Information overload – and what lawyers can do about it

May 28, 2008

info-overload.jpgBlade was once a practising solicitor, back in the halcyon days when email and the internet were but twinkles in a costs draughtsman’s eye. Now, however, as this paper by George Paul and Jason Baron on the Spada blog shows, we are awash with information. The information overload is a serious matter for the legal profession, say Paul and Baron, who argue that litigation, in particular, “is threatened by information’s new hyper-flow.” The authors show that the new “inflationary dynamic” has caused “written information to multiply by as much as ten-thousand-fold recently,” placing huge stresses on the legal system. As they say, “it is becoming prohibitively expensive for lawyers even to search through information.”

In Blade’s day, Discovery (or Disclosure, as it is now known) in a substantial claim was seemingly endless, time-consuming and, for the client, cost-ineffective. Blade shudders to think what it must be like today. Paul and Baron’s premise – that the legal system will reach breaking point, if the information overload continues unchecked – is indisputable. Fortunately, the authors have some suggestions as to what to do about it. Their paper ought to be read in full, but the key points are:

1. There must be a culture change among litigation lawyers. As they say: “The last 30 years have seen truculence, gamesmanship, and a supreme rule of ‘volunteer nothing.’ Because of the new complexity and volume of information, however, the game theory underlying much of litigation has changed. Litigators must collaborate far more than they have in the past, particularly concerning the discovery of information systems. If they do not, they act against their own self-interest.”

2. The legal profession needs to be receptive to the idea of deploying new kinds of computer technology. New types of search methods and techniques, beyond the use of keywords and including sampling, should be considered for use in litigation. Manual review is “too time-consuming and expensive – with costs often exceeding the amount in dispute.”

3. There must be “innovation in the law, particularly governing inadvertent disclosure of privileged information. New rules on inadvertent disclosure should be given effect, which limit or eliminate the waiver of privilege, or the system will become impossibly expensive through continued need for meticulous review.”

4. Creativity is all. Lawyers “must embrace creative, technological approaches to grappling with knowledge management as information inflation continues apace.” In the absence of this, the legal profession will not be able to retrieve and process evidence.

There is no denying the scale of the task ahead. As the authors note, “All this equates to the biggest new skill set ever thrust upon the profession… What it means to be a lawyer will change rapidly in the years to come.”

Jason Baron is hosting a workshop on search and retrieval issues in London on 25 June. See this link for more information.

 

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Good work by Rusbridger

February 10, 2012
scissors

The headline says it all: ‘Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger takes pay cut‘.

Dan Sabbagh’s piece says a bit more: said editor ‘emailed staff at the newspaper to say that his salary in the upcoming 2012-13 financial year will be £395,010, compared with £438,900 in the current financial year’.

Some voices say: ‘How worthy.’

Others opine: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

But we say: good work by Mr Rusbridger. For the sake of the media’s survival, we hope that others in senior positions in the industry will follow suit.

Image of toolkit allegedly deployed by Alan Rusbridger courtesy of Flickr user LollyKnit.

From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.