This has little to do with electronic discovery, but says a little about the cultural differences between the UK and the US, something which is relevant to those who sell in both jurisdictions.

Visiting remote parish churches recently in rural Suffolk and Cornwall, I came across notices solemnly warning that it is illegal to smoke in the church. At the door of the Gaylord Hotel in Texas which was host to ILTA this year, I came across this notice:

The Labour government provided local authorities with £30 million to help them check that every public place had no-smoking notices in the same year that it lopped £15 million off the budget for flood prevention. The notices have been effective at ending the (presumably widespread) practice of people lighting up during Communion – although they are, of course, not needed in those churches which are under water as a result of inadequate flood protection.

It has to be said that I was not shot once whilst I was in the hotel, which just goes to show how valuable these notices are. Given how the UK crime figures have shot up whilst New Labour was focusing on the smoking ban, perhaps we ought to have notices banning guns and knives outside every church, alongside those about smoking.

To the extent that there is any message here, it is to do with identifying the things which actually matter and focusing on them. Messages which matter in one place mean little elsewhere. It may well be necessary in Texas to tell you to leave your arsenal outside, but we take that for granted in Britain – just as Americans, on the whole, seem quite capable of working out where they can and can’t smoke. Things which matter very much in US e-discovery – defensible collections and formal Early Case Assessments, for example – don’t mean quite so much in the UK. It is not that they don’t matter, just that other things matter more.

Just as notices which state the obvious distract from things which matter more, so marketing material which rings the wrong bells (or rings the less important bells first and loudest) obscures things which are of greater significance. What matters varies from one place to the next, and it is important to know what matters in foreign jurisdictions before starting to market there.

Home