Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes is, as you doubtless know, Latin for “there must be a catch somewhere”. It seems unlikely, of course, that the Greeks are going to be bearing gifts for anybody just now, but Millnet seem to be. They obviously reckoned that the fear of a catch might be your first reaction on learning that they are offering up to £10,000 of e-discovery services for free, because they draw attention to this possibility on the page headed Driving down the cost of e-discovery which promotes their offer

If there is a catch, I cannot see it, but I would not spend too much time looking for one if I were you, because the offer is open only to the first ten law firms to place an order, which must be delivered for processing by no later than 31 March.

The more relevant saying (with the additional merit of being in English) is the one about how you can take a horse to water but cannot necessarily make him drink. I hope that some at least of the fortunate ten firms will be ones who have not yet stuck their necks out and attempted the task of handling electronic documents electronically. It is not a revolutionary concept really – indeed, the daft approach is to handle electronic documents by any other means, like converting them to paper first. Millnet’s offer seems a good way to try, so get in there before the ten offers go to less deserving firms for whom it is second nature to shop round for the best price with each job. It seems unlikely that they will find a better price than this.

Where else can you go, incidentally, to find articles which make the subject of electronic disclosure so relatively simple? You had to speak Latin and be au fait with EU economic current affairs to understand the first two sentences, so the rest must appear comparatively easy to get your mind round.

PS Thinking about this overnight (that is, having posted the above and ruminated further), I think that Millnet’s rivals probably ought to be grateful that someone else is willing to introduce new entrants with this kind of splash. It is presumably not sustainable for long (if it were me I would have halved the ceiling and doubled the number of offers) and Millnet are presumably subject to the same economic pressures as everyone else in the middle term.

The issue we face is not so much the actual cost as encouraging lawyers (or their clients) to pick up the phone and ask at least two suppliers to give them estimates. This offer might jog some lawyers into the realisation that there is a thriving competitive market out there offering services which make the lawyers in turn competitive vis à vis their own clients. That ought to benefit everyone once this eye-catching initiative has been used up.

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