It is a great pleasure to welcome Navigant as the latest sponsor of the eDisclosure Information Project.

My primary involvement will be with the Legal Technology Solutions practice in London. I have known the UK practice leader, Managing Director Alex Dunstan-Lee (picture  left) for many years – one of the few people on the services side of the eDisclosure market who served his time as a solicitor at a major firm before moving across to the technical support side. His recruitment to this senior position in August last year was an indicator of the importance which Navigant attaches to its Legal Technology Solutions practice in the London market.

Navigant is well-established in the London market, having provided e-disclosure services for nearly 10 years in London.   Alex’s senior team consists of Directors Tanya Gross (joining Alex from his former team) and Jon Marshall (who has transferred from Navigant’s US practice).  Navigant’s UK practice has also made a number of other investments and hires to focus on expanding its e-disclosure consulting capabilities and (importantly) its structured data (non-standard ESI) capabilities.

I also know Jim Vint, another Managing Director in the global Legal Technology Solutions  practice, who leads the Discovery Consulting practice, based in the US. I have as close an interest in US eDiscovery as I do in UK eDisclosure and it will be good to work with a company with both feet firmly planted on each side of the Atlantic.

Navigant itself is a broadly-based consultancy and advisory business with interests in a range of vertical industries such as construction, energy, financial services and others, with offices in Canada, China, Denmark, the Middle East and Singapore, as well as in the UK and the US.  Navigant’s Legal Technology Solutions practice forms part of the wider Disputes and Investigations group at Navigant, offering a wide range of accounting, consulting and compliance services connected to disputes and investigations.  Disputes know no boundaries and international clients need globally-spread advice as well as a close understanding of what is required in their home jurisdictions.

Developments in UK civil procedure have made it increasingly necessary for companies and their lawyers to seek help from third parties, something Navigant is well placed to offer. The eDisclosure Practice Direction 31B of 2010 requires that parties exchange information at an early stage in the proceedings about their sources of electronic information. The Jackson Reforms of 2013 made this even more important, with the additional requirement to discuss and try and agree the proper course in relation to scope of disclosure, the methods of achieving it and, not least, the costs of the proposed exercise.

How a corporation or a law firm manages the eDisclosure process for litigation or for investigations will vary with the company and with the problem. Even those who have in-house staff and experience may need to call on others to help them: it may be because the task – of collection, for example – has technical implications which they are not equipped to deal with; it could be because they cannot deal with them cost-effectively; for many, these tasks are not part of their core business and it makes sense to pass them to others. Some need full project management; others simply see the economic and management benefits of delegating all or part of the process, leaving them to deal with the strategy and tactics of managing cases.

The Navigant Disputes and Investigations website sets out the range of services on offer, including forensics and collection, processing, early case assessment, hosted review, predictive coding and data analytics, with Relativity and Clearwell available as the primary review and analytics platforms. On top of all these discrete services Navigant brings a layer of advisory services from people with the experience of Alex and his team.  Navigant’s view is that e-disclosure is made successful by people first (technology second).  Navigant aims to be technology agnostic and to focus on the client’s specific challenge to find a solution.  Navigant also has a dedicated ‘structured data’ team and custom applications group, enabling Navigant to support clients and their lawyers with a broad set of data challenges, moving beyond e-mail and office documents to complex databases, social media and other data types. Navigant’s approach is to license what it believes to be leading third party technology but also to develop its own solutions for discrete tasks or unusual data challenges.

eDisclosure / eDiscovery is not a free-standing task; apart from the fact that it provides the evidence needed for a litigation case or an investigation, it can be part of a wider requirement such as compliance or may need specific skills such as forensic accounting. Navigant offers all this.

One expects from such a provider not just that it knows the relevant rules but that it is alert to the shifting demands of clients. These most obviously includes a focus on cost – not just the level of cost but the predictability and transparency of cost. Navigant understands this very well, as you can see from this video interview which I conducted with Alex in Prague last year. He entirely takes the point that it is not good enough for lawyers and others involved in the litigation process simply to expect clients to pay the bill, whatever it may be, at the end of the process.

The Navigant website includes a Legal Technology Solutions Experts’ Corner full of articles about particular subjects. I look forward to being a contributor to those pages.

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