As it is more than 6 years since I was invited to present eDiscovery to the Rules Board of the DoJ, I thought it was about time to attempt to obtain some idea as to whether there was any progress or not, despite the fact that I was told not to “pester” them! As if I would!
We all know that they have implemented the e-Court Rules, Court Online as well as Evidence Management via Caselines. Court Online is in essence an e-filing system, in other words, it is NOT eDiscovery. Nor is Caselines, which simply deals with the electronic production of documents such as trail bundles. Neither determine how electronic documents should be discovered, and to be fair they do not pretend to do so.
We also know that when Caselines was first introduced (prior to Court online) it was, bluntly, a disaster, and I am not going into all of the reasons why. Since then, Caselines has been acquired by Thomson Reuters, a vast improvement, and the data is stored in the cloud via MS Azure. It is not clear to me where it is stored, as this came about prior to MS Azure being available here in SA, but there may have been a migration. Anyway, one would hope that our DoJ would have satisfied itself as Data Protection.
What we do not know, definitively is how is Court Online and Caselines faring? I hear conflicting comments, and have no statistics on the take up, opinions, experiences etc. You may well ask, why I am bothered about this? Well, I am, because the Rules Board tell me that they have a plan to introduce all things digital (by which they include eDiscovery) “incrementally” and based upon “role player inputs”. I find this a little disturbing given that eDiscovery, as such has no effect on the Court’s administration and does not require them to host anything, nor, should opinions of practitioners on Court Online and Caselines have any bearing on whether we have eDiscovery in our Rules or not. However, if this is the case I hope everyone agrees, quickly, that all in the garden of Court Online and Caselines is lovely!
I guess, although I may be clutching at straws, the one positive I take from this is that they are effectively saying, eDiscovery is in mind, and is in a queue. The only question, then is how long will this queue have to wait for the bus?
I can remember preaching in the UK in 2003, that you should not wait for CPR changes before embracing eDiscovery as it was already here with the proliferation of electronic data. I have been saying the same here for many years and, I am delighted that my comments have been heeded, and I am so proud that eDiscovery technology is in use every day here in SA, despite no Rules change. I am especially proud to be associated with the fact that global market leader RelativityOne is now hosted here in SA. Without doubt this has had a catalytic effect on the use of eDiscovery in SA and we are witnessing the beginnings of an eDiscovery industry as I predicted many years ago.
When I see more SA lawyers embracing the technology and hear of major SA corporations desiring a Rules change, I almost feel like a proud father! In a response to one of my recent blogs, a UK eDiscovery specialist commented “ The change regarding ediscovery in SA is breathtaking. Really impressive to see.”
Continues to make all of the blood, sweat and tears worthwhile.