Chris Paley-Menzies on the changing approach to e-disclosure
The case of Digicel vs Cable & Wireless, where Digicel alleged that Cable & Wireless deliberately conspired to delay interconnection with Digicel's telephone network, has brought the issue of electronic disclosure the forefront of the legal mind. The recent decision made in the case on the inadequacy of the search efforts made by Cable & Wireless will have an effect upon how e-disclosure is approached in the future.
In their efforts, Cable & Wireless racked up some £2m and nearly 7,000 hours of legal time and yet their key word search was still not deemed “reasonable”. The decision to force the company to do further searches on Digicel's terms was also compounded by the fact that they will now have to include the restoration of backed-up tape data. The problem now faced by Cable & Wireless would seem to be one of numbers. From the original list of 10 key words used, over 1,000,000 documents were returned and these were, expensively, whittled down to
