Banging on

Posted on 13 December, 2011 by Charles Holloway

There are times when I can be quite as grumpy as the next man. Indeed there are acquaintances (in the circumstances, I cannot call them friends) who think I have perfected the art. All I know is that there are people who wish to tell anyone who is listening what they had for breakfast and many other fascinating details of their daily life, and that does not appeal to me at all.

So I will not tell you about my recent train journey to Liverpool courtesy of Sir Richard’s Virgin Pendolino trains where, at a totally unscheduled stop in Crewe which was going to make us late in any event, the train came to a grinding halt and the “train manager” (whatever happened to the guard?) announced a complete loss of power and urged anyone in the disabled loo not to panic when the doors failed to open!

35 minutes later, power was mysteriously restored and we arrived some 45 minutes late into Lime Street to find there were no taxis. I promised not to tell you about all this but instead of being grumpy I found the extra time useful to catch up on some reading and to reflect on the end of 2011.

Will it go out with a bang or a whimper? I have already posted some predictions for 2012 [Old Holloway's Almanack, 1st December, 2011] and the time will doubtless arrive to review 2011 but I find myself curiously optimistic. Just as well I was not in the loo when the train stopped as my mood would have been somewhat different once released. Continue reading →

Pandora’s box

Posted on 6 December, 2011 by Charles Holloway

Lovers of Greek mythology will be familiar with the story of Pandora, whose curiosity ensured that she opened the box given to her by Zeus with instructions that she should on no account open it. When she did, evil escaped around the world and although she tried her best to get the lid back on, everything inside escaped except Hope.

Rest assured that references to Pandora’s box and Ancient Greece are not intended as a prelude to commentary on the dire state of the Greek and other Eurozone countries (and others like our own which are directly affected by the mess the over-confident Europhiles have made of the economy of the once prosperous Western world).

No, my purpose is to praise the ever colourful language of our American cousins sitting in their courtrooms around the USA, who, while dealing with a variety of cases which might just as well be heard in any court in this country, ever delight in a word or turn of phrase which while slightly out of the ordinary, serve when used by US Judges to underline the truths we should come to accept as the norm here in this jurisdiction. Continue reading →

Postcard from Munich

Posted on 22 November, 2011 by Charles Holloway

Worryingly, I have realised that it is almost a lifetime ago that I was last in Munich. Actually that is not quite true because I was there about 5 years ago to watch a performance of Pygmalion in which my daughter was acting, but, fun as that was, my memories of Munich are from the late 1960s and consist of snow bound streets and noisy Fasching parties with what I would today call music which is far too loud. It was definitely very different from the more sober surroundings of the Kempinski Munich Airport Hotel where I found myself last week for the IQPC Information Retention and eDiscovery Exchange conference.

The promise of three sunny and cold days did not materialise, indeed a number of us found ourselves fogbound in London and/or Munich and/or were diverted via Nuremberg. Not that it mattered in the end as we were soon cosily ensconced in a comfortable hotel with a good programme of talks and interesting one to one meetings with General Counsel from a variety of the largest companies in the world. Continue reading →

The moral of the tale

Posted on 16 November, 2011 by Charles Holloway

Did you know that India has over 600,000 lawyers? The profession in India is said to be the second largest in the world. No prizes for guessing that the US has the largest number of lawyers at a truly staggering 1,143,358 registered and active lawyers in 2007. I have been unable to find a more up to date figure presumably because there is some embarrassment about publishing the statistics.

Even the UK has 150,000 lawyers. I find it hard to believe that we in this country have so many. We have 25% of the number of lawyers in India, a country with a population which is 20 times larger than our own. The truly amazing figures continue. Whereas there are approximately 8-10,000 law graduates coming into the profession in England and Wales each year and about 30,000 in the US, the figure for India is over 60,000, every year!

No wonder there is a shortage of training contracts!

Continue reading →

Is everything in the garden rosy?

Posted on 8 November, 2011 by Charles Holloway

Not if your garden is in Greece! The latest news suggests that horticulture in that part of the Mediterranean must be very tricky. Drought conditions prevail and the plants are looking a trifle sickly.

It is not much better further along the Mediterranean either with Berlusconi withering on the vine, Zapatero running for cover (elections in Spain have been announced early for 20th November) and Portugal assumed to be every bit as badly off as the others.

And that is before we come to our own rather parched patch in the UK to say nothing of the swathes of desert in Ireland and the increasingly bare ground in France, Belgium and the USA.

One of the few verdant areas in the financial garden is Germany but the indigenous gardeners are not keen on lending out their watering cans and still less their extra produce to sustain less fortunate horticulturalists. Continue reading →

Battle of the e-discovery bulge

Posted on 13 October, 2011 by Charles Holloway

In the last winter of the Second World War (1944-5), the Germans and the Allies fought a tank battle in the Ardennes region of France which has become known as the Battle of the Bulge, so called because of the initial German advance which caused a bulge in the Allied line as depicted in maps and newspaper reports of the time.

It was one of the bloodiest battles of the war. Official estimates put American dead at 19000 with over 80000 casualties, and German casualties were said to be between 60000 and 100000.

Dramatised in the 1965 film Battle of the Bulge starring Henry Fonda, Robert Shaw, Telly Savalas, Dana Andrews and Charles Bronson, the allied victory marked the beginning of the end of the German war effort as their reserves had been depleted and the Luftwaffe smashed.

Continue reading →

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

Posted on 2 June, 2011 by James Moeskops

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.

Continue reading →

No flash in the pan

Posted on 19 May, 2011 by Charles Holloway

In 2010, about 8 years after filing for Chapter 11 protection, Polaroid entered into a contract with Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.

Polaroid used to be the film company of the future, famous for its instant film cameras.

Its eventual bankruptcy in 2008 was widely attributed to the failure by management to anticipate the effect of the advent of digital photography on its film business.

And Stefani? What is her role in all this? Those of you who are well versed in such things will have immediately recognised that Stefani is better known as Lady Gaga and it is she who is now Creative Director of the company and said to be the “new face” of Polaroid.

Continue reading →

A leap into the unknown

Posted on 11 May, 2011 by Bridie Sheldon

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.

Continue reading →

Nailed to the perch

Posted on 4 May, 2011 by Charles Holloway

When I first started writing this blog way back in August 2009, I decided that the purpose was to give a partly serious but also partly light hearted view on the world of e-discovery/disclosure.

There are, out there, any number of learned and serious articles, blogs and tweets on all aspects of e-disclosure and some are even in the Smart e-Discovery blog! My purpose was slightly different! I thought there would be interest in the views of an experienced former litigator from one of the larger law firms who had migrated towards the delivery of services to lawyers in the e-disclosure field. I may be tempting fate but almost 150 posts later (and many more by my colleagues) we have a loyal readership both directly on the blog and also on Twitter.

Continue reading →