Last Friday we had Terry Harrison as our guest speaker on our Tech Talk Legal webinar, he gave us an overview of discovery, e-discovery and how it could assist in cases like Makate v Vodacom and in general the legal system in South Africa.
Some snippets from Terry’s talk:
“Discovery is making a reasonable search for documents which are or have been in your possession or control and disclosing them to the other side, if relevant, even if they are averse to your case. Many years ago, I was talking to a French lawyer and telling him about the principles of discovery. The reason we were having the conversation was because France is one of the countries that does not use discovery. I told him exactly what discovery was and then he said to me: “You mean you find documents that are against you, and you give them to the other side?” and I said well that’s about the size of it yes and he said: “You English you’re crazy!”
What is e-discovery? The official definition is simply that it is the collection, production and review of documents stored in an electronic format.
A practical definition a UK litigation lawyer gave me many years ago is: “it’s about being clever with the way you do document reviews; it’s about picking the right search terms, using a good provider, and having a proper hosting platform!”
I can tell you that global statistics tell us that more than 97% of all business documents today are created electronically and more than 35% of those never see paper.”
Enough of the snippets of the talk, watch the recording of the webinar…
