New Practice Direction (draft)

Guidelines for the Use of Technology in Litigation in any Civil Matter

The latest consultation draft can be found at www.scl.org

There is at last a serious prospect of a court-led insistence on the use of technology for handling documents in court proceedings. A draft Practice Direction called Guidelines for the Use of Technology in Litigation in any Civil Matter is being discussed by interested parties, the most significant of whom is Lord Justice Brooke.

The initiative is to be welcomed.

These new initiatives may at last be the spur for the proper use of IT in Disclosure.

First, there is the draft Practice Direction which, if implemented in anything like its present form, will require parties to court proceedings to consider jointly, at the earliest stage, whether and how the use of information technology might lead to more efficient conduct of the litigation.

The other is a draft Protocol for data exchange. This sets out the primary data fields which parties should use when describing documents in order to make it as easy as possible to exchange both information about documents and electronic copies of the documents themselves.

These changes are long overdue. The CPR ducked the whole issue, and previous attempts to devise data exchange standards foundered largely through lack of any impetus from the courts.

Chris Dale is in a unique position to comment on the changes. He was a litigation partner at a large London firm for 10 years and has spent the 10 years since then devising and selling software solutions for litigation. Richard Brockbank, the MD of Oxford Law and Computing has been advising lawyers on IT matters since 1988. Together they write and sell the Openlaw Document Handling Software which pools their technical, legal and practical knowledge and experience.

Together they have looked at the proposed changes and at what they might mean in practice to firms of all sizes.

Articles (click on the title to go to the article) include:

Is IT going to happen at last for Disclosure?

A proposed Practice Direction requiring the use of IT for Disclosure, and a draft Protocol for Data Exchange have been a long time coming. They arrive only just in time to cope with the enormous growth of potentially Disclosable documents, many of them existing only in electronic form. Chris Dale looks at why is this happening now.

There is at last a serious prospect of a court-led insistence on the use of technology for handling documents in court proceedings. This article looks at the draft Practice Direction and questions whether its authors are clear in their own minds whether the parties are to be required to use technology, or merely encouraged to do so.

If Lord Brooke has his way, parties to civil litigation should be required give Disclosure electronically. Chris Dale shows that this is not necessarily the burden it may appear to be and suggests that the tools already in your office are adequate for many cases.

Can you properly comply with Part 31 of the CPR as it stands without some electronic means of capturing and filtering the documents?