I have some heavyweight writing in hand at the moment involving, amongst other things, an analysis of the costs figures which Lord Justice Jackson set out in his Preliminary Report on Litigation Costs. Most of my articles come from my head, fortified by occasional references to other sources. These heavier papers are rather different, with lots of cross-referring between, in this case, the Preliminary Report, its Appendix 19 and the Civil Procedure Rules.

With that section done, something made me look back through my as-yet unfiled InBox to the week before I went on holiday. I had a vague recollection that I had not followed up a message from Laurence Eastham, editor of the Society for Computers and Law’s excellent magazine and website. I found it eventually – a recommendation that I look at an e-disclosure article on the Computers and Law site. Remorsefully, I looked it up – to find that it was all about the costs figures which Lord Justice Jackson set out in his preliminary report. I could have saved myself some research.

The article is called E-disclosure: Numbers too! and is written by Simon Anthony, a chartered accountant and a Managing Director in Navigant Consulting’s Disputes & Investigations Group in London, and Phil Beckett, a chartered certified accountant and the Director of Navigant Consulting’s Computer Forensics and E-Disclosure Group in London. I had lunch with Phil Beckett a few months ago and, with my own research still fresh in my head, I was interested to see his accountant’s perspective on the numbers involved in e-disclosure.

The fact that I am pretty sated with the subject today gives me the excuse simply to refer you to the article, which is both interesting and meticulously footnoted, needing no gloss from me. Laurence Eastham was kind enough to bring it out of the members-only password area for a bit so that my readers who are not SCL members can see it. This dispensation will not last for long, so it makes sense to read it now.

It would make even more sense, in fact, if you were to join the Society for Computers and Law. Its benefits do not end with its extremely good and varied paper and web publications – it is at the moment taking bookings for its annual conference. Called The impact of changing economic cycles on the practice of IT Law, it takes place in Bath on 9 and 10 October, and is sufficiently interesting to warrant a separate post, which I will do shortly.

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