Barrister Damian Murphy has resigned from Enterprise Chambers to set up his own Chambers, Indicium Chambers, focusing exclusively on electronic disclosure. There is a Lawyer article about this interesting development here.

I am doing three events with Damian in the next few weeks, details of which you will find at the end of this article.

You may like to look back at a very long article which I wrote in May called Breaking the dam: barristers moving in to eDisclosure which is a report of IQPC’s Information Governance and eDisclosure Summit in London. Quite a lot of my article is devoted to the potential role of barristers in the management of eDisclosure. One of the quotations with which my article opens came from Damian Murphy – his “Look judge, here’s an idea” seemed to me to reflect exactly the opportunities which the new case management rules give to lawyers and judges to work within the rules to find inventive approaches aimed at focusing on what really matters.

We have to get away from the idea that eDisclosure / eDiscovery is just a set of mechanical processes. Its purpose is to find evidence and to build a narrative, and the CPR offers plenty of opportunity to leave the junk on one side and focus on what matters whilst yet complying with the duties of candour implicit in the disclosure obligations. Project management skills are vital (and Damian Murphy’s CV includes them), but the process is not the objective.

I said this about barristers in my article:

Barristers do not have teams of associates to deploy on eDisclosure. I do not (obviously) buy the idea that the brightest and most articulate of would-be lawyers choose to be barristers rather than solicitors, but analysis and advocacy are the stock-in-trade of barristers. If you can find someone else to do the brute mechanics of eDisclosure / eDiscovery, then the strategic, tactical and analytical skills, together with the legal knowledge and articulation, can come equally from barristers or solicitors – and barristers are increasingly in the front line at case management conferences. The only things which hold barristers back in this area are traditional ideas of the division of labour and an archaic attitude to fees.

I referred also to something which Professor Richard Susskind said in reply to a question from Damian Murphy. Damian observed that barristers get barely a mention in Susskind’s Tomorrow’s Lawyers – what lies in store for them them?

Richard Susskind showed no more optimism for the Bar than for solicitors as the profession was presently constituted. The best prospect for barristers, he said, was to gather together with others (by which he meant providers of non-legal services) to deliver services as legal risk managers – people who could see the potential for things to go wrong. Barristers tended to be talented, articulate people for whom there was potentially a bright future if they were willing to broaden their horizons beyond the traditional role of the bar.

I am pleased to say that I have three events coming up in which Damian Murphy is also involved. The first is Lawtech Europe Congress 2013 in Prague next week when I am moderating a session called Scope, Method and Costs, whose description is as follows:

Reducing timescales and costs requires an early grip on scope (What documents are really necessary?), method (What is the best way of performing the eDiscovery tasks?) and budget (What is it going to cost?). That is how every other commercial project is managed. Why not eDiscovery?

That should be right up Damian’s street. We are to be joined in this by Chad McManamy, Assistant General Counsel at Guidance Software, Karl Obayi who brings dual technical and legal qualifications to the subject, and Patrick Burke of Reed Smith who has extensive experience on both the legal and the technology sides of electronic discovery.

After that Damian and I are recording a video webinar together for CLT Online entitled Jackson and eDisclosure – Making It Work In Practice – you can find details about that here.

Lastly for now, Damian Murphy and I are involved in a panel at ILTA INSIGHT in London on 14 November. Our subject is Non-traditional sources of evidence and we will look at BYOD, Facebook and Twitter and the general subject of potentially disclosable data sources which might easily be overlooked by lawyers, whether from their own side or from opponents.

I look forward to these events and wish Damian Murphy well with his new venture.

Home