Tag Archives: digicel

Winning the battle and losing the war

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According to research carried out by me wholly unscientifically, I discovered that “to win the battle and lose the war” appears in a treatise entitled “The Art of War” written by military strategist Sun-Tzu in the 6th century BC.

Sun-Tzu may not have been a real figure but his existence is given credibility by the fact that others have repeatedly quoted from his treatise from the period of his supposed existence to the 19th and 20th centuries.

He was reputedly a general in the armies of King He Lu, the King of the Wu province of China and there is one legend about Sun Tzu which amused me. You can find the story in Wikipedia but, to whet your appetite, it concerns the king testing Sun-Tzu’s skills as a general by commanding him to train a harem of 180 concubines and turn them into soldiers. I will leave you to read it and enjoy, as they say!

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It’s the strategy, stupid!

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Let me remind you of the hoary old statistic often trotted out, namely that some 90% of corporate documentation is now created electronically rather than on paper, and over 90% of that is NEVER turned into paper.

Whether the statistics are accurate or not, there can be no doubt that vast amounts of information are now held in electronic form. This leads to questions about the way companies deal with the storage of such information and what arrangements they have for its retrieval when faced with litigation, a regulatory investigation, an arbitration or a Freedom of Information application.

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Confucius, he say…

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“May you live in interesting times” is reputedly the English version or paraphrase of an ancient Chinese curse.

Whatever its origin, the saying crops up in a variety of differing situations including a speech by Robert F Kennedy in 1966, a letter from Austen Chamberlain to a member of the US House of Representatives and more recently in a speech by Bob Garvin, the character played by Donald Sutherland in the 1994 film, Disclosure.

The film starred Demi Moore and Michael Douglas who, contrary to what you might expect from the title, were not engaged in a Hollywood version of Part 31 but played a couple who worked in a technology company and who became engrossed in a sexual harassment case!!

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Watch out! Costs About!

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A Salutary Tale of Disclosure Obligations

Not everything in this blog is intended to be light hearted, as I found myself saying the other day. A kindly soul who had expressed approval of and interest in the blog had caused me to explain that there was intended to be a partly serious side to my musings as well as a bit of fun. So for those of you who only want to be mildly entertained, you should not read any further!

Actually, I rather hope you will read on, because litigation lawyers might have missed a recent decision which is relevant to everyone who conducts litigation in this jurisdiction.

British & Irish Legal Information InstituteI have to admit that I am a new convert to the webpages of the British and Irish Legal and Information Institute www.bailii.org.  The website is a veritable mine of information about recent cases, and what I like is that, at a click of not very many buttons, you can find a table of recent cases with very fast hyperlinks to judgments in cases which may be of interest.

I had been looking for the judgment in a recent case with a very different subject matter (and nothing to do with e-disclosure!) which had been reported in the newspapers last week, when my eye alighted on a case several places up the list of latest cases. I had stumbled across a judgment of His Honour Judge Simon Brown QC dated 8th October 2009 in the case of Earles v Barclays Bank PLC .

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