IDM: Australian ediscovery industry grows up
22 June, 2010
History of e.discovery in Australia by Allison Stanfield
In Australia, large law firms have been involved in electronic discovery for some time. In the 1990s, the rapid uptake of technology led to voluminous hardcopy documents in litigation. Lawyers soon found that doing even simple tasks, such as searching or sorting large volumes of documents, was inefficient and time-consuming using traditional techniques.
An early implementation of electronic discovery technology in Australia was to number the hardcopy documents and manage the index data (e.g. document number, author, date, type, title etc.) in a database. The index data could then be exchanged electronically by the parties. This was similar to records management technologies in use at that time. In 1990, the $1 billion collapse of the Estate Mortgage Trust led to complex legal proceedings with 12 parties and 750,000 documents. This spurred the development of the Ringtail software suite where the index database was linked to images of the documents. Both the index data and the document images were electronically discovered by the parties in accordance with an exchange protocol. The successful Ringtail product line, now owned by FTI Technologies, is used around the world for electronic discovery.
An electronic courtroom provided by Systematics for the hearing of the Estate Mortgage case was also successful. According to a 1999 Victorian Law Reform Committee report, users in the case estimated that the technology reduced court time, and therefore costs, by 50%.
Despite the significant initial investment in creating these electronic systems (i.e. imaging and indexing each document), in a complex case with voluminous documents, there was a demonstrable return on investment. In the very biggest cases, it was just about impossible to run the case without such a system.
Thus was born electronic discovery in Australia. Court practice notes sprang up around the country setting out guidelines to support this practice.
Internal departments emerged in large law firms to assist the lawyers to manage large cases using technology. Specialist litigation support bureaus, that could provide document processing and software services also evolved to support the law firms and to effectively run the end to end process for smaller firms. The industry became known as litigation support.
Read the full article here
Back to Listing