The article refers to the emails in which Goldman employees variously described the mortgage based security at the centre of the affair as “God, what a shitty deal, God what a piece of crap.”

Nicole Bullock and Telis Demos, the writers of the article comment, “In hindsight, these sometimes snarky and sarcastic missives from the height of the credit bubble looked embarrassing at best and potentially incriminating at worst.”

It is an interesting moral dilemma whether employees should be discouraged from commenting adversely in email (or in thought or anywhere else) on their firm’s dubious and allegedly unethical practices or whether the firm itself should be discouraged from carrying out such allegedly unethical practices in the first place…

Readers will have no doubt have reached their own conclusions on the Goldman affair and the rise in Goldman’s share price on news of the out of court settlement, indicates that the markets certainly have!

The FT article is an interesting read and a cautionary tale nevertheless.

*Free registration with FT.com is required to read this article

I am not talking about Legal Process Outsourcing, nor Smart e-Discovery. I am talking about a report I first heard early last Thursday morning on the Today programme about the discovery of more than 70 flint tools and chips unearthed in Happisburgh on the North East coast of Norfolk.

Happisburgh (hands up all of you who thought it was called Happy’s Berg, when it should be pronounced Hazeboro’!!) is a small village on the coast of Norfolk between Cromer and Great Yarmouth. Until last week it was remarkable for little more than a red and white painted lighthouse, a nearby garden owned and cultivated by one Alan Gray and a propensity for its houses nearest to the sea to fall off the cliffs into the waves below, a phenomenon common enough on the east coast of England and one which arouses huge controversy every time someone suggests that it would be a better use of taxpayers’ money NOT to shore up the ever crumbling cliffs against the encroaching sea but to pay proper compensation to the house owners to enable them to move elsewhere.

Now, since Thursday morning July 8th 2010, it is famous for relics of an ancient human colony of homo antecessor or “pioneer man” a species from about 800,000 years ago in Spain. New techniques have dated the find to between 780,000 and a staggering 950,000 years old, showing that early humans reached Britain almost 250,000 years earlier than previously thought.

The previous oldest ancient human site was at Pakefield in Suffolk and dates to about 700,000 years old. As The Times put it that day …”British civilisation began in Norfolk”.

Often, it is a case of being in the right place at the right time. The ancient East Anglians migrated and/or died out as a new Ice Age turned the temperature from balmy to bleak and the area was recolonised later on so the pioneer men weren’t really in the right place at the right time.

According to Legal Week of 8thJuly, a number of deferred associates who might well have thought they were not in the right place at the right time and who went to work in the public sector while awaiting their places at recession hit law firms absolutely loved the experience. The report says they received reasonable pay, worked for the greater good and worked on more interesting and responsible jobs than they would have done as a menial worker ant in a big firm. Some were even said not to want to return to their firms!!

The sad thing is that almost certainly if and when they do return they will be treated to a diet of mundane tasks such as document review despite their experience gained elsewhere. That is the way of large law firms who have to keep the pyrimidical structure going. In the meantime the deferred associates may come to view their secondments as being in the right place at the right time, something they would not necessarily have thought likely when they first heard that their appointment was to be deferred.

May be this is all too gloomy a view. Reading about a Strategic Technology Forum held recently in that Mecca of the legal world Marbella, I was struck by the comment (Legal Week, 8th July) by Mark Dawkins, managing partner of Simmons & Simmons who have recently struck a deal with Integreon to outsource document review, due diligence and document production, that he expects the gearing between partners and assistants to decline. He accounts for his views by saying that junior lawyers will be expected to focus on higher quality work which needs to be kept in house while the other less valuable work is sent to India.

He may well be right but I fear for the growing number of aspiring lawyers who will, on that basis, graduate and not be able to find a job in a law firm, one of the unintended consequences I suspect of the current rush into outsourcing.

I have already expressed the view in recent posts that outsourcing should not be regarded as a panacea and that a well organised review of documents after sensible application of technology here in the UK may well provide a quicker and more cost effective e-discovery solution than sending everything to India, however good the reviewers there may be. Add to that, the real possibility that lawyers here will just not get the right experience and you will soon find that the pyramid is not nearly so broadly based with all the unintended consequences that brings in terms of a drop in partner remuneration and fewer funds for expansion, together with a contraction in the amount of work which clients feel it right to send to their lawyers when it can, according to those very lawyers, be done better and more cheaply elsewhere.

Being in the right place at the right time is sometimes pure chance but sometimes can be engineered. The early Norfolk inhabitants migrated or died and others took their place. Was that chance or poor planning?

I make a prediction. Despite the headlong rush to outsourcing, the next big idea will be…… insourcing.

You may laugh! After all, it is known that I live in Norfolk, where we now know civilisation in this country began and so what do I know?

But when insourcing is a reality, remember you read it here first!

The article looks at how the process of forensic investigation works and how litigators go about finding the right firm for the job. Grania writes fluently on the subject and is kind enough to quote me in a couple of areas, so I will leave you to read the article at your leisure -

Call for backup, Solutions, July 2010 [PDF 586KB]

Kim Jong IL

I make no apology for returning once again to the subject of Legal Process Outsourcing or LPO as it is colloquially known. The phenomenon is also known as Legal Services Outsourcing or LSO, making both sound like performances from the Royal Albert Hall rather than the relatively new process of instructing foreign lawyers to carry out legal tasks in a different country for a fraction of the price you would pay in this country.

LPO/LSO appears to be pretty high on the agenda of managing partners of law firms and others at present, presumably because the notion that you can use lawyers offshore to carry out tasks for a fraction of the cost of your own lawyers within the jurisdiction is irresistible in these straitened times. I am not sure what the army of paralegals and others who would have been engaged on the various tasks in this country think about it; they are surely going to be out of work if outsourcing increases, but for present purposes, I propose to leave consideration of that aspect of LPOs to one side.

LPOs operate from a number of hubs around the world. India appears to be the favourite hub at present doubtless because most outsourcing is done by lawyers and organisations whose mother tongue is English and India contains a high proportion of native English speakers or at least those whose command of the language is at the higher end of the scale. Also, insofar as we are talking about legal work being done by Indian lawyers, it is a considerable advantage that the legal system in India is based on the English system.

Other hubs exist in Japan, France, South Korea, Australia and South Africa. Coming up on the rails are China and Sri Lanka, although China will have to train more of its millions to speak a higher level of English and will have to review its internet policies before it can rival India.

CPA Global’s deal with Rio Tinto last year which resulted in General Counsel Leah Cooper moving from the mining company to CPA after effecting a 20% reduction in the company’s legal bills, stands out as one of the more successful pieces of outsourcing. Other companies come into the frame such as Pangea 3 and United Lex to whom BT outsourced its commercial contracting and anti-trust regulation work.

But the largest deal to date has been won by Integreon who are reported to have signed a whopping $852m deal over 10 years with CMS Cameron McKenna, covering marketing, accounting, HR, training and IT. Integreon also claim that they undertake work for 32 of the 50 biggest law firms including Clifford Chance, Allen & Overy, DLA Piper and some of the world’s largest organisations.

Investors are falling over themselves to get a slice of the action. India is investing heavily in infrastructure and IT as well as in training lawyers and ensuring their people speak a high quality level of English. It will be fascinating to see what the Chinese in particular make of all this. There is already a nascent LPO industry in that country and reports suggest that the Government in Beijing is intent on training 200 million and more Chinese to speak English fluently. Evidently, they cannot bear to see their great rivals India walk off with the prize but there is a long way to go before outsourcing to China will feel as comfortable as it does to India, not least because of their highly publicised censorship and control of the internet.

We have seen many instances of outsourcing in relation to legal review recently. The experience has been a bit of a curate’s egg, to be frank, as can be seen from my previous post. [Technophobia alive and well and living offshore, 2nd July, 2010] 

Nonetheless there are some impressive instances of successful outsourcing out there and if even a small proportion of the deals which have hit the headlines prove successful for the participants, outsourcing will have become a truly global phenomenon.

It is always easy to nitpick about new initiatives and this is something which should be avoided if possible. I am, however, interested to learn how those who have been involved in outsourcing or those who are thinking about it have been able to reconcile the problems which undoubtedly exist. Surely, it cannot all be about money, can it?

If you accept that you are going to go for outsourcing of, say, legal review, there are obviously a number of issues you have to overcome. I do not pretend that the list is exhaustive, but questions will surely include:

• How you choose an outsourcing company.
• Does its location matter?
• Will it have sufficient resources.
• Is a different time zone a problem? India goes to bed as America wakes!
• Data Security.
• Adherence to quality standards.
• Cost
• Confidentiality.
• Quality control.
• Liability of service providers.
• Lawyer/client privilege.
• Language abilities (English)
• Training of lawyers carrying out the review. Will they have enough training to be able to grasp complicated concepts and the needs of the outsourcers to make the process worth while.
• What happens if, despite best endeavours, the work is less well done than hoped for so that the work effectively has to be done again in the country of origin at higher cost and involving a considerable waste of time?
• Lawyers at the other end may not be subject to the same professional regulations or ethical standards.

None of this is intended to suggest that the issues cannot be resolved. After all, US $582 million ought not to be wrong, although the credit crunch and the banking crisis may be examples of how wrong one can be!

However, they are matters which need to be considered, and as reflected in my last post, outsourcing should not be viewed as a universal panacea for problems of cost and resource. I do not seek to comment on issues such as HR and marketing but in relation to legal review there will be circumstances, and personally I will be surprised it this is not more often the case than not, when an efficient application of the technology here in the UK coupled with a review based on the results of that application will deliver a better and more reliable result at less cost.

Currently I am preparing a short questionnaire on legal outsourcing which will be emailed to selected recipients canvassing their views. The carrot is that the questionnaire will be short (no more than 6 questions), easy to complete and I propose to offer lunch on me for the best reply (judged by me)!

That said, if there is anyone out there with an interest in the subject who would like to be included in the mini survey please let me know. You can add a comment at the foot of the post or you can contact me via the contact form on our website.

Talking of India and China, I read an article in The Economist recently on the issue of title inflation. [Too many chiefs: Inflation in job titles is approaching Weimar levels, June 24th, 2010]  Do you remember when the ratcatcher became the rodent officer? Even if you do not, you will understand the concept of giving people fancy titles to make them feel superior and to deny them a pay rise or similar.

India and China were singled out as countries where there is a longstanding obsession with hierarchies. If you have more than a passing acquaintance with the lonely hearts columns of some Asian newspapers you will know that fancy job titles can be the key to getting a bride, as the article points out.

I had no idea that Southwest Airlines has a chief Twitter officer. Equally, it has passed me by that Coca Cola has a chief blogging officer and that Kodak has one of those as well as a chief listening officer.

The article is full of such splendid monikers as Sanitation Consultants (lavatory cleaners), vision controller of multiplatform and portfolio (our old profligate friend the BBC) and, of course, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (sorry Lord Strathclyde).

But the best “title-fluffing” is reserved for the man with no fewer than 1200 official titles, including apparently guardian deity of the planet, lodestar of the 21st century, eternal bosom of hot love and the greatest man who ever lived. Step forward, not the Right Honourable the Baron Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham, Privy Counsellor and formerly First Secretary of State, now Shadow Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills, but our old friend the North Korean dictator and all round monster, Kim Jong IL!!

I do not know whether the burgeoning buildings in Gurgaon, 30 miles outside Delhi and a few miles only from the Indira Gandhi International Airport, are filled with people with fancy titles (The Economist suggests Chief Stationery Officer, Global Multi-Platform Paperclip Interface Ambassador and Lodestar of the Supply Cupboard). I am sure that, as in many organisations, there are some extravagant descriptions applied to a number of (self) important people. Indeed, The Economist reports that the number of members of LinkedIn with the title of “Veep” grew 426% faster than the membership of the site as a whole in 2005-9!

What is important is that we keep an open mind about LPO while never failing to ask the important questions. After all, that is what true consultancy is all about: asking the questions that people forget to ask because they think they are too obvious and then being surprised when the unresolved problems come back to bite them!

This was not a reference to the E M Forster story written in the 1920s, which uses the trial of Doctor Aziz accused of raping Adela Quested on a visit to the Marabar caves to produce a trenchant commentary on the sometimes awkward relations between India and the British Raj some quarter of a century before Independence. This was a story about the growth of legal outsourcing with a subsidiary strap line proclaiming “Companies and law firms are turning to India for cut price legal services”.

Much has been written recently about the growth of legal process outsourcing and in a piece entitled A cunning plan  [7th April, 2010]  I mentioned that, on the back of outsourcing legal work to Indian lawyers at CPA Global thereby saving 20% of its legal costs, Rio Tinto’s general counsel Leah Cooper had jumped ship to join CPA as its strategy director.

A number of high profile outsourcing contracts have been signed by law firms with household names such as CMS Cameron McKenna, Osborne Clarke and Simmons & Simmons. The LPO industry in India is predicted to grow from $146 million in 2006 to $440m this year and $1.1 billion by 2014.

With Indian based lawyers charging around $50 per hour for their services against the $400 charged in this country, concerns about quality and confidentiality appear to have taken second place to considerations of cost and cost cutting. Equally, others have raised the fear that lawyers in this country will never learn to “cut their teeth” if the work they traditionally do is outsourced to Delhi. Leah is dismissive. She says “I hear that every day and my response is I didn’t learn a thing as a baby lawyer digging through boxes in a storeroom. We may have to rethink how our lawyers are trained.”

Despite my status now as a non practising lawyer, I retain a considerable affection for my chosen profession and it has been one of my enduring concerns that many lawyers are failing to keep up with the fast moving world of e-discovery, the changes in the practice directions, the new cases and the improving technology which can assist law firms to retain their influence over the course of a piece of litigation for a client. Too often, I fear, the lack of expertise or knowing where to turn for help is in danger of driving the client to bypass the lawyer and turn to an expert, with the result that the lawyer only gets to see the papers after decisions have been made about review.

Leah may well have a point when she says we will have to look at how lawyers are trained. Lord Justice Jackson also urged the profession to have some training; echoing Tony Blair’s mantra of education, education, education!

It must be legitimate to ask how long will clients be prepared to go on paying for lawyers to educate themselves at the clients’ expense?

But what do I make of this apparent rush to outsource? I am not sure how widespread it is despite the high profile announcements and I am going to see if I can conduct some research in the marketplace to see how deeply law firms are engaged in this process or at least are thinking about it.

In the meantime, I wish to strike a note of caution! Indeed I am prepared to be a little provocative.

It will doubtless be argued that there are considerable cost savings to be made by using the undoubted expertise of well trained lawyers based in India where the costs of providing the infrastructure to support them is a fraction of the same cost in the West. In our current economic straits there is irresistible pressure from clients to drive down the costs of legal advice and if law firms can deliver aspects of the preparation of a litigation case at a reduced cost by using Indian based lawyers, everyone is a winner. It creates jobs in India and the law firms can present a lower bill to their clients. This in turn will satisfy the bean counters back at the ranch and the clients may even be more inclined to contemplate other and better litigation, if they can see it is not too expensive.

But is this all an illusion? What is actually happening? Why is it thought to be a sensible move to spend a good deal of time and therefore money instructing lawyers in a different jurisdiction to understand enough about a complex case and the issues involved only for the bulk of the review to be re-exported back to the UK for an experienced and expensive lawyer to carry out a review?

Let’s imagine a typical scenario. A law firm is consulted over a piece of litigation which involves a considerable amount of electronic documents. When I say considerable I do not mean that the case has to have terabytes of data but it should have more data than can be comfortably handled manually using paper. The partner and associate involved have to decide how they are going to advise the client on the strengths and weaknesses of the case early on so that a strategy can be devised either to settle the case as soon and as cheaply as possible or to defend the case robustly ( with many other possible outcomes in between!).

They are tempted by what they have heard about legal process outsourcing and decide that they should engage one of the LPO companies to assist. In order to provide instructions to the outsourcing companies the lawyers have to understand enough about the case to ensure that sufficient information can be given to the lawyers in India to carry out the review exercise efficiently. Assuming they do so the lawyers in India then return the reviewed documents to the instructing solicitors, who then have to conduct their own review of what has been reviewed together with the next stage of disclosure or witness statements, etc.

It is conceivable that this process will result in a saving of cost but it is also possible that unnecessary extra costs will be incurred.

What if the instructing solicitors were to work smarter in the first place? They might not need the outsourcing lawyers at all, they could deliver results to their clients more quickly and they will dramatically reduce the risk that their client decides to cut them out of this early pass review process altogether next time round.

The technology to enable lawyers to do this is here. It is readily available and there are people out there willing to train lawyers to use it.

Let me give you a real live example from our recent experience!

A law firm identified around 70,000 documents which were responsive to a series of agreed keywords and was faced with the problem of how to review these in a two week period. At a cost of approximately £7,000, Equivio Relevance was used to prioritise the documents for review with 1800 documents selected as a statistically significant sample. The remainder of the documents were ranked from 0 to 100 where 0 was totally irrelevant and 100 was totally relevant. The lawyers decided that they could skim read around a third of the total that fell below the 30% relevant ranking, leaving time to carry out a more detailed review of the higher ranked documents. Despite these decisions, it was clear that there were insufficient resources to complete the task in the limited time available. It was agreed that the review would be outsourced offshore where 30 reviewers were engaged on the task at short notice. Even so, the reviewers only managed to conduct a first pass relevance review of half of the documents at a cost to the client of £15,000. The process was much slower than anticipated on account of differences in understanding the issues offshore and the fact that there was no dedicated team of lawyers sitting around carrying out the review together and able to discuss issues as they arose. In the event, most if not all of the documents that were reviewed offshore needed a second and in some cases a third pass review to resolve issues of consistency and privilege. The net result was that the UK based lawyers ended up reviewing pretty well all the higher ranked documents at least once and 8 people were involved in the process! I can guess at the expense but have no actual figures to share with you!

The conclusion to be drawn in that particular case is that outsourcing provided little or no benefit and no savings to the overall project.

This is not in any way intended to denigrate the process in general but serves merely to illustrate that not all outsourcing is automatically the answer to your prayers. In that particular case, an efficient application of the relevant technology in the UK and a review based on the results of that application would have cost significantly less than the outsourcing and would have delivered a better and more reliable result.

There is a danger that the recent increase in LPOs is replacing one problem with another. The legal profession appears to be overcoming its xenophobia but is in danger of not overcoming its technophobia; xenophobia in outsourcing to another jurisdiction with all that may mean in terms of quality control and confidentiality and technophobia in the sense of an unwillingness to get to grips with the technology available or engage with an expert to help them master it.

Sadly if the technophobia is not overcome too there is a real risk that clients will no longer be prepared to pay lawyers to do something at which they are not expert and will engage others in the process thus cutting out the lawyers from a vital part of the work they traditionally do as litigation advisers and managers!

In short, xenophobia, pretty well sorted! Technophobia, not much progress yet and danger signals ahead!

Even that did not really capture the menace behind the image until one realised that the blemishes grouped together in the left hand corner of the back of the chair were in fact the marks made by the bullets fired by his executioners into the chest and heart of convicted killer Ronnie Lee Gardner.

Whatever your views about capital punishment I was left with the overwhelming sense that this was not what I wanted to see published in my newspaper. After all, in the days when we had capital punishment here we were not treated to interviews with the hangman or grisly pictures of the swinging noose ( or at least not since the days of public executions).

Too much information, you might think! But then I came across the extraordinary news that the Utah State Attorney General had tweeted the news that Gardner’s pleas had been rejected shortly before the execution took place. He tweeted: “I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied  his victims”.

The fact that the Attorney-General announced to the world that he had allowed the execution to proceed is not, in itself, remarkable. There was a significant public interest in the event and if he had made the announcement in a letter or on TV I doubt if there would have been any controversy. However, the fact that he used the medium of Twitter has caused a storm with commentators arguing that the use of this medium to disseminate this kind of information is inappropriate and others arguing that it is all a matter of getting the information into the public domain and the means used were quick and efficient.

I mentioned late last year that the first injunction was served in this country using Twitter and that the Twitterati had been at least in part responsible for the lifting of that horrible animal the super injunction in the case of the Ivory Coast toxic waste dumping. [See:  The Last Straw 6th October, 2009 and King Charles I and the Twitterati 27th October, 2009]

Tweeting injunctions and disseminating information about them seems to me to be in a different category altogether from State officials tweeting information about life and death. Efficient as it may be I cannot help but feel that this type of communication should not be used for subject matter as potentially explosive as reprieves ( or not) on Death Row.

But if anyone thought that Twitter did not concern them they should be quickly disabused of the idea. In a recent case of Sexting (yes, it really exists) in California, (where else?) a Sergeant Quon appeared to be sending an inordinate number of texts on his departmental pager. Department officials discovered he was sending an average of 28 texts per shift but that only three were work related. The personal messages were largely to his wife and mistress both of whom happened to work for the local police department. Quon sued the police department for violating his privacy after they sought to recover from him the cost of the personal texts. But in a unanimous judgement, the Supreme Court held that government officials were entitled to review emails and texts on work owned mobile phones and computers as long as there is a legitimate work related purpose!

It is a strange old world out there and woe betide anyone who thinks that Twitter is not something they need to be concerned with. After all the next client who rings you (assuming they use anything as old fashioned as a telephone) may be wanting advice about a text they sent at an unfortunate moment to someone they would rather not have involved from a place they did not want their nearest and dearest to find out about.

You may not like it as a medium but you need to be aware of it and its capacity to surprise!

Much has already been written about it. The statistics are there for all to see. It took 12 years, it cost £190 million, there were approximately 2,500 written statements and the opening statement was the longest in English legal history. The tribunal heard from almost 1,000 witnesses, sat in Derry and in London and spawned judicial review litigation which reached the then House of Lords (now the Supreme Court). 

As I have mentioned earlier [Bloody Sunday, 22nd June, 2010] I was involved for the best part of six years in gathering the evidence for the Tribunal but little of my time was spent in the actual hearings apart from listening to one or two witnesses of particular interest.

After all, how often does one get to hear a former Prime Minister (Edward Heath) give evidence after having interviewed him? To my knowledge, it is only on rare occasions that Prime Ministers or former Prime Ministers give evidence in public, such as Margaret Thatcher in the Franks Inquiry and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to the Chilcott Inquiry. It is a very modern phenomenon. 

It is the modern aspect of the inquiry which has just caught my attention. I have not yet assimilated all 5,000 pages of the report but have cast my eye over the summary and I have found a short section on the technology used by the tribunal which I would like to share with you. 

Much has been said about the slowness and the cost of the inquiry but I suspect that the whole process would have proved impossible without technology. 

Tucked away at the end of Volume X of the report under the unassuming heading of Appendix 1: Matters Relating to the Inquiry are a few paragraphs on the systems in use - the section on technology is at paragraphs A.1.1.184 to 194 (approx. 4/5 down the page).

The main points are as follows: 

• Substantial use was made of technology. Material obtained by the tribunal was given to the interested parties electronically and at the hearings the system used was TrialPro 11.
• In the Guildhall in Derry there were two screens, one used to display the document being referred to and the other a video image of the person speaking. Arrangements were made to relay those images to various other locations in the city and when the inquiry moved to London the images were relayed to all the Northern Ireland locations.
• The proceedings were recorded using LiveNote. This involved a truly stupendous effort by the stenographers who produced a record on screen within seconds, a daily transcript some two hours after the end of the day’s hearings and a daily electronic version which was posted on the inquiry website. The proceedings were also recorded on audio tape which proved to be a useful backup in case of any misunderstandings about what had been said.
• There was a virtual reality model of the relevant parts of Derry showing what the area looked like in the early 1990s with another version where artists’ impressions of the buildings which existed in 1972 were superimposed and this was used to assist many of the witnesses in their evidence.
• The tribunal found that it was much quicker to show a witness an electronic version of a paper document rather than to wait for all concerned to turn up the same paper version from amongst hundreds of lever arch files. Also, the use of technology enabled the public to see much more of the workings of the tribunal than would have been the case had paper only been used and the CCTV cameras meant that the public could watch the proceedings in remote locations without having to travel to the hearings.
• The members of the Tribunal made extensive use of laptops onto which versions of LiveNote and TrialPro 11 had been loaded which meant that they too could work remotely.
• Finally, some of the information technology systems were deployed in other hearings. I can vouch for their use in the Shipman Inquiry (in which I was also involved) and they were also used in the BCCI litigation, the inquest into the Omagh bombings and other ongoing Northern Ireland Inquiries (Nelson, Hammill and Wright). 

Whatever views may be expressed about the cost of the inquiry and the time it took to reach its conclusions, the use of technology was a positive factor. Much of what was used is now no longer at the cutting edge as technology moves on so quickly, but at the time its use was clearly of great advantage to those engaged on the inquiry and the wider public. Given its later use, the cost of it was also spread over a number of other inquiries and hearings.

"That was some thunderstorm!"

On 10th September 2010, Simon Mackenzie Smith and Rupert Marks  will climb into a 1929 Ford Model A and drive over 14,000 kms from Peking to Paris, retracing the steps of the motor car pioneers who raced each over the same route in 1907. The 2010 Peking to Paris Rally is expected to take 5 weeks and will involve driving through the wilds of Mongolia as well as the ‘stans’ and Iran.

Millnet is pleased to sponsor Simon & Rupert in their ripping yarn. Loads of derring do will be done along the way and, if they make it through the ‘stans and all the way to Paris, we will be there to welcome them!

It’s all in a good cause (two good causes)  – all proceeds will go to Debra and the Pioneer Sailing Trust- and you can support their valliant efforts via Just Giving or contact the guys directly via their web site www.pekingparismodela.com

Official Peking Paris website – www.pekingparis.com

Should it be the demand from Europe that George Osborne should let the Commission or the Finance Ministers or the cleaners at the Berlaymont Building see his prep in future (our Budget) before he delivers it to Parliament?  By the way, did you know that the building which houses the Commission is in the Rue de la Loi, which roughly translated* means the rule of law?  How cheeky is that?

Should it be the seemingly endlessly bad publicity and bad-mouthing of BP coming out of the USA? The US President is right to be concerned about the oil spillage but what is he doing to help? I have always been intrigued by the phenomenon which is particularly American that when there is a real disaster the President can send in the National Guard and declare the relevant area a disaster zone thus releasing Federal funds and assistance to those in need on the ground. Quite right too, but is this not such an emergency and if not, what is Obama playing at? BP has after all acknowledged responsibility for its actions and will doubtless pay up subject to what may be endless litigation about exactly who is liable.

Should it be the Saville Report into the circumstances of Bloody Sunday in January 1972, weighing in at 45 lbs of printed paper?

There are always stories to write about but in the spirit of the Smart e-Discovery blog I thought I should stick to headlines which readers might find more interesting than European squabbles, polluted seas and forest destroying reports.

Mindful that I have expressed the view in the past that e-disclosure is now main stream I was gratified to see a number of stories in the past couple of weeks which appear to confirm the position.

Consider that the Swiss authorities have apparently handed over to the US around 500 accounts of UBS clients under an agreement to end a tax dispute (according to City AM of 14th June). The Swiss Parliament has apparently put a spanner in the works as it rejected the agreement last week thereby delaying a decision whether to allow a further 4450 client account details to be handed over to the US authorities. Not much traditional Swiss Bank secrecy there whatever the outcome as 500 people have already suffered, if that is the right word, from their account details being handed over.

The Times of the following day (June 15th) reported that Chelsea Barracks witnesses were accused of lying with the headline: “Prince’s planning role e-mails ‘were erased’.”

The Candy brothers, Christian and Nick, are suing Qatari Diar for breach of contract alleging that they pulled out of the agreement to build a housing project on the site of the former Chelsea Barracks after an intervention by the Prince of Wales who is said to have persuaded the Emir of Qatar to agree to withdraw the planning application. After the trial had concluded but before judgment some 70 emails came to light which are said to suggest that the views of the Emir and the Prince were “key” to the decision to withdraw the application.

Counsel for the Candys, Lord Grabiner QC, told the judge at a special hearing to deal with the issue that the emails showed that witnesses for Qatari Diar had lied at the trial. He alleged there had been a determined effort to delete emails which might damage the Qatari Diar case. Whatever the outcome, the judge decided that it would be disproportionate to order further hearings but asked Counsel for the Qataris to comment. Counsel accused the Candys of attempting to pervert the course of justice and added that “these are entirely unjustified allegations”.

None of the above is particularly heart warming! Emails and electronic disclosure are clearly now so much in the mainstream that it is almost impossible to pick up a paper or hear a news item which does not involve them.

It was, therefore, a relief to read of yet another story of local authorities coming together to share legal services and lawyers. There have been a number of such stories over the past 12 months involving local authorities banding together with their neighbours in an attempt to save costs by pooling their legal advice and reducing the panel of lawyers they use. Indeed, talking to a consultant some months ago about this very subject, I was informed that councils are deadly serious about reducing their legal spend and that they are actively looking to see how their litigation budgets can be reduced, not just by sharing lawyers and extracting major concessions from them on fee rates but also by trying to approach the whole problem from the point of view of finding out how costs can be reduced and the process speeded up by the use of technology.

Legal Week of 17th June carried an article about the public sector feeling the pinch and commended the approach adopted by a group of London and Kent councils who have created a joint panel consisting of a number of firms of lawyers.  Those lawyers welcomed their inclusion on the panel because it was implied that although the rates agreed by the firms were inevitably lower than their headline rates, there was a reasonable prospect of real work being delivered. The article made the point that the Government’s legal procurement agent, Catalist, with 48 firms on its panel, was under pressure to reduce the legal spend still further and many of the firms did not get much work from it anyway. Perhaps the local authorities are playing a smarter game here in offering a real diet of work at fees which do not make the lawyers want to walk away. Smart e-Discovery in their litigation could lead to a win-win for the lawyers and the local councils.

Is there a lesson there for all involved in litigation? If so, that would be truly heart warming!

*Source: “Trotter’s Dictionary of Peckham French” - allant pour a chanson at a market near you.

The new appointments include Stephen Davis as Director of Legal Support Services, Emma Bolsover as Director of Technical Services and Emma Kettleton as Manager, Technical Operations. 

Stephen Davis joins Millnet from Anacomp where  he was Sales Director of its UK Business Process Management business and latterly Managing Director of its Litigation Support Software subsidiary, CaseLogistix.  Prior to that Stephen held senior sales roles in blue chip technology companies in both the UK and New York. Stephen takes on responsibility for client development and new business.

Emma Bolsover’s promotion and the creation of the new role of Technical Services Director reflects the increasing importance of the project management and consulting aspects of the business. Emma was a founding member of Millnet’s pioneering e-discovery team when it was established in 2000 and has played a key role in the development of the consulting and project management team  in the past ten years.

Emma Kettleton has worked in litigation support for a number of years, most recently at US law firm Latham & Watkins where she worked as a litigation and e-discovery specialist. Before that, Emma spent 6 years as a project manager at Australian firm, Allens Arthur Robinson, where her main role was managing litigation and e-discovery cases.

Commenting on the expansion, James Moeskops, Managing Director of Legal Support Services, says, “These appointments reflect our aim to establish the strongest independent litigation support team in the sector. Although the technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, in many ways this had made it harder for lawyers to determine the most effective approach in any given case.  For instance, just because the technology now exists to undertake in-depth forensic analysis, it does not mean that this should always the first port of call.  When it comes to e-discovery, one size certainly does not fit all. Our desire to offer appropriate solutions means that product knowledge, experience and judgement are of equal importance in deciding the best approach.

I have always believed that technology should be an adjunct to expertise and not the other way around. With over seventy man-years of e-discovery experience in the team, Millnet is well placed to advise its clients, particularly in the post-Jackson world where proportionality and keeping down the costs of e-discovery are imperative. This requires not only good technology but good advice.”

“And,” he adds, ”this is an ongoing expansion – we are always looking for good people!”