Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
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BUSINESS CASE "There are many lawyers in Canada who don't know what's going on and don't re- alize how important [technology] is," he says. Adopting soſtware that "whittles down the haystack" and identifies rel- evant documents and files to the case is the best course of action, he says. "Failure to comply with e-discovery requirements can have drastic conse- quences for the firm and the client. If one side doesn't produce documents, and the court believes there's a lack of fair play, the judge could award the judgment to the other side," he says. The good news is there are a growing number of firms specializing in e-dis- covery and data mining are entering the market. He says several of the newcom- ers have relayed stories of well-estab- lished law firms coming to his team in need of immediate help aſter underes- timating the complexity of e-discovery. David Stewart, national leader of De- loitte's analytic and forensic technology practice in Canada, says it's hard to pin- point the cost of e-discovery because so much depends on the amount of data involved, the litigation, how many cus- todians are involved, and how well de- fined the search terms are. He says small searches could be as cheap as several thousand dollars while complex ones could run to six figures. But to provide an idea of the scope in- volved, he says if you printed off all the documents and e-mails from a laptop with a 40-gigabyte hard drive, the stack of paper could be as tall as the CN Tow- er. Stewart says one of the biggest chal- lenges in setting up e-discovery infra- structure in Canada is that there aren't many experienced professionals to hire. "There's not a lot of skilled labour here that have done hundreds of e-discovery jobs like they have in the U.S.," he says. Stewart says it's particularly impor- tant for companies that are regularly involved in litigation, such as pharma- ceutical, manufacturing, and financial- services firms, to ensure they follow best e-discovery practices. "If you don't have a strategy in place to deal with evidence in your systems, you can get caught where you're ill prepared to respond to the requirements of the legal action," he says. "You have to think about how you collect, preserve, and store information. A lot of firms are spending significant dollars on how they manage e-mail on a go-forward basis. There are technology costs and human-capital costs. You may have to rejig some of your processes and how you back up your information." It's one thing to find and produce doc- uments, such as e-mails, but it's another to be able to prove that the version in question is the original and hasn't been tampered with. Robert Childress, president of Wave Soſtware, an Orlando, Fla.-based e-dis- covery soſtware firm, says it's imperative e-discovery only one guide Billions of bytes, millions of dollars, thousands of hours, only one solution. Canada's irst law irm exclusively focused on e-discovery. Wortzman Nickle guides you through overwhelming data management challenges and transforms them into a corporate or litigation asset. www.wortzmannickle.com Susan Wortzman swortzman@wnpclaw.com 416.642.9025 Susan Nickle snickle@wnpclaw.com 416.642.9026 E-discovery and litigation management counsel 40 OC T OBER 2008 C ANADIAN Lawyer INHOUSE Untitled-11 1 8/28/08 3:38:45 PM