Those who know me are aware that I keep a close eye on the global industry of eDiscovery through my international contacts. It is crucial to see what is happening elsewhere, partly to keep up to date with important happenings and also because most things filter through to, or affect, SA eventually. One matter which caught my eye is yet another case involving fake ChatGPT citations. This time it was in Colorado and the lawyer concerned was suspended for a year for citing case law in a motion which he found through ChatGPT. He failed to inform the Court of the existence of the false cases after ..read more

When you have been in eDiscovery as long as we have, you expect to see, year on year, improvements and new features and the industry rarely disappoints. When I think back many years ago to being excited seeing a solution “tally” documents by custodian and I look at what has developed since it is really quite astonishing.   As I say, we expect, and corporate clients expect, constant changes which react to the ever growing volumes and increasing complexity of electronic data, all aimed at saving time and driving down cost. However, just once in a while, a new feature occurs which is tr ..read more

As it is more than 6 years since I was invited to present eDiscovery to the Rules Board of the DoJ, I thought it was about time to attempt to obtain some idea as to whether there was any progress or not, despite the fact that I was told not to “pester” them! As if I would! We all know that they have implemented the e-Court Rules, Court Online as well as Evidence Management via Caselines. Court Online is in essence an e-filing system, in other words, it is NOT eDiscovery. Nor is Caselines, which simply deals with the electronic production of documents such as trail bundles. Neither determine ho ..read more

There are more and more lawyers in South Africa using eDiscovery technology on a weekly, even daily, basis. I have experience of lawyers properly advising their clients of the benefits of the technology and for sure more service providers are being consulted regularly. This is truly inspiring after years of hard work, encouragement and education. There is no doubt in my mind that having RelativityOne hosted here in SA has been an influencer. It settles clients and lawyers minds and avoids any conversations about Data Protection and Privacy where the data is not hosted here. POPIA, general ..read more

Meta (owners of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) have been fined 1.3 billion USD for their latest data privacy violation bringing their total fines to approx. 2bn USD in less than a year. They have been ordered to cease sending data from Europe to the USA. I was alerted to this by my good friend Doug Austin in one of his recent blog posts which I recommend you to read. It brought to me think about where we are in SA having POPIA. I am so happy that SA has Data Privacy and Protection legislation which is at least the equivalent of GDPR. At last, I am seeing people respect its existence an ..read more

I am hearing from all over the country about what appears to be an ever increasing problem in the delay of payment of professional fees or, worse, people expecting services for free. Is it the state of South Africa’s economy that is causing this problem, bad management or deliberate actions? Probably a combination of all three, but whatever the reason, it is not acceptable. When I was in the UK I saw similar problems, although the Government did take some action by guaranteeing prompt payment from all government departments. Can you imagine that happening here when it is the government departm ..read more

Those of us in the global eDiscovery industry seem to talk every year about the fact that, generally, lawyers are still not getting to grips with the use and value of technology and how to speak authoritatively with their clients about it. Here in SA this position is exactly the same and I hear of instances where lawyers insist on dealing with aspects of discovery or production in their traditional way rather than the correct way in terms of eDiscovery. Then there is AI. Everyone is talking about it every day. I smile sometimes because eDiscovery technology has been using AI long before the ac ..read more

In its regular blog, global market leader, Relativity writes an excellent piece - -  on the top global trends in eDiscovery in 2023 and I recommend my SA contacts involved in this space to read it.  In summary, the top 4 trends are:-  1.    eDiscovery continues to incorporate AI into more parts of the process. 2.    Workflow automation consistently improves human practice 3.    ECA is truly transforming to EDA 4.    Cloud based technologies continue to accelerate and prove their value  How can these global trends w ..read more

Belated Happy New Year everyone, I am forecasting a very busy eDiscovery in SA year starting already, of course, with the fantastic news that RelativtyOne is now hosted via MS Azure in South Africa. RelativityOne is the global market leader in eDiscovery and investigations solutions and it is just wonderful that it is now hosted in our country, removing any data protection concerns for corporations and individuals. Watch this space for more news following this announcement in the coming weeks.   Speaking of discovery in SA I have recently come across a large number of instances where SA l ..read more

  Sometimes a client needs to do something important in connection with a case which is going to take days and days of manual work to say nothing of the risk of individual mistakes. Harrisons eDiscovery Consulting Pty Limited was approached recently by a local Advocate client to solve just such a problem. Our Advocate was pursuing a Sequestration order against a former client. He needed to isolate a number of emails and attachments from his laptop for discovery purposes. There were issues in that the emails existed in more than one place and were further complicated in that some were repl ..read more