My article The Mysteries of Disclosure, published on 3 January 2007 by Computers & Law here suggested that litigation support suppliers could do more to offer packaged and costed solutions which might persuade the converted but uncommited to make a start with eDisclosure. I suggested that one of them would market their services in this way and that the rest would follow.

This prediction is open to challenge on two main grounds: the assumption that there is an untapped market of interested non-committers and the implied assertion that there is such a thing as a bog-standard source of documents for Disclosure.

As to the first point, we shall see what response the article gets from suppliers and from users, who are invited by the Editor of Computers & Law to submit, respectively, their product information and their experiences and would-be buyers.

As to the second point, I anticipate the argument that you cannot wholly package and quote for a source which may have all kinds of hidden complications. That is true, but it ought to be possible to give a package rate for a routine Disclosure exercise subject to caveats.

This is not a novel suggestion anyway, and is in fact how most professional support companies quote if you ask them, using the number of documents or, increasingly, the size of the end-product in Gigabytes. The possible new approach says nothing as to how suppliers will interact with their existing clients or with those who have taken the step of asking for a quotation.

What I look forward to is the day when a potential new client can go to suppliers’ web sites and get a broad idea of the costs of eDisclosure in generic terms (albeit hedged with qualifications) rather than having to ask for a specific quotation for his specific job.

Any views for against this, from suppliers or potential clients?

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