The proliferation of email presents litigation lawyers with an arduous task in terms of gathering evidence relevant to court proceedings.
For one of our cases this meant travelling to West Africa to uncover the plethora of electronically stored information held by our client locally. This exercise uncovered in excess of 60,000 documents, which is not unusual in terms of the amount of information organisations store electronically.
My team now have two weeks to sift through and identify any documents that might be disclosable in our case. This is a mammoth task that, despite being made easier by specialist IT consultants working within the litigation department, will require much resource and manpower.
In fact e-disclosure, which has been described as the 21st Century legal challenge, almost makes you wonder, who would be a litigation lawyer?