I am in Hong Kong, having just finished the two-day InnoXcell eDiscovery conference. The purpose at these conferences – my purpose anyway – is to encourage lawyers to know their way around the rules, the practice and the technology so that they can set off in the right direction. The rules have more flexibility in them than most people realise; the technology advances in ability and reduces in cost in a way which keeps pace, more or less, with the increases in volumes. Lawyers acquire a certain confidence if, as well as knowing the facts and understanding the issues, they can use the rules to their advantage, estimate the costs and have at least some idea of what technology exists to help them to help their clients to their objective. Electronic documents holds the evidence, and knowing how to give discovery is a primary litigation skill.

Relatively few lawyers have this array of skills and knowledge, whilst purporting to offer a litigation service in which the costs and other implications of electronic discovery/disclosure are usually the biggest single component. Hong Kong taxi drivers offer a parallel.

You expect certain things of a taxi driver – that he has learned to drive, knows the rules of the road, keeps his car roadworthy and, not least, knows how to get to the client’s destination, that is, his objective. On my first night, armed with the name and address of a restaurant, I hailed a cab. Peel Street, it transpired, meant nothing to at all to the driver, notwithstanding that it is a few short blocks from Central Station. He set off with apparent confidence in the right general direction (because I had told him it was near Central), and his command of the steering wheel, accelerator and brakes seemed at least adequate. Various of Peel’s contemporaries from the mid-18th century England came by on street signs – Wellington, Shelley, Elgin – but there was no sign of Peel. The driver had no GPS (nor even a map) and kept ringing base-station. At one point he tried to set me down in a dark street.

Eventually, he dropped me at the bottom of a flight of steps, cheerfully demanding a fee of which at least half had been wasted in my grand tour of Hong Kong’s back alleys. He gestured vaguely up the hill. Peel Street proved to be a steep alley, dangerous to go down and arduous to climb, so the penalty for missing the destination and having to retrace my steps was high. Did I say that it was pouring with rain? The alley had steps at irregular intervals, so walking whilst scanning the shop-fronts for the restaurant’s number was dangerous. At one point a plastic box moved under my feet as I stepped down, propelled, as it transpired, by a sturdy mouse. I e-mailed for directions, but got no response.

After several passes up and down the hill, I found my host, standing outside a building which I had walked past several times, but which bore only Chinese lettering and no number. His BlackBerry was behind the bar being charged, which is why he had not replied to my e-mails. The directions which had been sent to me had included the Chinese version of the restaurant’s name but, since my BlackBerry has only the English character set, that had not come out.

The parallels are irresistible, aren’t they, even without that final refinement of the character set which you cannot read because you do not have the right language components? The driver lacked both the knowledge and the technology to allow him to meet his client’s objective; substantial unnecessary fees (the cab fare in this case) were incurred as he went round and round in circles (and many ediscovery exercises involve difficult retracing of steps). We have a missed deadline (I was 30 minutes late), time and money wasted, and a failure to meet a client’s legitimate expectation. The rain overhead and the vermin underfoot symbolise that general sense of despair that the client feels as his thoughts turn to giving up – settling litigation on bad terms equating to going back to my hotel’s room service, as I nearly did.

It is good to be back in Hong Kong. The weather falls somewhat short of perfection at this time of year – too hot for comfort but with frequent rainstorms, the harbinger of a typhoon which may yet arrive here. It is the rain which drove me to cabs – usually, the underground railway and trams provide more than adequate transport. Public transport actually works here, which is not something I am used to, with the added bonus that railway announcements are made in clear, unaccented English – when did you last hear that in London?

Thanks to a quirk of airline pricing, it proved cheaper to keep me here until Sunday than to fly me back when the conference ended. My hotel room makes a perfectly decent office and, if the weather continues like this, I can knock off a fair amount of work before I leave, starting with a report of the conference.

Moderating, with Senior Assistant Registrar Yeong Zee Kin of the Singapore Supreme Court and Eddie Sheehy, CEO of Nuix

(I wish you) Did It My-y-y-y-y Way

Browning Marean of DLA Piper US and US Magistrate Judge David Waxse duet with suggestions as to how ediscovery might be improved.

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