Summary
I was a litigation partner at what is now Taylor Wessing for ten
years. I have worked since then almost entirely in litigation
support, developing litigation software, data conversion, and
helping lawyers with electronic Disclosure.
Most of my work in the last 13 years has involved:
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litigation readiness, data conversion and related
matters, mainly with larger firms on document-heavy cases,
and specifically on complex or badly-presented data which is
not susceptible to push-button solutions |
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working with lawyers and
others who need to get to grips with e-Disclosure but who do
not have the internal resources or knowledge to get started. |
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commenting on technical e-Disclosure matters, recent and
pending changes to the Court Rules, and the litigation
support market |
My whole working life has therefore
been spent either as a litigator in practice or in the mechanics of
handling document populations efficiently.
Following my trip
to LegalTech in New York
this year, I am focusing on the US experience and on what the UK can
learn from it and teach to those coming into the UK market from the
US.
"My relevant experience is obviously part of
the qualification, but so too is my predisposition to question the
apparently obvious"
Background
Oriel historians were taught that everything should be
challenged, whatever the importance of known facts, accepted ideas
and established conventions. This perhaps gave us some flexibility denied to
those reading law - "there are no marks for originality in the
law", as I was told on starting my articles.
Challenging the norms
does not imply merely favouring the new over the old, the
modish over the conventional, but testing whether the newer
ideas are in fact any better than the old ones. The ideal is to
welcome new ideas which add value without discarding those which
still work. This is the more true where one's market place is
simultaneously fiercely competitive and largely traditional.
The areas in which I mainly work, litigation support and web site
design, have more in common than one might think, as I analyse in
the section on
Services. The available
technology takes great leaps almost monthly, outstripping as it goes
the ability of most of its market to understand it. The basic task,
and the desired outcomes, however, remain much as they always have -
to analyse a set of documents or to attract clients to the firm. My
role is to mediate between the new technology and the constant
targets.
Qualification as Solicitor
I served my articles
at Taylor & Humbert in Gray's Inn in 1978. Old-fashioned it may have
been in many ways, but it had the latest IBM Golfball typewriters, a
telex and a word-processor the size of two washing
machines, used exclusively for conveyancing documents. Litigation
lists of documents were typed and retyped on the typewriters.
I qualified as a solicitor in 1980 and became a litigation
partner in what had become Taylor Joynson Garrett in 1982.
Computing Background
In 1984, the firm bought me a PC - IBM's PC and
Microsoft's MS-Dos had only appeared three years earlier. I bought a copy of dBase II and taught myself
database programming.
In 1989, I acted for the liquidator in Al Saudi Bank v Clarke
Pixley, a document-heavy auditor's negligence claim. No-one in London
was offering a database service, so I built a document listing
application and hired a team to enter the data. Other cases
followed, warranting extensions to my application or justifying its
use. Handling these things is routine now, but it was not then.
Meanwhile, the firm was growing by mergers and there came a point
where we had five word-processing systems between three office
buildings. I was given the responsibility of bringing us all on to one system -
a vast task which taught me a great deal, including the wisdom of
delegating such tasks elsewhere and getting on with client work.
It was a good exercise also in leading horses to water and trying to
persuade them to drink.
IT Consultancy
In 1993 I left the firm and set up my own consultancy. I joined
forces with Oxford Law and Computing to develop and market my
document listing software under the name Openlaw. That went through
three versions under our joint ownership and is still being
marketed.
The main activity over that 13 year period was developing and
testing Openlaw, writing the manual and supporting the users. There
was data conversion work and consultancy on
litigation support matters, often on cases larger than I had managed
as a litigator, and on quasi-litigation work such as Government
Inquiries.
The work was not all dispute-oriented and included advice on
contact management, practice management, information systems and more general things
both in large firms and smaller ones.
I was also
involved in project-managing an EU consultancy project in Uzbekistan
and, later, in web site design.
Advances in Litigation Support
The litigation support market has changed a great deal since 1993 but the greatest change has been over the last 18 months or
so. The cases now coming to litigation are ones whose whole
back-history has been run electronically, and e-Disclosure has grown
as a result. A Practice Direction has been added to Part 31 CPR to extend the scope (or,
rather, to define more closely the actual scope) of the Disclosure
obligation.
Much work has been done, by LiST amongst others, to
encourage the exchange of documents data and the documents
themselves, electronically. New players appeared - software
suppliers, bureaux and, most importantly, clients. The firms skilled
in litigation support are handling ever higher volumes and firms with
no experience in it find themselves expected - by client, court or
opponent - to engage in litigation support from scratch
It became clear that being tied to one particular supplier's
application was a limitation. My real interest lay more in the
technical, legal and business aspects of Disclosure and less in the
software used to handle it. In 2006, I parted company with OLC to
concentrate on my own interests. Those are described in the section
on
Services.
Experience applied to Practice
The distillation of all this amounts to the right qualifications
for the market in which I work, whether that work is with the
lawyers and their clients or the IT managers and the suppliers, and
whether it involves the legal and commercial aspects of an
electronic Disclosure list, a web site or other project, or the
hands-on technicalities of managing it. My relevant experience is
obviously part of the qualification, but so too is my predisposition
to question the apparently obvious. That often
involves encouraging clients to abandon their traditional approach
in favour of a more efficient method. That in turn usually means
delegating the labour-intensive, automatable, elements to the right
service provider and/or software supplier.
The challenge often, however, involves querying whether the very
latest technology really is necessary for the business aim in hand
or, at least, drawing attention to the fact that the technology,
however useful (and increasingly essential), is an aid to, and not a
substitute for, the old-fashioned virtues of thoughtfulness and
attention to detail.
Please do not
hesitate to
Contact me if you want to know more or discuss how I might
help with a particular area of your work. |
