eDisclosure Information Project

Matters of mutual incomprehension can pass unnoticed. In the context which concerns me, for example,  English and American participants in e-discovery can fail to realise that one is talking about chalk and the other of cheese.

For example, American lawyers and litigation software are all geared around whether  documents are “responsive” or not. That seems the obvious word to use to refer to documents which are “in” as opposed to “out”. But the importance of responsiveness follows from an aspect of US discovery which is very different to that which obtains in the UK – under the US rules, discovery is given of documents which “respond to” a request from opponents. English disclosure does not work like that – each party self-starts on its disclosure, at least for the standard disclosure which initiates the process. The concept of being “responsive” is therefore meaningless save in the broader sense of finding a “response” to one’s own search.

The gap exists not so much because one is using terminology which the other does not understand, but that neither appreciates that the terminological difference exists at all. You can miss each other in the dark like that, whether talking of discovery or international politics. Continue reading →

One of the reasons I go to American conferences is to fly the British flag as serious players in the electronic disclosure world, and to answer questions about it. The Civil Procedure Rules apply only in England and Wales. The only thing anyone in Washington wanted to talk about was Scotland.

It would be easy, staying here in the UK, to underestimate the level of American anger at the decision by Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill to release the Libyan terrorist Al-Megrahi who was convicted of playing a part in the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988. One becomes cynical of government-level complaints designed to look populist at home and to safeguard contracts or diplomatic relations abroad. Nevertheless, it was interesting to realise what very strong feelings run amongst ordinary people in America about the decision to release Megrahi.

One of the issues is that Americans, understandably, find it hard to distinguish between the component parts of Europe, let alone the United Kingdom. They lump the UK in with Europe, for a start, believing that we are part of it; they are puzzled to discover that there is a mismatch between the political and the cultural, and that Britain does not feel part of Europe in  most senses. This is part of a long tradition: Lord Raglan, commander-in-chief of the British Army in the Crimea in the 1850s, persisted in referring to the enemy as “the French”, notwithstanding that we and France had not been at war since Waterloo in 1815 and that the French were actually our allies in the Crimea. Continue reading →

One of my roles for sponsors is to pick up the nuances of language differences between American terminology and English English, which amount to a great deal more than remembering to avoid references to “attorney”. It is not that I claim anything special for English English (well I do, of course, but not in this context) but that if you are trying to sell solutions to English lawyers, you should do so in their language.

I was a little taken aback this morning to find a large and very smart black people carrier outside the Gaylord National Hotel with the name “Suburban” proudly emblazoned on its side. That would be the kiss of death in marketing terms in England. It is not that we don’t value the suburbs – people like to live and bring up their children in them and they hold an important place in modern British culture. Like so many other things which we value, however, we simultaneously despise them. Where Americans see (I assume) pleasant detached houses in large green plots behind low white fences, we think of rows of tacky 1930s semis or even tackier 1970s estates, where people with dubious accents and faux-posh expressions twitch their net curtains in between bouts of wife-swapping. Continue reading →

You have probably heard enough from me for a bit, and I am pushing off to the country for a few days. My wife is just back from yachting in Croatia, and I see more than enough of aeroplanes and departure lounges during the rest of the year, so England suits us well.

We have been lent a cottage on an estate with a famed garden. Back properly on 23 July.

My title comes from what appears to be an automatic translation of one of my recent articles which I came across on a site called 123people. What it has been translated into and by whom remains a mystery. My son Charlie Dale found it because it references him. It is called The untapped premature of YouTube as a promotional method and should be read alongside the source article The untapped potential of YouTube as a promotional medium.

The first paragraph turns this:

Lord Justice Jackson will do his launch tomorrow with an old-fashioned press conference.

…into this:

Lord Justice Jackson determination do his get going tomorrow with an old-fashioned huddle colloquium.

I will capture it all and post it somewhere where it won’t be confused with my own actual prose. I never thought of describing what I do as a means of bringing psyche to the commonplace words of the rules and the fresh judgments in Digicel, Abela and Hedrich. Why did the Phoenix Fall not think of launching their song What exceedingly matters to me at evensong? The description of Gordon Brown as the least telegenic partisan concert-master is pure genius.

I leave you with this:

The e-disclosure interplay is delicate, to communicate the least, but marketing ideas eddy for all that….There is wastefulness of elbow-room here to be inventive in decision ways to spread issue, partisan and other messages and to seize unexpected audiences.

Any of you thinking of using automated translation tools may care to get some samples before you start.

Enjoy.

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