There are more and more lawyers in South Africa using eDiscovery technology on a weekly, even daily, basis. I have experience of lawyers properly advising their clients of the benefits of the technology and for sure more service providers are being consulted regularly.
This is truly inspiring after years of hard work, encouragement and education. There is no doubt in my mind that having RelativityOne hosted here in SA has been an influencer. It settles clients and lawyers minds and avoids any conversations about Data Protection and Privacy where the data is not hosted here. POPIA, generally follows GDPR and is usually happy if the data is hosted in a GDPR area, but this does not mean that the client is always happy! Think about major financial institutions holding huge amounts of sensitive and private information about their corporate and private clients. I know of instances, where, irrespective of compliance with GDPR, they are much more comfortable knowing the data is hosted here in SA. My point is that this hosting aspect has boosted lawyers confidence in talking about eDiscovery with their clients.
Anyway, back to what is happening here on eDiscovery. As I said the usage is established and still growing, and the confidence in allowing the features of the technology to help with decisions and reviewing documents is excellent. There is still a way to go to be matching the practices and processes of international lawyers but “Rome wasn’t built in a day”.
Now, I want SA lawyers and clients to seriously think about the next level in connection with litigation and investigation matters and the use of technology. They totally get the use of email communications being filtered and using features such as email threading as well as duplicate and near duplicates. They appreciate the value and power of ECA and other features. However, how many people are aware that global statistics tell us that the change of how we communicate has seen a 32% decrease in emails. To what, you may ask? The answer is what we call Short Messaging. Let me tell you that WhatsApp has 2.4bn users and MS Teams has 270m users, to name but two of the most used and well known. The question is “Are we looking at Short Messaging in appropriate cases?” Remember that discovery is not limited to documents, letters, emails etc. it refers to communications and as I have mentioned one more than one occasion in the past, even emojis have been held to be discoverable in various jurisdictions.
There has been technology available, for many years, to help with collecting and reviewing data held on mobile devices but the increase in calls and meetings in Teams and Zoom, for example, has helped to drive software providers to give us more. Clearly, we need a method of capturing short message content in litigation and investigations and make that contact easily reviewable and searchable. At Harrisons eDiscovery Consulting (Pty) Ltd, we use RelativityOne, hosted in SA and this global market leading solution has developed and introduced their short message solution called RSMF – Relativity Short Message Format. This allows us to bring short message data into RelativityOne and allow it be viewed in a very readable manner. The inclusion of the metadata can tell us e.g. who received a message, did they read it, was it edited by someone and more. We can get a view of the participants, date ranges and timelines etc. It is truly fantastic and vey much the “next level”. I can see its use in all types of cases but investigations spring into mind here is SA. Relativity have produced an informative, brief e-book on the subject. It is obtainable, free of charge on a download from Relativity. Check it out.
You know that the US and UK require evidence to be kept in a “reasonably usable” format including, metadata, text, images, track changes etc. We don’t have those rules yet, here in SA but, rules or not, the duty to discover evidence is the same. Now is the time for SA to step up a level and embrace the latest world of communications.