Secretary was said to use an account known among his aides as the “Mrs Blurt account” registered in the name of his wife.

All very puzzling! But it reminded me that private emails may not necessarily be lost in relation to the collection of a body of emails, say in a piece of litigation.

Best practice dictates that when searching for emails between two custodians, you should cast the net widely and run the resulting corpus of data through a search tool such as Nuix which will identify the existence of email accounts being used other than the primary account. While Nuix will not identify the actual content, the fact that other email accounts are being used opens up a line of enquiry which may lead to a request for specific disclosure or an application to the court for an order that the email account owner disclose user names and passwords/log-in details so that the contents of the private emails may be discovered.

Something useful to blurt about, perhaps!

•Technology created the problem so technology needs to solve it.

•Electronic discovery is often the tail which wags the litigation dog, using up between 50% and 80% of the litigation budget.

•I am afraid not to know it because it dominates every part of the case.

•None of the above.

The debate goes on and what is surprising is how many divergent views there are about a subject which ought by now to be mainstream. After all, no litigator can now be doing his/her job properly if they do not at least consider the use of technology when deciding how to manage the data in the case or deciding on the strategy to be adopted.

The views above are not original but come from an article in Law Technology News - Lawyers Struggle to Get a Grasp on E-Discovery, 10th Aug, 2011 - wherein Gina Passarella discusses how lawyers struggle with e-disclosure/discovery. The article is full of quotes from lawyers and so-called IT experts. What is beyond doubt is that the take up of technology by lawyers can seem from time to time somewhat disappointing. There are obvious exceptions notably among some of the small to mid tier law firms who have grasped the fact that they need the help technology can give to compete with the larger firms on something approaching a level playing field.

I disagree wholeheartedly with the view expressed by Ben Barnett, who is described as Dechert’s e-discovery practice guru, that technology created the problem and should provide the solution. I prefer the comments by, amongst others, Stephanie “Tess” Blair of Morgan Lewis & Bockius that “…we’re at the end of the beginning with e-discovery.” Or Thomas J Smith of K&L Gates: “All the tools are in place, but it is up to the judge to use them and the parties to ask that they be used.”

I think Mr Barnett is wrong because I do not accept that it is technology that has created the problem. It is technology which now provides a solution for lawyers to manage their clients’ data in a timely, cost effective and efficient manner.

The article concludes as follows:

The biggest problems with e-discovery fall into a few broad categories — cost, time, slowly developing case law, and a general lack of knowledge or anxiety over how the process works. In the most simplistic sense, time will heal those wounds as technology improves, courts generate more case law or procedures for handling e-discovery and lawyers gain a better understanding of the courts’ views toward e-discovery and how the attorneys can best manage the process.”

I prefer the glass half full analogy myself – this is the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end! If you agree, may be we should talk! If you disagree, perhaps we should talk too.

After all, you have nothing to lose but your prejudices.

It is a very good question. The trainee was right to ask it and there was no need at all to feel embarrassed about it. It is a common problem and illustrates the sometimes yawning gap between the theory and the practice of electronic document management.

The technology in this area has improved exponentially over the past 10 years. The speed and reliability have improved and the cost has plummeted. The problem arises where lawyers think they prefer to use paper rather than work electronically.

How do you persuade a client or a lawyer that they should work electronically when so may appear to prefer to deal with paper with all its imperfections?

I used to sneer at algorithms. Not because an algorithm is something inherently unpleasant or useless but frankly because I had not taken the time and trouble to understand why they might be helpful to me. An algorithm is essentially a set of instructions on how to make a calculation rather like a mathematical formula and algorithms are present in all technology software used in e-disclosure.

Since hearing about Joan Ginther[The luckiest woman in the world?, Today, BBC Radio 4, 11th Aug, 2011] I am going to take algorithms more seriously. Joan has just won her fourth multimillion lottery jackpot and has clocked up a $20 million dollar scratchcard fortune. She is apparently a Stanford educated maths genius who just may have cracked the code that determines how winning tickets are distributed.  The odds of her winning streak have been assessed at 1 in 18 septillion where one septillion is the number of grains of sand on Earth! If Miss Ginther has worked out the algorithm which decides how the cards are distributed, her phenomenal run of luck has been estimated to occur only once in a thousand, million, million years!!

Clearly algorithms are not to be sniffed at and I urge lawyers to take them seriously from now on; which brings me back to the trainee’s fascinating question.

There is no simple answer to the question but if you have been reading James Moeskops’ recent series of articles on how lawyers can waste their clients’ money, you will recall that his first example concerned printing out electronic documents - Waste #1 – Printing Electronic Documents,  Smart e-Discovery blog, 2nd June, 2011.

It will almost always be more efficient and more cost effective to work with electronic documents electronically, rather than printing them out. Before printing out electronic data, you should balance the perceived comforts against the main benefits of using e-discovery software:

• Searching – from simple keywords through to highly complex and targeted queries involving logical operators such as AND, OR and NOT.
• Sorting in a myriad of different ways at the click of a button using fields of metadata such as dates, authors, recipients and document type extracted automatically from the electronic documents.
• Web based access to the documents to facilitate remote working and collaboration across offices and with 3rd parties such as experts / counsel and the end client.
• If collected and processed correctly electronic documents retain the original structure and source information which is often of relevance and is typically disclosed in accordance with Practice Direction 31B.
• Electronic tagging / classification of documents is more efficient and flexible than the use of ‘post it’ notes in lever arch files.

May I suggest the trainee bookmarks this post and has it ready next time the partner in the group comes calling and asks for electronic documents to printed out?  In my experience, trainees who can argue coherently and knowledgeably almost always find themselves promoted. 

Now, that’s a bit like winning the lottery without the need to buy a ticket!

It seems obvious to me that if you are going to try and engage anyone in a process which is unfamiliar to them you need at the outset to set their minds at rest and you will not succeed in doing that if you use language with which they cannot identify. At best their eyes glaze over and at worst they run a mile. What makes it worse in the world of e-disclosure/discovery is that they cannot run far because considering whether to use technology is now firmly centre stage in the litigation process. While they may not be able to run far, they will almost certainly not run back to you if you get it wrong to begin with and they will end up with one of the many other organisations who profess to offer similar services. Last time I put the term “e-disclosure” into Google I came up with 95 million hits, so how on earth does a lawyer or anyone else looking for help decide which one to go for?

To be fair to the technology industry, there are a number of complicated and clever technologies on the market and many of them, although different in their way, in reality do much the same thing. So how do you choose?

I have been following the debate about predictive coding with interest. Chris Dale (@chrisdaleoxford) has written a summary of the present state of the debate from his vantage point of sunny Carmel on California and you can read the article here: Judge Peck and Predictive Coding at the Carmel eDiscovery Retreat [e-Disclosure Information Project blog, 2nd Aug, 2011]

One of his points resonated with me particularly. I have noticed in recent presentations that lawyers often now ask about the defensibility of the technology being used. I am not aware of any decision in any jurisdiction where a court has been asked to rule whether a particular piece of technology or process is valid/legal/appropriate, still less have I seen a judgment where the judge has said that a particular process or technology is valid etc.

This is not surprising because most judges are not technical experts themselves and even if they are technically astute the point of their judgments is not likely to bear on the efficacy or otherwise of a particular process or technology. The closest it may come is to consider whether the procedure adopted by a party and its lawyers was appropriate, proportionate or cost effective in the circumstances of the particular case; and that does not get us very far down the road of endorsing the use of a particular piece of technology.

I usually content myself with answering the question about defensibility by pointing out that the CPR now requires a consideration of the use of technology, there has been no case of which I am aware where a court has determined the issues based on the use or not of a particular process and if you want something a little more concrete, you have Senior Master Whitaker in his judgment in Goodale v Ministry of Justice saying:

Indeed, when it comes to review, I am aware of software that will effectively score each document as to its likely relevance and which will enable a prioritisation of categories within the entire document set.

Lawyers should take heart. It is really not that complicated, as many have discovered. Indeed, I have recently been involved in a case which dramatically illustrates the effective use of a variety of pieces of technology with tremendous results and I am hoping to persuade the client to allow me to use it as a case study to share with you all..

Remember the overriding objective of the CPR!

1. These Rules are a new procedural code with the overriding objective of enabling the court to deal with cases justly.
2. Dealing with a case justly includes, so far as is practicable –
   1. ensuring that the parties are on an equal footing;
   2. saving expense;
   3. dealing with the case in ways which are proportionate –
      • to the amount of money involved;
      • to the importance of the case;
      • to the complexity of the issues; and
      • to the financial position of each party;
   4. ensuring that it is dealt with expeditiously and fairly; and
   5. allotting to it an appropriate share of the court’s resources, while taking into account the need to allot resources to other cases.

If you remember that when you approach a new piece of litigation or the process of collection and review as well as the process of disclosure you will not go far wrong. Add to that a decent expert provider to help and you will not be troubled about considerations of “technospeak” nor defensibility.

Waste #10 Utilising the Wrong Level of Staff

One response from law firms to the pressure on hourly rate charges has been to pass document management and first pass document review down to the most junior and lowest-cost staff possible.

We have seen three approaches:

• Increased used of paralegals, administrative staff and trainee lawyers.
• Some law firms have established ‘central’ in-house teams typically in lower-cost UK or international locations (examples include Addleshaws (Manchester), Clifford Chance (India), Herbert Smith (Belfast).
• Outsource often involving TUPE arrangements and long term contractual undertakings to one of the LPO firms such as Integreon, Exigent etc.

Passing certain aspects of the work down to lower hourly rate staff, whether in-house or outsourcing, tends to ignore the opportunity to leverage electronic disclosure technology, which would allow a far larger proportion of the budget to be allocated to the most senior and experienced lawyers (i.e. those with higher charge rates) .

Probably the best example of this approach is to involve senior lawyers or even partners on the initial document review through use of the advanced ‘expert-led’ technologies highlight in an earlier article in this series [Waste #6. Failure to use advanced search/review technologies, 5th July, 2011]. The objective is to dramatically reduce the number of review hours which would otherwise be required (by paralegals, junior lawyers, etc.) in the absence of expert input  at the outset.

Previous articles in this series …

Waste #9. Selecting the Wrong Electronic Disclosure Technology or Expert

The provision of electronic disclosure services to law firms and their clients incorporates a myriad of niche service elements which are ‘mixed and matched’ on a matter by matter basis. The definition of these service elements is best represented by the Electronic Discovery Reference Model ‘EDRM’ (see www.edrm.net for more information).

One of the market trends of the past decade has been for firms providing niche services in one area of the EDRM to present themselves as a one stop shop service to law firms. Lawyers need to be aware of the relative strengths of different service providers and at times may need to consider engaging multiple service providers on a single matter.

Common examples of where we have seen the ‘wrong’ technology or service provider engaged include:

• Forensic investigation firms being engaged for typical commercial disputes where their emphasis is on collection and analysis of data but where the requirements should be more focused on document management and production (see  example cited below).
• Full service firms (including Millnet) do not necessarily have the expertise and technology to provide niche services such as video analysis, investigation of mobile phones or PDAs.
• Global matters potentially involving collection of electronic and hard copy from multiple locations or requiring data to be hosted in specific jurisdictions. The ability to process and review multiple foreign languages, for instance, will generally require the engagement of multiple service providers.
• Flexibility of pricing structures, capacity and working practices differs across firms offering ostensibly the same services. For instance, the large global service providers tend to be less nimble and responsive on relatively small electronic disclosure matters, however the large global service providers have more resources to bring to bear on very large or global matters.

Over the past 18 months we have been engaged on three matters where law firms had incurred considerable charges in the early stages of matters where they had engaged forensic investigation firms. One notable example involved a commercial dispute with an estimated value of circa £1-2 million where the law firm representing the claimants engaged a forensic technology firm and incurred forensic collection charges in excess of £50,000 at an early stage in proceedings. Thereafter, the law firm were advised that the cost to process the electronic documents was circa £100,000 and that the monthly charge for hosting these documents in a review platform would be circa £10,000. Not surprisingly this level of cost was perceived to be entirely disproportionate and ultimately Millnet were appointed and performed all of the processing work at no charge in order to assist the law firm out of a difficult situation. In our opinion, it had not been necessary to forensically image a considerable proportion of the data collected given the nature of the dispute.

The shoe can easily be on the other foot, as when we took on a matter involving large volumes of electronic documents in Russian, Ukranian and English, including email data from a system used only in countries from the former Soviet Republic. It soon became apparent that the litigation support system that we were using for the matter did not function well with Cyrillic characters. We swiftly agreed that these issues were not within our control and assisted with the process of handing the matter over to another provider who was able to do some custom development work to accommodate the language requirements at short notice.

Such is the nature of the rapidly evolving technology, that we now would have the capabilities to provide the services as required, which  illustrates the need for almost constant two way feedback between the law firm and their preferred service partners.

Previously…

Waste #8. Inefficient Manual Production of Bundles

On large document-intensive matters the production of hard copy and/or electronic bundles for trial, arbitration or mediation can become hugely costly.

Costs are mitigated if the bundles are created from an electronic disclosure database because the process of organising documents, creating an index and ultimately producing the documents in electronic and, if required, hard copy form is far more efficient.

Conversely, bundle creation costs are compounded when the documents to be included in an electronic bundle are in hard copy format - even if we disregard all the associated upstream inefficiencies.  When these hard copies originated as electronic documents that were printed out at the review stage, the result is a wasteful and costly merry go round of printing and scanning, scanning and printing.

My example here is partly related to an issue I raised earlier in this series, and partly to do with the capabilities or otherwise of legacy IT systems. 

In 2010 we were contacted by lawyers working on an action associated with a large insurance claim. The majority of the documentary evidence was made available within their client’s Lotus Notes web email interface and review was undertaken ‘natively’, with all of the inefficiencies associated with reviewing in that format, as per #2 in my Top 10  List. [See Waste #2 - Reviewing Electronic Documents in ‘Native Form’]

As preparation of bundles loomed, the legal team were facing the prospect of producing bundles containing 10,000+ emails and attachments via a process of manually printing out then sorting and copying. Their client’s Lotus Notes system had no means for bulk printing or exporting and there was no simple means of cross referencing particular documents back to their source and issues.

At the time we estimated the time charges associated with the manual bundle production process was going to be in the order of £200K+ and was probably impossible within the timescales. Further, because the data was in a form that was difficult to export and process, our estimate of costs to assist was in the order of £30,000+.

Fortunately, the crunch moment never came. The matter was settled at the eleventh hour without testing anybody’s resolve on the method and costs of producing the bundles.

Previously…