eDisclosure Information Project

“Did you know that, until about 1990, time didn’t run for pleadings from 1 August to 1 September?”

This tweet from a barrister prompted this reply from me:

Note: Generally, the English don’t have “vacations”, but holidays. This use is an odd exception. The RCJ is the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, daunting when buzzing with life, haunting when empty.

The Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand

In practice, it wasn’t just pleadings time limits which went to sleep in August – most deadlines in court orders took de facto account of the assumption that no one would be working. I loved it, in the days before I was concerned about school holidays, and would make sure that I took my holidays while everyone else was at work. It seemed almost incredible that they paid us the same in August as they did for the rest of the year (not that that was very much at the time). Continue reading →

Last week was meant to be one of high output. Most of the videos from earlier events are completed and published, and my son Will is filling my Inbox with drafts of the Legaltech videos. There are pending events to promote (like the Nuix one which I have just written about) and a new disclosure judgment in England and Wales (Serco v MoD, which I have also just written about).

One interruption last week was a scheduled one – to hospital going under anaesthetic so that a camera could be winched down my throat (all clear, thank you). The open road to a publication stream lay before me.

That night, however, my mother died down in Suffolk. This was not truly unexpected – she was 89, and we were told she was dying last June, so she had a pretty good run after that. I mentioned this briefly on Twitter and was quite overwhelmed with the reaction, from people I actually know, people I know only on Twitter, and people I don’t know at all. It was an uplifting experience. Continue reading →

The UK’s Ministry of Defence has, unfortunately for it, become the reverse poster child for disclosure by UK government departments. Its most recent reverse comes in a judgment by Mr Justice Fraser in Serco Ltd v Secretary of State for Defence [2019] EWHC 515 (TCC) (28 February 2019).

My thanks to Litigation Futures for spotting this and for its helpful summary.

I have more sympathy for the MoD over the 2010 Al-Sweady judgment than I did when I first wrote about it (see Al-Sweady v Secretary of State for Defence: blame for e-Disclosure failures gets personal – and public.

This is partly because of what we now know about the origin of those proceedings, and partly because of other factors, including lack of investment in IT systems, the nature of military operations, and the need for military secrecy. The judgment’s continuing value as a source of instruction lies in its lessons about the importance of explaining properly and timeously what the problems are, and for the fact that a named army officer was criticised personally for his work by the Court of Appeal. I wrote this, quoting the Court of Appeal:

Accordingly, if [insert your own name here] continues to be put forward as a principal or even a significant witness in judicial review proceedings or if he is in any way responsible for disclosure, it is our view that any court seized of those proceedings should approach his evidence with the greatest caution.

The words in brackets which stand substitute for the officer’s actual name are mine. I added that “I would work quite hard to ensure that the name in that sentence was not mine”. Continue reading →