Cleaver Fulton Rankin's Managing Director, Jonathan Forrester, discusses how the Company is embracing E-Discovery.
As a commercial litigator, I fully understand how onerous and time consuming the discovery process can be, particularly when there are tight deadlines to be met and a significant volume of documents to review. With most information now stored electronically, law firms are increasingly relying upon technology to assist in the discovery process.
Essentially, E-Discovery is the process of disclosing electronically stored information in the context of litigation by using analytics and search filtering technology to identify patterns in data and trends in documents. In recent years, parties to litigation have moved away from the traditional approach of engaging large teams to review a high volume of documents and are turning to E-Discovery to improve efficiency and to facilitate the legal review and evaluation of the core documents.
A number of external factors are also changing the approach of the legal profession, the main ones being:-
- The exponential rise in the volume of electronic documents, the capacity to store data and the number of devices in circulation in our clients' businesses, all of which have resulted in a fundamental shift in how document review must be conducted;
- The legal sector is now receiving direction from the Court to use legal technology;
- There is a market inversion – Clients are now asking "why isn't legal technology being used?". Clients now demand efficiency, not a headcount of available personnel;
- To meet these demands there has been a significant improvement in technology solutions over the last 15 years – creating a worldwide market of globally tried and tested technology.
Now I think it is fair to say that, traditionally, law firms have been circumspect about the use of such technology but our own experience is that clients now expect their legal teams to be technology-assisted. At Cleaver Fulton Rankin, we have made the decision to invest heavily in E-Discovery services and to develop a new practice area which will provide E-Discovery services throughout the UK.
We have recently recruited a Director of Innovation and Legal Technology, who will lead this new practice area. Her role will primarily involve:-
- The development of a Digital Services Group and Legal Project Management services to leverage legal review technology in order to deliver solutions for our clients;
and
- The Digitisation of the firm's internal processes to drive efficiency gains and increase our capacity.
This will involve investment in our People, Training and Technology, which will enable us to:-
- Develop bespoke document review templates, legal review manuals and workflows;
- Provide witness statement support and assistance with other bespoke pre-trial exercises, such as the automated generation of trial bundles and electronic redaction where required;
- Effectively deal with subject access requests on behalf of our clients;
- Take advantage of the technology resource in order to produce results more quickly;
- Perform due diligence and document review exercises more efficiently in the practice areas of commercial property, Corporate, Employment and Banking;
- Conduct larger scale Regulatory reviews and investigations.
We are confident that our investment will improve:-
- The speed at which we work in time-sensitive matters;
- Our ability to meet the demands of clients informed in such technology; and
- Our ability to compete with alternative legal service providers and larger law firms.
I strongly believe that, in time, this investment in our digital strategy will enhance our service delivery across our full suite of practice areas.
Originally Published by Cleaver Fulton Rankin, March 2021
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