I wrote recently about Cats Legal, the combination of established print solutions provider Cats Solutions and litigation support provider LDSI (see Cats Solutions combines with LDSI to become Cats Legal).  My planned meeting with Mark Wagstaff of Cats Legal had to be postponed, so I have yet to visit the new operation. What I have had, however, is a press release from Digital Reef announcing a partnership with Cats Legal.

Cats Legal obviously intends to hit the ground running if this deal is anything to go by. Digital Reef brings a range of solutions for handling data for e-Discovery / e-Disclosure. Apart from its scalability (it can apparently process as much as 10 TB per day in some cases), it can be brought into use very quickly, making data available to a company and its lawyers in the timescales imposed by regulatory investigations as well as for litigation and internal investigations.

This deal is important for Digital Reef as well – it is their second recent UK win (Legal Inc is the other) and implies a determined bid for a place in the international market. I came across the name first when John Turner, then CTO of Anacomp, mentioned it approvingly, and a reference from John Turner is worth a lot. My contact there is Charles Lavallée, formerly of CT Summation who certainly looked happy enough when I saw him at LegalTech.

The main point for lawyers and their clients is that there is a thriving and very competitive market in the UK, offering a wide range of applications and services. Whilst there is obviously a considerable overlap in functionality between the various products, there are sufficient differences between then and the manner of using them to create genuine choices. One of the results of Lord Justice Jackson’s section on e-Disclosure in his Final Report is the increased expectation which courts have that parties will at least have some idea of the range of solutions available to tackle their clients’ electronic documents.

If you are in any doubt about this, have another look at Master Whitaker’s judgment in Goodale v MoJ. Quite apart from the obvious duty owed to clients, I am not sure that I would want to be caught on the hop by a Judge or Master who knew more about software solutions than I did.

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