Older Articles on Litigation Support

"...[I recommended] the more widespread use of litigation support technologies (document indexing, full text retrieval and document image processing) within the legal profession to assist with the management of documents in preparation for trials, and more specifically, to help cope with discovery.

… advocates of these systems still speak forcefully of their benefits and I continue to believe that they will bring cost savings and improvements in quality and productivity which can benefit clients and lawyers alike …"

The Woolf Report

The snippets below will help to understand what Lord Woolf had in mind.

Some terms defined
What exactly is imaging? I've heard it is not very accurate. Or is that OCR? Or perhaps text retrieval? What do all these terms mean?

What good will it do me or my clients?
The terminology is clear enough. But what are the benefits of Litigation Support when compared with the way we do things now?

A never-ending stream of paper
From the first trickle of papers, through the spate of Disclosure to the narrow channel of the core bundle on appeal, via the side-streams of affidavit indexes and counsels' bundles. The Documents as a River

Sharing data with your friends…
The client is in Columbia, the accountant is in Accrington, the expert is in Essex, the barrister is in Brick Court, the appeal is in April - and you are in the middle with all the information the others need. How to share data with the team.

… and with your enemies
The other side have offered you their data in electronic database format, and demanded yours under the new Rules. The Court seems to agree but your client thinks you'd be selling him down the river. Co-operative litigation replaces adversarial litigation - what does it all mean? What is data exchange anyway?

Woolf - less means more
Lord Woolf says we should disclose less. That means I can ignore all this stuff about efficiency and computerising disclosure. Or is there in fact a Growing role for IT as the volume of Disclosure reduces?





Chris Dale

Chris has been working on litigation support software for over 10 years. The software is marketed under the name Openlaw.

Openlaw is low cost litigation support software, priced by the matter, designed to help litigators meet their post-Woolf obligations in the most cost-effective manner.