The handling of electronic documents seems to be something of a taboo subject among disputes lawyers. We all know that our clients may have hundreds, if not thousands, of electronic documents relevant to a case. Similarly, we know that the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) give us little practical guidance on how to search for, disclose and inspect electronic documents.
Yet, strangely, there appears to be little open discussion of how we and our clients ought to approach these issues. It is perhaps even more surprising that very little practical consensus has emerged on any of these issues in more than four years since the implementation of the Woolf reforms, beyond a common realisation that we ought to be checking our clients’ e-mails and maybe printing them off to be inspected.
