Discovery protocol

54and56

Hi,

I'm a sole practitioner providing a B2B service and I'm required to provide +/- 1,000 emails and related documents for a civil case I'm involved in.

I estimate that printing out the emails and documents will run to over 20,000 pages of A4 (it was a very involved multi national project which ran for 9 months) and will take me +/-15 working days to complete assuming I can identify and print 10 emails and attached documents per hour which is about as fast as my office printer (it's a workforce printer so not slow) will go.

I'd MUCH prefer to export the emails and correspondence to a Dropbox folder which the other side could have access to and the ability to download and actually search etc as they see fit.

Is producing discovery in such a soft copy manner accepted these days or will I have to kill half a rain-forest and waste 3 working weeks to print all the stuff off?

hullaballoo

Convert to PDF and send.

It's a little more complicated converting attachments too but google will tell you how.

There is a very slow move to electronically presented discovery, but better to let the lawyers do the printing of they see fit.

54and56

hullaballoo wrote: »

Convert to PDF and send.

It's a little more complicated converting attachments too but google will tell you how.

There is a very slow move to electronically presented discovery, but better to let the lawyers do the printing of they see fit.

Hi Hullaballoo,

Thanks for the reply.

I'm well used to converting emails and docs to PDF, that's not a problem but it would only mitigate the problem I'd still have to convert each email and document manually and email them in batches. It would save paper no doubt but that's about it.

Can I assume from your answer that the Irish legal system can't handle the exchange of electronic documents in an electronic fashion the way (for example) companies have done via data rooms for M&A due diligence etc for years?

Doing a bit of Googling I came across http://www.ediscoverygroup.ie which implies there is an accepted protocol for producing discovery documents in electronic format but I guess adoption rates are still low???

chops018

Lots of the big firms would employ eDiscovery companies to sort out and code all these documents, and even put them into categories. The firms task then is to trawl through the documents to see what is relevant to the discovery categories agreed/ordered and hand same over to the other side.

There have been some cases which have seen over a million documents being handed over at the discovery stage. Usually seen in cases in the Commercial Court.

By your OP and further comments it sounds like you're doing this all yourself?

And yes, the website you provided does contain a Good Practice Direction for eDiscovery. See the PDF here:

http://www.clai.ie/userfiles/file/Discovery/CLAI%20-%20Good%20Practice%20Discovery%20Guide%20v2_0.pdf

54and56

chops018 wrote: »

By your OP and further comments it sounds like you're doing this all yourself?

Yes, it's a David (me) Vs Goliath thing :eek:

chops018

Fair play to you for getting to the discovery stage of proceedings as a lay litigant (if that's what you are).

I'd highly suggest contacting a Solicitor tbh. It's late, but if a Solicitor comes on record they should easily be able to get more time to fully consider the case. Look around for a Solicitor with experience of your problem. They will know what to do and would more than likely have done similar Commercial Litigation cases so they would be well versed in the Rules of the Court. A case like this sounds like you need Counsel involved too. If it's a complicated Commercial case that is. However circa 1,000 documents is not much and a Solicitors firm would well be able to deal with this. Although they would still need you to give them all these documents as far as I know. So you probably would still have a workload on your hands anyway.

54and56

chops018 wrote: »

Fair play to you for getting to the discovery stage of proceedings as a lay litigant (if that's what you are).

I'm not. I do have a solicitor and a BL who I'm very happy with but my solicitors are a small firm and suffice to say they wouldn't be leading the charge when it comes to technology etc hence I'm looking here to validate/challenge the requirement for all of this to be physically printed off.

I guess if I was with a bigger firm and had deeper pockets I could have all of this dealt with by them but I don't so I have to do a lot of the heavy lifting myself.

C'est la vie.

chops018

I see.

Nothing you can do so except get everything they need off to them and let them handle it.

Even the big firms would need you to hand them over the documents you have anyway so I wouldn't think like that, you'd still have some work to do yourself behind the scenes.

hullaballoo

Sorry for giving you short shrift yesterday, I made a number of assumptions and left a mediocre and incomplete answer. Giving a complete answer to the question of eDiscovery could take some time, so I'll give a better but still incomplete answer!

Basically, eDiscovery is a term that conflates two concepts, namely, the process of discovery as it applies to electronically stored information and also the production of all discovery, whether electronically stored or not, in electronic format. The term applies (wrongly, imo) to both. It is unhelpful.

Anyway, what you are concerned with is the process of producing electronically stored information for the purposes of giving it to your opponent by way of discovery.

Now, you're not a lawyer, so your role here is limited to providing the information to your legal team in a manner that they can further process it as they are required to do as a part of discovery - i.e., they must search/read/whatever what you give them and decide on relevance etc. and categorise relevant documents all the way through to compiling an affidavit as to documents.

Because you're a small fish and you presumably cannot afford to carry out the full shebang of having a specialist eDiscovery firm come in and do their thing, you may not be obliged to do so. However, you (and your lawyers) are obliged to do as best you can with the resources available.

So, depending on your setup, you need to invest a bit of time into getting your emails over to your solicitor in such a way that s/he can further process them. There are numerous ways of doing this. If your solicitor is a technophobe or has legitimate concerns about using third party storage facilities, they may think the best way is to get you to print them out and get them to her/his office with no third party intervention. Certainly, that is more secure than some of the alternatives. However, if you're tech savvy and it sounds like you are, you might be able to convert your mailbox to PDF - yes it's time consuming and will probably cripple whatever workstation you're doing it from for hours if not days, but it may still be the best option - and then give the files over on an encrypted device or by some other secure means such as an end-to-end encrypted file sharing service, if such a thing exists.

The security is a matter for yourself since only your confidence is broken if someone else gets a hold of these documents. No one else has any rights in respect of them that may be breached by inadvertently disclosing them to third parties or, worst case, the other party to your case.

I hope the above is of further assistance.

54and56

hullaballoo wrote: »

Sorry for giving you short shrift yesterday, I made a number of assumptions and left a mediocre and incomplete answer.

Not at all, your response was helpful.

hullaballoo wrote: »

Basically, eDiscovery is a term that conflates two concepts, namely, the process of discovery as it applies to electronically stored information and also the production of all discovery, whether electronically stored or not, in electronic format. The term applies (wrongly, imo) to both. It is unhelpful.

I sped read "The Good Practice Guide to eDiscovery in Ireland" guide and couldn't agree more with you. As a complete lay person I came to the same conclusion, there's a very important process to literally "discover" the relevant documents/data etc (Good traditional search technique will enable me to identify what I'm being requested to produce) but then there's the challenge of how to you produce/communicate that in an effective manner. The latter is not so much "eDiscovery" as "eProduction" in my book and that's the challenge I have.

hullaballoo wrote: »

Because you're a small fish and you presumably cannot afford to carry out the full shebang of having a specialist eDiscovery firm come in and do their thing, you may not be obliged to do so. However, you (and your lawyers) are obliged to do as best you can with the resources available.

Unfortunately I'm the only available resource. I'd have the funds to engage a bigger firm etc if the contract I'm in dispute over had been honoured. It's kind of ironic that by breaking our contract my opponent in the case deprives me of the financial ability to pursue them other than on a total shoestring but those are the cards I've been dealt and regardless of how unfair it may be I know I'm not going to change the system so I've accepted it. The harder it is to win the sweeter the victory

hullaballoo wrote: »

if you're tech savvy and it sounds like you are, you might be able to convert your mailbox to PDF - yes it's time consuming and will probably cripple whatever workstation you're doing it from for hours if not days, but it may still be the best option - and then give the files over on an encrypted device or by some other secure means such as an end-to-end encrypted file sharing service, if such a thing exists.

Yes I'm tech savvy so I'll definitely look into somehow being able to auto convert a batch of selected emails and their attachments. That would be the hard bit. Sticking them on a thumb drive or onto Dropbox would be the easy bit. Security isn't a high priority. The content of the emails is way past being commercially sensitive.

a 10 second Google search throws up something which looks very promising, looks like it could be possible as my email archive are hosted by Google.

hullaballoo wrote: »

I hope the above is of further assistance.

Massively so. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

hullaballoo

What email platform are you using?

54and56

hullaballoo wrote: »

What email platform are you using?

Google G Suite for business - https://gsuite.google.com

I can use search terms to identify all emails during the requested discovery period where the sender or recipient is X, Y or Z and (hopefully) then convert the list of results to PDF which can be stored on Google Drive.

That's the (current) plan anyway!!

hullaballoo

Sounds like you're off to a decent start then but let me know if you hit any snags.

54and56

hullaballoo wrote: »

Sounds like you're off to a decent start then but let me know if you hit any snags.

Will do.

BTW, good luck at the weekend. I hope Mr Conte has more charge in the Black and Decker to break down the 19th century football than we (Liverpool) did on Monday!!

hullaballoo

Je_suis_Jean wrote: »

Will do.

BTW, good luck at the weekend. I hope Mr Conte has more charge in the Black and Decker to break down the 19th century football than we (Liverpool) did on Monday!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOgToHw7ABI

A Pool fan with his own business?

Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?

54and56

hullaballoo wrote: »

A Pool fan with his own business?

I know I know. I must be a smoked salmon socialist or something!! I'm actually a total capitalist which doesn't sit too well with a lot of my fellow red's but then I point out to those of them with a left leaning bent that they are passionately supporting and in many cases arguing the defence of players some of whom earn more in a week than the average industrial wage pays a typical fan in four or five years!! The irony of that particular situation usually quietens them down a bit

hullaballoo wrote: »

Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?

Who is this place, what spot, which is a strip of territory?