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The eDiscovery Playbook: Court Requirements Across Australian Jurisdictions
What area(s) of law does this episode consider? | eDiscovery Requirements and Strategies |
Why is this topic relevant? | eDiscovery has become an essential part of the litigation process in Australia, but the requirements and expectations surrounding it can vary significantly depending on the jurisdiction. With the increasing volume of electronically stored information (ESI) in modern litigation, the ability to navigate these complexities is critical for ensuring that discovery obligations are met efficiently and cost-effectively. One of the key challenges in eDiscovery is ensuring compliance with the specific rules and guidelines that govern each jurisdiction. While there are common themes such as efficiency and proportionality, each state and territory may have differing rules about how electronic documents should be managed and disclosed. Lawyers must stay ahead of these evolving requirements to avoid delays and sanctions, among other negative outcomes. |
What legislation is considered in this episode? | Evidence Act 1995 (NSW) |
What are the main points? |
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What are the practical takeaways? |
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Show notes | Supreme Court of Victoria, ‘Technology in Civil Litigation Practice Note’ (SC Gen 5) Supreme Court of New South Wales, ‘Use of Technology Practice Note’ (SC GEN 07) Federal Court of Australia, ‘Electronic Discovery Practice Note’ Federal Court of Australia, ‘Central Practice Note’ (CPN-1) Federal Court, ‘Litigation using Electronic Discovery’, eDiscovery Resources Supreme Court of New South Wales, ‘Generative AI Practice Note and Judicial Guidelines’ |
Sky Discovery Resources | eDiscovery Practice Directions by Jurisdiction Guide for Preserving Critical Metadata in Data Self-Collection Data Identification Questionnaire When to Use eDiscovery Services Key Benefits of an eDiscovery Workflow Using eDiscovery as Part of your Pitch to Win Work Key eDiscovery Timings to Consider Guide for Lawyers Drafting Effective Document Exchange Protocols Navigating Court eDiscovery Requirements |
DT = David Turner; MH = Matthew Hollings
00:00:00 | DT: | Hello and welcome to Hearsay the Legal Podcast, a CPD podcast that allows Australian lawyers to earn their CPD points on the go and at a time that suits them. I’m your host, David Turner. Hearsay the Legal Podcast is proudly supported by Lext Australia. Lext’s mission is to improve user experiences in the law and legal services, and Hearsay the Legal Podcast is how we’re improving the experience of CPD. Today on Hearsay, we’re talking about eDiscovery. eDiscovery has become an essential part of litigation in Australia, but the requirements and expectations of the court surrounding it can vary pretty significantly depending on the jurisdiction you’re in. With the increasing volume of electronically stored information in modern litigation, the ability to navigate these complexities is really critical for litigators to ensure that discovery obligations are met efficiently and cost effectively. In other words; that they’re just quick and cheap. Now, one of the key challenges in eDiscovery is ensuring compliance with the specific rules and guidelines that govern each jurisdiction, not to mention, non-binding but highly influential practice notes. While there are common themes like efficiency and proportionality, each state and territory might have different rules about how electronic documents should be managed and disclosed and lawyers have to stay ahead of these requirements to avoid delays, sanctions from the court, amongst others. Now, our guest today is Matthew Hollings, Director of Clients and Marketing at Sky Discovery, a leading provider of eDiscovery solutions. From his experience helping firms to navigate the intricacies of electronic discovery, Matthew is joining us to share his insights into current trends in eDiscovery and how to manage these processes across different jurisdictions in Australia and what lawyers should keep in mind to stay compliant. Matt, thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay. |
00:01:53 | MH: | Thanks for having me. |
00:01:54 | DT: | Now, before we get into this topic, eDiscovery, I remember a time when it was considered a kind of interesting option to consider in large litigation matters. It’s certainly not an option now. But before we get into that, I just want to hear a little bit about how you got into legal technology and how you got into where you are at Sky Discovery. |
00:02:10 | MH: | Yeah, so this is my 10th year working in legal process outsourcing and specifically eDiscovery. But prior to that, I was an admitted solicitor working for a large national law firm in a litigation team. Like most people at that time, started as a graduate. It was post GFC, so the busiest section of that particular firm was regulated mortgage debt recovery. So I spent most of my graduate rotation, if not all of it, doing that area of practice and then I also spent a short period of time, maybe nine to 10 months working in-house on secondment to one of our large financial institutions in unregulated debt recovery. So personally speaking, I didn’t set out to become a lawyer who enforced unpaid mortgage debts, and the more that I did it, the more I realised I probably didn’t want to make a career out of doing that. So I had every intention of leaving that practice to go and explore other areas of law, and fell into a business development role for a legal process outsourcing company and part of the services they offered at that time was eDiscovery services. The lady that hired me at the time was, I remember quite vividly, so excited that a lawyer had applied for the role. She was like, “oh, look, you’re so perfect in the sense that you either are, or could be a client, and would be acutely aware of the challenges that we’re attempting to solve. So who better to be speaking to potential and current clients about those benefits than someone who has perhaps experienced the pain firsthand.” And yeah, 10 years later, I now work for Sky Discovery. So we focus solely on the provision of eDiscovery services and the business itself is about to celebrate its 10 year anniversary. So the role I have here now is one in which I oversee a client-facing team. Some are lawyers, some are general technologists, but ultimately we’re responsible for ensuring that the experts within our business are connected to the right clients and that we’re doing the right job for them. |
00:04:05 | DT: | So I guess over the 10 years that you’ve been working in eDiscovery, you’ve seen some pretty marked change, both in the capability of the technology and also in the extent to which it’s regulated and dealt with as a specific and discreet tool in litigation by courts. I certainly remember a time where there was no discreet rule for eDiscovery as opposed to your locker team of graduates in a room with archive boxes and “come back in a few weeks.” So tell me a bit about if you like the eDiscovery landscape in Australia, because it’s fairly different jurisdiction to jurisdiction. We don’t really have uniformity in the way we have uniformity for other practice rules. |
00:04:42 | MH: | No, I suppose the great thing is that there is some consistency and those consistencies exist in the sense that I think every Supreme Court jurisdiction around the country now, the Federal Court and some inferior jurisdictions basically have some sort of guidance. They acknowledge that the discovery process is costly, time consuming, and that approaching it with some degree of technology or technological service is going to yield a hopefully better outcome for ultimately the people trying to move the cases along. But you’re 100% correct. The way in which the various jurisdictions give guidance, I suppose, to practitioners coming before those courts varies wildly. You’ve got some jurisdictions that basically refer to eDiscovery in one paragraph and others that have an entire practice direction dedicated to how, when, and in what manner parties might go about engaging in an eDiscovery process. So subject to where you are practicing and where you naturally practice, there can be a great degree of certainty and guidance provided to you, or you could effectively be left in the wilderness fending for yourself. I suppose the reassuring thing that practitioners should appreciate is that from our perspective, we see the courts being very pro technology. Anecdotally, years ago when I first started, there were judges who just wouldn’t want to see technology used in a specific way in their courtroom. So you’d have some circumstances where parties might want to be leveraging eDiscovery technology or e-hearings, but orders might be made that those sort of processes get undertaken in a more traditional sense. That’s certainly not the case anymore, and definitely the outward position of the courts insofar as it relates to their practice directions is we want to see practitioners engaging with technology in order to deliver a more efficient outcome for their clients. |
00:06:39 | DT: | Yeah, absolutely. As we said at the top of the episode, the volume of information that practitioners are kind of obligated to process through the discovery process is increasing at such a rate. I think when we talk about the volume of material produced in discovery, there’s a misconception sometimes that it’s the result of, kind of inadequate culling of documents into specified classes by the lawyers conducting the discovery process. The reality is there’s also just a lot more stuff to process. |
00:07:07 | MH: | It’s an exponential growth curve. The volume of data being created now as compared to 10 years ago is monumentally greater in a way that you have to express as a mathematical equation because there are too many zeros on the end of the volume of data we create. We’re talking about zettabytes of data, a word that a lot of people aren’t even familiar with, still grappling with a terabyte of storage. So the volume is definitely a massive challenge, but also the types of information that make up that volume of data are also proving to be problematic. So we’re not just dealing with a suite of documents created within Microsoft’s products, Office365 or whatever, there’s a myriad of productivity tools that exist now that record information that is potentially disclosable needs to be reviewed and therefore extracted from their source and then produced to the other side. So there’s a challenge on two fronts for lawyers in modern day litigation. |
00:08:04 | DT: | Yeah. It’s kind of amusing that the definition of document under the Evidence Act, I think still refers to like, “lithograph records” and stuff like that, but it’s intended to capture the breadth of what a document might be. And really includes all of these arcane file types and electronic information that eDiscovery tools and users of eDiscovery tools have to be able to identify and grapple with. |
00:08:27 | MH: | Absolutely. We see it in the construction industry, for example. So a large amount of the work we do is in construction litigation. The systems and tools they use on the front end to project manage a construction project are incredibly useful to those individuals, but do prove to be challenging to then utilise in circumstances where that project falls into a dispute of some kind and the volume of documents, the way that they’ve been stored, are great for a for a forward looking process, but not particularly easy to extract and then naturally get into a format that the lawyers are capable of reviewing in an accurate and effective way. And then you’ve got the further challenge of, “well, how do we convert that?” So it’s compliant discovery, what processes and costs are involved in doing that… It is a lot to manage. |
00:09:17 | DT: | Yeah. And that raises an important point, which is that I think when we use the term eDiscovery, some practitioners, maybe of our vintage, might remember Ringtail and think about eDiscovery as confined to the use of electronic means to reduce the volume of documents in a first pass before a human reviewer identifies whether material should be disclosed or not. It’s far broader than that, isn’t it? And it includes tasks like the ones you’re describing of really converting information into a format that can be subject to a discovery process at all. |
00:09:50 | MH: | Correct. It is a workflow in its entirety, and you’re right, the name is a bit of a misnomer. Realistically, it’s an investigative tool, and the process of doing discovery is an investigation of sorts, so its application is far broader than just litigation. We’re often engaged to provide assistance on pre-proceedings investigations, like do we have a cause of action, regulatory responses, the ACCC or ASIC or any of the state regulators might issue notices to a particular entity and they need to review their material in order to produce a compliant list of documents for that purpose, but I think, historically, practitioners have had the luxury, due to the relatively small amount, or comparatively small amounts of data there used to be, that they could engage with the eDiscovery process quite late in the piece, i.e. “we’ve even reviewed these documents, here’s a list, can you convert it into the appropriate format for electronic exchange?” But underpin, every step you take in the matter from the first conversation you have with the client to the completion of the relevant hearing. |
00:10:58 | DT: | Yeah. And I think a related misconception is that a lot of lawyers have identified eDiscovery as something that takes place in the larger litigation that is in their practice, not in a regulatory investigation, not in the early stages of a response to a government authority making inquiries. So it’s a far broader application of the tools in a far broader range of matters and a far wider scale of those matters as well in terms of what might be one of your smaller matters in your practice and one of your larger matters in your practice. I just want to go back for a second though, we were talking about how how variable the guidance is for practitioners in different jurisdictions. Can you give me an example of one that’s especially good, in particular of the Federal Court, as being one of those gold standard jurisdictions for guidance on the use of technology? |
00:11:45 | MH: | Yeah. There is a particularly good set. So the Victorian Supreme Court’s probably one of the best we’ve seen, primarily because it is very pro technology. So most of the practice directions are like, “we recommend you use an electronic means to review and produce your documents.” The Victorian Supreme court flips that on its head and says, “we have an expectation that you use electronic means to do this. And if you want to undertake it in a more traditional manner, you need to provide justification for that cause of action.” |
00:12:16 | DT: | Interesting. |
00:12:16 | MH: | Which is very progressive. It is the right approach to take And look, I think that one was 2018, I think. So it’s reasonably new. The Victorian Supreme Court is also a jurisdiction that recently released a practice direction involving the utilisation of generative AI and saying, “we’re more than happy for practitioners to engage with this sort of technology, but here are the things that they need to be aware of in terms of doing that responsibly and not undermining the judicial process more broadly and over relying on that technology in circumstances where that might yield a negative outcome.” So we definitely look to the Victorian Supreme Court as being a pretty good standard. TIP: So Matthew just mentioned that there are eDiscovery practice notes in most Australian jurisdictions. We’ll include a link to each of these practice notes in our show notes. The Victorian Supreme Court released their practice note SC Gen 5 in 2018 to encourage the use of technology in civil litigation to reduce time and costs. That practice note says that the discovery phase in proceedings should leverage technology to enhance efficiency and minimise costs. Parties are expected to proactively consider technological solutions during case management discussions regarding discovery. The court operates, in this practice note, under several key assumptions. First, that exceptional justification is required for converting electronic files to hard copies. Second, that reviewing documents in their native format is generally more cost effective. Most documents these days would be electronic in their native format. Third, that the inspection and exchange of documents in their native format are preferred. Again, the native format of the vast majority of business records and other documents in today’s day and age will be an electronic format. Fourth, that hard copy to electronic conversion is justified only if the volume of hard copies is minimal compared to the total documents or if the cost savings from conversion exceed conversion costs. So, again, there’s a bar to reach there, but a significantly lower bar than conversion in the other direction, that is, from electronic to hardcopy. Fifth, legal practitioners should be competent in managing electronic documents. Sixth, parties should aim to eliminate duplicate electronic documents and facilitate access to uncommon electronic formats. And seventh, any preference for hardcopy documents rests on the individuals requesting them. When significant discovery is anticipated, and the practice note defines this as over 500 documents, so, that’s the vast majority of discovery, at least in my experience, parties must prepare a practical discovery plan that incorporates technology, addressing the scope of discovery, the proportion of electronic documents, and the processes for review and exchange of documents. That plan should be established early to promote cooperation and cost effectiveness. If the parties can’t agree on a discovery plan, then the court can mandate a discovery conference to facilitate agreement on it. This might involve assistance from qualified individuals like an associate judge or a court appointed assessor. In cases with large quantities of electronic documents, technology assisted review, or TAR, is typically accepted as a reasonable way to conduct searches. Parties can agree on protocols for this review, which might include the appointment of operators, detailed methodologies, and arrangements for the management of privileged information. Under the practice note, the discovering party must provide electronic lists or schedules of discovered documents. Collaboration between parties is essential for accessing electronic documents, and if a request for an electronic format copy of a document is refused, that refusal must be justified. The goal is to ensure efficient document management and cost effectiveness throughout the discovery processes. That’s just one of the practice notes that encourage the use of eDiscovery in Australia. We’ll leave a link to all of them in the show notes. The Federal Court has always been held up as a good example of guidance provided. They have quite a few practice directions that exist, but also resources that are on their website, and they do provide a very specific, example exchange protocol. So “here is what we suggest you utilise as a baseline in terms of the rules and regulations, how you’re going to go about formatting and then producing and exchanging documents with other parties to the proceeding.” That being said, that particular exchange protocol is, relatively speaking, quite old. I don’t think it’s been updated since 2018 in a material way. There are sections on their website that talk about it being under development and that’s not a bad thing because I think what practitioners should be aware of in relation to all of these eDiscovery practice directions is there is a lot of leeway for parties to adopt current best practice. So, they’re all just guides. Even the Federal Court, the Queensland Supreme Court also has its own example protocol. But in most of those practice directions, and I think all of them, they say, “this is a starting point. We expect practitioners to look at these documents meaningfully, tailor them to the specifics of this matter, and agree on that course of action collectively by engaging in some sort of constructive discussion.” |
00:16:58 | DT: | I guess a practical takeaway for our listeners is, if you’re in one of those jurisdictions that provides relatively little guidance – we won’t name them – but if you’re in one of those jurisdictions, there’s nothing preventing you from going to the Supreme Court of Victoria’s practice directions and adopting that as some influential or useful guidance, although it is not binding on you in your proceedings in your local jurisdiction. And you and your counterparties can absolutely take that guidance from other jurisdictions, right? |
00:17:27 | MH: | And they regularly do. So most people in jurisdictions that don’t have an example exchange protocol will look to the Federal Court and adopt the protocol that’s in there, with changes that make it specific to – less so the jurisdictional requirements, but more so – “this is the sort of data we’re dealing with, these are the volumes of documents that we’re grappling with,” and the protocols get changed to account for that nuance. There is no jurisdiction that I’m aware of that is, “you must do it this specific way.” I think there are those that are more helpful – Victorian Supreme Court, Federal Court – that are trying to give some base level guidance to practitioners, but ultimately saying, “technology moves really quickly.” Even if they updated their exchange protocol every year, it still wouldn’t account for the rate of change. |
00:18:12 | DT: | Kind of a futility to it, right? |
00:18:13 | MH: | And I think that’s why they’ve got these little catchalls, these discretionary powers that say, “provided you can come to the court and justify the course of action you’re taking,” and we see this practically in the work we do, we regularly advise on changes that should be made and provide the basis for those changes to our clients who then either negotiate that with the other side or if there’s a dispute around it, use that to advance their position and why they’re taking a certain stance as it relates to eDiscovery. TIP: The Federal Court provides a very thorough and detailed practice note providing actionable checklists for practitioners to use during the discovery phase. In the Federal Court, discovery is governed by part 20 of the Federal Court Rules, which says that no party is entitled to discovery without a court order – that’s rule 20.12. Requests for discovery should only be made if they will help resolve the case efficiently, quickly, and at minimal cost – that’s rule 20.11. The court will only approve reasonable, targeted, and justified discovery requests that are proportionate to the complexity of the case. Such requests must demonstrate the relevance and significance of the document sought, and the documents must be likely to be probative or materially relevant. The Federal Courts Practice Note also sets out some additional tips, such as; for electronic documents stored in databases, proprietary systems, or other uncommon formats, practitioners might want to consider creating a data map to clarify the relationships between different databases. Some modern database providers already do this for you and you can easily export that map of relationships between different sources of information. Practitioners should also avoid re-supplying documents that have already been provided in electronic discovery. Elimination of duplicate copies is a bit of a theme you might be noticing. For instance, when submitting witness statements or expert reports, all referenced evidence should be cited by its original document ID without re-numbering them. Documents in the court book should also retain their original discovery document ID to save time and costs, and printed documents for trial purposes should also maintain an original document ID, all in the name of avoiding duplication. |
00:20:07 | DT: | So I suppose, although there is this variation and parties are free to look to other jurisdictions to fill in the gaps, there is a consistent theme throughout Australian jurisdictions around efficient and proportional use of eDiscovery tools. Tell me a bit about those requirements as you see them playing out. |
00:20:25 | MH: | So, look, there is – the jurisdiction I practiced in was the Queensland jurisdiction – rule 5 of the UCPR is; everything you do should be in the pursuit of resolving these proceedings as efficiently and effectively as possible and at proportionate cost, and there is a similar provision, not expressed in that specific way, in almost all jurisdictions. |
00:20:46 | DT: | In New South Wales, my home jurisdiction, we call it just “quick and cheap.” |
00:20:49 | MH: | Yep, so that’s sort of even referenced in most of the more detailed practice directions. They say, “we’re providing this guidance on the basis that we want you to use this because we know it advances this overarching obligation that we all have, not just as it relates to the discovery process, but how you conduct yourself as a litigator before the court more broadly.” So we are seeing a lot of that play out. We see things like discovery by way of category, limited discovery… We very rarely see broad and general orders for discovery made, like everything relevant to an issue in dispute. There’s typically now either express limitation through the civil procedure rules of the relevant jurisdiction or a position taken by the court that, “we want you to come to us having discussed how you’re going to narrow the scope of this because we don’t want to see a million documents exchanged if we can avoid that.” So, there’s definitely an overarching trend of, “how do we cut to the most important things first?” |
00:21:52 | DT: | I remember a few years ago, there being a bit of pushback or criticism from the bench in some jurisdictions that parties in litigation in the superior courts of those jurisdictions were treating the bench a bit like a machine of its own, were producing enormous amounts of material through eDiscovery processes that it was really impractical for a judicial member to engage with meaningfully at all, let alone within a meaningful measurable period of time, to give justice to the parties. And I guess your initial thought there is, “oh, well, those parties aren’t sufficiently narrowing the scope of their review. They’re being overly inclusive in what they’re considering to be relevant to the issues in dispute.” But I do wonder whether causation might flow the other way, whether some of that volume coming through the courts that judges were critical of, was in part, a bit of a lag time in practitioners and the courts catching up with the sheer volume of data that’s available and more regularly utilising tools like discovery by category. |
00:22:56 | MH: | And this sort of touches on something I’m sure we’ll come to discuss in terms of taking early action to understand the data. If you print something out, you can see it, right? That’s 40 ring binders, that’s a lot of information – but data’s not as visual. Like you can pick up a USB stick that, if you printed it out, would be higher than the Sydney Harbour Bridge, for example. So it’s harder to conceptualise and truly understand without the right tools and experience how big something might be. So I think you’re right. I think some of it was probably inadvertent, i.e. “alright, we’ve agreed on a protocol. We’ve agreed on a timeline.” And then you get stuck into the detail and go, “oh my gosh, this is way bigger than we anticipated, but we’ve already agreed categories, we’ve agreed keywords, and they’ve just caught more than we anticipate.” That’s definitely changing, and eDiscovery plays a big role in validating the approach. So, a good example of that is a matter we worked on – well, a couple of matters like this – but we effectively test the keyword searches that the parties are proposing to use to limit the volume of documents that need to be reviewed before they get agreed, and you’d be surprised how many people would be like, “that seems like a sensible set of keywords. Cool.” Everyone shakes hands on it, and then they go and get run in an eDiscovery database and you go, “wait a minute, 99% of the data is responsive to these keywords we’ve agreed.” So it seems sensible, but it wasn’t commonplace. So, on a particularly large matter we’ve been working on, we actually helped formulate keyword search strings for each of the tens of categories that were agreed, and tested them to make sure that they were actually effective in reducing the volume of documents, but whilst also preserving the integrity of the eDiscovery process. And so all the parties to the proceeding, no doubt, were doing something along those lines, because we’re talking millions of documents here. No one needs to review that many documents. No one should have to. And certainly the cost of doing so in a traditional sense is exorbitant. So we went through quite an extensive process and even things like the Boolean connectors you might use could mean that a particular search is grabbing 100,000 more documents if a certain Boolean connector is used in place of another. So little simple things like that, and the reporting we’re able to do, say, the presence of this word means that everything in the database is relevant, but if you remove that, or you add a “within five words,” then it’s a much more sensible thing to do and manageable sort of outcome. TIP: Now, Matthew and I have mentioned a few technical terms used to describe the different ways of sorting through a mass of data. Let’s break a few of those terms down. First, we mentioned search strings. A string just refers to a piece of text that users can input into a search engine or other search function to locate specific information. The word string comes from the technical term for a data type in many coding languages and is used to distinguish strings of text or characters from other data types like numbers. The structure of a search string varies based on the type of search. Users might enter a search string directly into a text box or fill out a more complex advanced search form with various input fields. In the latter case, the application will generate the search string behind the scenes from the user. For example, using Google – the most ubiquitous search engine – users can perform basic searches by entering keywords directly in the homepage. Alternatively, its advanced search feature enables more detailed queries through different text boxes and drop down menus, allowing users to specify which websites they want to search and other terms to include or exclude in their search. Some search engines enhance efficiency by ignoring common, what we call “stop words” – words like ‘the,’ ‘and,’ ‘with,’ or ‘or’ – words that don’t really add anything semantically. They also use stemming techniques to match words that have the same root. For example, ‘managers’ might also return results for ‘manage’ and ‘management.’ Again, this is often done behind the scenes, but some search functions require users to explicitly identify if they want to use a stemming technique or require users to exclude stop words. Matthew also mentioned that the results of this search can depend on Boolean Connectors, or Boolean Operators. The term Boolean Operators refers to the use of special words like ‘and,’ ‘or,’ and ‘not’ to define relationships between search terms. By using these operators, users can specify their search criteria more effectively, ensuring that documents retrieved meet their needs. The main Boolean Operators – ‘and’, ‘or,’ and ‘not’ – allow users to combine or exclude search terms, enhancing the precision of their search outcomes. For example, using the ‘and’ operator can require that multiple terms appear together in a result in order for it to be displayed, while the ‘or’ operator can broaden the search to include documents containing either of the specified terms. Additionally, the ‘not’ operator means users can exclude certain terms to filter out unwanted results. Say I wanted to find a document that discusses automobile wheels. I could potentially search the terms ‘automobile’ or ‘car’ or ‘motorbike’ as the document might not include the term ‘automobile’ but it might still be relevant to my search if it discusses cars or motorbikes exclusively. I could then include the operator ‘and’ and ‘wheels’ to ensure that alongside any of those potential vehicles the term ‘wheels ‘has to appear in the document. Finally, I might be getting a lot of results related to bicycles, which isn’t a kind of automobile, so I might then include the term and boolean operator in my search; ‘not bicycles.’ |
00:28:14 | DT: | That iterative process of working with an eDiscovery provider, working collaboratively with the other side, to get to the right Document Management {lan to get to the right definition of those categories. Sounds like a very clever idea. It also seems a bit at odds with what I observe, or have observed in the past in discovery processes, which tend to be quite linear. The parties identify categories based on the issues in dispute, based on the pleadings, and they move forward inexorably from that earlier step to the later step without revisiting some of those decisions, having regard to what gets produced – or I guess more accurately, what would be produced if they were to land on that. So that idea of working iteratively with your eDiscovery provider to really test how you’re defining that is really interesting to me. Tell me a bit more about how that comes about. Do the practitioners propose that? Do you propose that? What role do you as a provider play in shaping how the parties are going to interact with their data? |
00:29:18 | MH: | A big part of that comes from me and my team. Part of our responsibility within the business is to educate practitioners on what’s possible. There’s a big challenge where a lot of people haven’t used eDiscovery for some time or at all, and therefore don’t even know that there’s this thing where you can test and iterate your keyword development so that it achieves the outcome that you’re trying to reach – proportionality and efficiency in the review process. So there’s an element that comes from education, and much the same as you do with podcasts like this, we try to do our own education for the industry more broadly, and that’s a mixture of our existing clients and ensuring they know what’s possible and what is available to them in engaging with a provider like us. A lot of that comes about from just a lived experience; “oh my God, I had no idea that you could do that,” or like, “that’s an amazing tool.” The amount of times we hear, “oh gosh, I wish I had heard about this six months ago.” I’ve been doing this for 10 years and I still get, in some of the presentations we run, people who just like, rock back in their chair and you can see that they’re like, “oh, I’ve had to go through some great deal of trauma doing this in a largely manual way.” I was talking to a client the other day and I said, “lawyers are exceptionally good at doing hard work.” All of the people that I know are like, “that sounds like a really tough job, but better get started.” There’s often just this muck in, “we’re going to get it done,” rather than stop and go, “is there a better way to get that done?” So we do try to change the mindset of our clients to be like, “instead of just running towards the solution, sanity check some of that with us: ‘Hey, we’re trying to get from here to here. We’re going to do it this way, but do you have anything that might help accelerate that process? Make it better, more accurate, quicker, cheaper?’” So there’s definitely a very big education piece, learning as we go, and those learnings get applied to the next matter. So a lot of the practitioners that come back for round two on a separate matter, bring the learnings from the last matter to be like, “right, we want to talk to you now, not in six months time, because it was too late last time. The key words were agreed. We ended up in a bit of strife.” But we still see a large amount of practitioners who, through no fault of their own, do matters like that very regularly, or the last lot of matters they worked on didn’t have a large volume of documents, or it wasn’t something they had to contend with, and do run into trouble, and we end up having to try and reverse engineer it and do what we can to assist from that point forward. |
00:31:37 | DT: | One of the other consistent themes, along with efficiency and proportionality, is early intervention – you’ve mentioned that a few times, how important it is to involve eDiscovery tools and providers early in the process, and I think for our listeners who have interacted with eDiscovery only occasionally, or even with discovery occasionally, they might be familiar with some of the processes that we’ve been talking about so far around identifying relevant documents, search functionality, technology assisted review, but have a less clear picture of the understanding the volume and shape of the data, what that looks like in terms of a service offering, what that looks like in terms of the work that you’re doing and the work that the lawyers are doing. So talk me through that step a little bit. |
00:32:23 | MH: | Yeah, our express recommendation or the advice that we provide is that when you’re trying to understand the legal nature of the matter that your client has come to you with, you should also simultaneously, or as a part of that investigation process, begin to plant the seed of; ‘you will have more data than you are aware of in more places than you’re aware of and it will be problematic to a degree.” The sooner we can gauge what we might be dealing with, it empowers us to make logical decisions that can have a far better outcome. It’s a bit like if you tack one degree now, the longer the matter goes, at the other end of the compass is a very big problem. The efficiency you might gain from small movements early gets amplified the longer the matter might run, and it doesn’t need to be expensive to do this or powered by technology. The first steps are actually human driven: “Have you got an IT manager? Can we talk to them?” A lot of the time you get how many documents they got, and you get forwarded a few via email, and then a few more, and then a dropbox link. |
00:33:31 | DT: | Oh yeah, the “let me just forward you what’s relevant.” |
00:33:33 | MH: | Yeah. |
00:33:34 | DT: | I think every time that happens to me in practice I develop a bit of anxiety for the next couple of weeks as emails just start dropping into my inbox. |
00:33:41 | MH: | And its intention is always good, right? Here are the things that matter most. And that’s important, but the reality of then, negotiating things like protocols, because in some jurisdictions – take Queensland for example – their practice direction requires you to have agreed on a protocol after the claim has been filed and before the defense has been filed. |
00:34:01 | DT: | Interesting. |
00:34:01 | MH: | So pleadings haven’t even closed at that point, and you’re effectively having to engage in a conversation that says, “this is how we might deal with discovery later on.” And there’s going to be provision for you to amend those protocols if you want, but we operate in an adversarial system and getting that agreement after the fact can sometimes be problematic or time consuming. But at that stage, a lot of people haven’t taken the time to push the client. And the thing with clients too – I don’t think there are too many clients that love litigation. So the stakeholder you’re dealing with, they may not have dealt with a dispute ever, or it has been some time since they’ve managed it. And if you think about what we talked about before with the exponential growth in the volume of data, if it’s five years ago, they might be thinking, “oh, that was only like 10 gig of data. That’s not much that related to that.” Whereas the volume we create now would be 10 times that. |
00:34:55 | DT: | It’s a relatively short span of time for expectations to change completely. |
00:34:59 | MH: | And a lot of the people just get themselves into trouble because they go, “oh, it’s not going to be that much.” |
00:35:03 | DT: | Yeah. |
00:35:03 | MH: | And it doesn’t take that much to go and talk to the IT team or your managed IT provider and go, “hey, can you just tell me how much is in David’s email inbox?” for example. And look, we did this example to illustrate for one of our presentations last year, I sent and received in my inbox alone, 15 gig of emails. |
00:35:25 | DT: | Yeah. Wow. That’s one person. |
00:35:27 | MH: | That’s one person over one year. And you think about the subject matter of some disputes being whole companies over far greater periods. So the volume of what you might be contending with is almost always going to be bigger than what you assume it to be. So the sooner you grapple with where it’s at, the sooner you can start to be like, “well, we only need David’s inbox from this timeline,” or we may not even need David at all because he’s not a key stakeholder in this particular matter. So those conversations need to happen almost immediately. |
00:35:55 | DT: | I was talking to someone recently about the concept of dark data, some of the data that an organisation has within its possession and control that it has access to that it might be obliged to produce in discovery, but that it doesn’t really monitor or track. A facile example might be; there’s 15 gig of emails in your inbox, but there’s like 20 gig in your deleted items that’s still stored because of a document retention policy. So to what extent does the eDiscovery process have to take into account this dark data or data that’s sitting in unexpected places that maybe isn’t the subject of conscious and intentional retention? |
00:36:33 | MH: | And look, this brings up a very interesting point of information governance within organisations. So the rules and regulations around how a company will create, retain, or choose to delete information. And that is so very important, but it’s also hard to implement and maintain without spending lots of money on very expensive systems that help that to happen. And of course, there’s a lot of people who go, “well, we’ve never been sued. Why would we spend a hundred grand on a document management system to better manage documents?” |
00:37:04 | DT: | … if we do get sued. |
00:37:06 | MH: | A risk that hasn’t yet materialised for us. So the better the level of information governance, the easier it is to find what you need quicker and without overlooking things like dark data. We have a very rigid, structured process with which we approach investigations like this. So we have, like a questionnaire and a checklist that we find relevant individuals, typically an IT stakeholder, and we go, “right, here’s the key people, here are the key dates. Have you changed systems?: The amount of times where people have upgraded to say Office365, but have like all of this information sitting on laptops or physical servers that, when they do that initial question, they’re like, “oh, we’ve got a hundred gig in ‘365, but there’s 500… |
00:37:46 | DT: | But it’s locally stored stuff. |
00:37:48 | MH: | Yeah, sitting and hanging around. So part of that is an investigation, a bit of; follow the bouncing ball: “Oh yeah, our IT went offline and everyone used their personal email addresses for six months.” We uncovered that in one of our matters a few years ago where for an extended period of time, everybody was effectively using personal email. To send emails relating to work and that didn’t come up in the initial conversation. No one had spoken about it and it wasn’t until one of the legal team had actually found it whilst using relativity. They’re like, “wait a minute, why are all these emails coming from Gmail?” And then it was like, “oh yeah, that’s right. Remember that time?” And we ended up having to add like another 400 gig of information, a million documents at the drop of a hat. And of course, scope just blows out from there. |
00:38:33 | DT: | Yeah. Well, especially with this, the volume of personal, unrelated material that you then have to sift through. You mentioned before, it’s an adversarial system. It can be difficult for parties to find common ground at the best of times, but this is one of those procedural requirements where the parties really are expected to come together and present a united plan for dealing with something that is procedurally and logistically quite challenging. What have your observations been from practice about, you know, the degree to which conflict between the parties – sometimes I think there’s a bit more bad blood between some practitioners and their counterparts than there is between their clients, sometimes we see really acrimonious proceedings between the legal advisors as well as the clients – what influence can that have on the discovery process? And by contrast, what influence can a really collegiate approach have on the discovery process? |
00:39:28 | MH: | We spoke earlier about the differences in jurisdictions, but a commonality is this focus on collaboration and coming to the court with an agreement. So Queensland, the Federal Court, the Victorian courts… There’s all this express assumption, I suppose, that at a various case management hearing or the critical juncta specified in the practice direction, you’re going to come before the court and go, “your Honour, this is how we’re going to be dealing with eDiscovery. Here’s the protocol, here’s the rules, this is why we’re going to do it.” It happens quite frequently. We do see a breakdown though, typically in circumstances where you’ve got perhaps a more experienced legal team who understand the value of eDiscovery and the role it plays, and other parties who have never used it, perhaps don’t litigate at that scale normally, and don’t want to engage with the process because they don’t view it as necessary. Typically that would be dealt with at some form of interlocutory hearing where, “we’ve said this, we’ve proposed this, these are the reasons for which we’re doing it.” And an order is typically made that yes, the protocol will be agreed and the parties will need to comply with it. But it is a tool that is used strategically as well. So in the same way we were talking about running keyword searches to ensure that it sufficiently limits the volume of documents – I’ve not seen evidence of this necessarily – but you could equally use the same strategy to be like, “oh, now it’s a million documents that are responsive.” So typically the courts try to avoid circumstances where there’s paper bombing people and disclosing a million documents, but it can be used as a strategic tool to make it harder or more difficult for a particular party to comply with their obligations. So, where there is that disconnect where someone’s got an expert on their side and someone doesn’t, we typically see a lot of conflict in those environments. Our role is to try and help our client validly justify why this is good for everybody. It really doesn’t make sense if one party has a lot of documents – and even if the other party doesn’t have much, chances are they’re going to be dealing with a lot of documents potentially in terms of what they might receive as discovery – and having that in a structured, ordered way, it being capable of being uploaded to a platform that would make the review of those documents easier, is in their best interests. Naturally though, if that breaks down, then everyone ends up in court and the judge typically decides the best way forward. |
00:41:47 | DT: | I want to come back to the court’s role, both in those interlocutory proceedings where their parties are unable to find common ground, but also in exercising their discretion to approve or reject a plan that might be presented by consent. But first I’m thinking about that situation that you described where there’s an experienced practitioner – when I say experienced practitioner; experienced using eDiscovery – and a practitioner who’s perhaps less so. Are Document Management Plans and Exchange Protocols typically vendor agnostic or are the parties required to really settle on a vendor? |
00:42:20 | MH: | Typically they’re drafted in such a way that it should be possible for any provider to comply with them. A lot of the standards are, like we use a platform relativity. You know, you mentioned Ringtail before, it’s now Nuix Discover. There are a bunch of other tools that are emerging or appear from time to time on the market as well. Most of them should be capable of dealing with what is accepted as the Australian standard for exchange – so the relevant load file formats. So that means you could move mid matter to another provider if you saw fit, or there’s been circumstances where the solicitors have changed mid matter and that solicitor might have a preference to be working with another eDiscovery provider. So, it realistically should be as simple as exporting it in the agreed format and then handing that over. And that does just highlight the importance of getting that protocol right and ensuring people aren’t departing from accepted standards, but also, that you are making necessary tweaks to ensure that it’s going to be efficient for you and you’re not going to be agreeing to something that might potentially become arduous or costly or time consuming for you to comply with at a later point. |
00:43:30 | DT: | Got it. So far we’ve been talking about the role of the client and of the legal practitioner in identifying the data that might be relevant, engaging early to identify the volume and nature of the data that might have to be processed, and then working collaboratively with one another and with an eDiscovery provider to understand an appropriate definition of the categories of discovery that might need to be produced. The court also has a pretty significant discretion in approving or varying plans for eDiscovery. Can you tell me a bit more about the court’s role as the final decision maker with these plans? |
00:44:05 | MH: | Yeah, so our role obviously is quite a technical one. So the specific technical rules around the structure of the databases or the format of the production, we don’t see the courts messing around with that too much. As I said, there are accepted baseline protocols and standards that exist that may have the odd tweak here or there, that in our view, what we typically change is easy to justify. It’ll make things easier or quicker or we don’t need to provide that because it’s covered in another environment – the changes we typically see in where, more of a passenger overlooking something like this relate to things like category agreement, which are typically driven by pleadings or the case strategy or any of that sort of stuff. So we inform it by reference to helping our clients understand what data might be present insofar as it relates to those categories. But the major changes we see come from a more substantive law front rather than a technical one that we grapple with. |
00:45:05 | DT: | Even as I asked that question, I was really thinking about the definition of categories, right? And I think lawyers, especially lawyers who’ve dealt with pre electronic discovery, who’ve been locked in the room with the archive boxes, have a bit of a bias in their thinking towards that as the primary consideration in a discovery process, right? But I can see a huge risk in spending a lot of time on category definition – which is important, right? But without the advice and intervention of an expert departing from those norms, as you say, and ending up in a bit of hot water in terms of how this logistically and practically gets done once everything’s ready to go. |
00:45:47 | MH: | Look, there’s a bone of contention within our business. There are some people, mainly because of the volume of categories that have been agreed on some matters, are, from an eDiscovery standpoint, dead against it. The amount of time sometimes that it takes for the review panes to be built with like 50 categories and subcategories within that. And sometimes you need to question the utility of, “yes, this document might be relevant to six categories, but it takes me longer to read through all the category options that it did for me to read the document.” And if the document’s relevant to one category and is disclosed, does the benefit of saying that this relates to six categories outweigh the cost of making that determination on the 100,000 documents that you might review? Or, is the fact that it’s been disclosed and you who put it into your database can run your own searches and determine how it relates to the matter? So there are definitely matters where, when the volume of categories get really high, it starts to go like, “are we losing sight of the benefit that flows from this exercise?” |
00:46:52 | DT: | Yeah, absolutely. So you’re saying there’s a relationship between the legal and strategic process of identifying the categories and the technical process of understanding; what is the return on investment, in a sense, of using this tool? |
00:47:05 | MH: | Correct. And going to the effort of categorising that document. And again, it depends on the semantics of the order and how you meant to undertake that category based discovery. But it typically is, in larger cases, involving lots more categories – a very time consuming process. And arguably, you could use some of the tools that exist in the database to make your own determination having received the document as discoverable, not subject to privilege and relevant to this matter more broadly. |
00:47:32 | DT: | Yeah, absolutely. Now, we’ve been talking primarily today about how the data subject to discovery is evolving or expanding pretty rapidly, but of course, the capability of the technology is evolving rapidly as well. What are some of the trends and developments you’re seeing in eDiscovery technology? |
00:47:52 | MH: | Yeah, the adoption of AI – and I say AI rather than generative AI – obviously, I think those two terms get mixed. AI is a broad umbrella term. Generative AI is a form like a patch on the umbrella, but AI more broadly has been utilised in the discovery process long before generative AI was a thing. Translation tools, technology assisted review, or continuous active learning – technology assisted review 2.0, effectively – are all forms of machine learning, which are forms of artificial intelligence. So there’s definitely an increasing use of AI. We’re obviously seeing now a huge amount of hype around generative AI and the release of a suite of various generative AI tools within a lot of the discovery software programs. So there’s definitely that trend. We’re still very much in the early days of generative AI, but AI more broadly – and we’ll use technology assisted review as an example – was formally accepted by the courts in Australia back in 2016. And we use it on a huge array of cases for varying applications, the relevant review, I suppose. We use it in other ways to validate or quality assure privilege. So you might have undertaken a privilege check and you train the AI model on the documents you’ve deemed as privileged, and go, “can you find any other documents that might be subject to privilege that we’ve potentially missed?” So, the application of that technology is very widespread, has been adopted, and it’s been adopted because it’s easily explained. So in the same way you agree on an exchange protocol for handing documents to the other side or receiving your set of documents, there are typically technology assisted review protocols: “This is how we’re going to use the technology. This is the particular workflow we’re going to adopt. Here’s how we’re going to validate and quality-assure the outcome.” And the parties typically agree on that as being the most appropriate course of action and then proceed using that. And it’s really effective. And our clients seem to like it. It’s not always effective – so things like technology assisted review, for example, are great for documents that have lots of text. But if they’re three word emails or images or Excel spreadsheets, for example, technology assisted review isn’t going to be of great assistance to you in reviewing that sort of material. So a bit like anything, the tools that exist in these platforms. There’s no broad brush, like, “you can use this on everything.” It’s more of a scalpel approach: “We’ve got a specific problem. Here’s a specific solution.” And I’m really excited about the prospect of what generative AI may do and be able to assist lawyers with. There’s a lot of parts of the discovery process that, despite the developments in eDiscovery technology, that are just still painful and time consuming and I think generative AI will be helpful in terms of alleviating some of that pain. We’re developing our own suite of tools at the moment, you know, “draft a chronology based on these 10 documents.” “Check this particular witness statement.” It refers to a document in our database; “Do you agree with the position that that person’s formed?” “Does this document reflect positively on Matthew Hollings?: No, it doesn’t.” So, there’s a lot of potential there, but we’re still in the early days. Some of this stuff’s really expensive, like any technology, I think over time it will become cheaper or free, absorbed into other cost bases. But the only way to figure that out is to get stuck in and to use it and test it and try it and determine what those use cases are. The other concern, though, that I have about generative AI is that for every benefit it might bring, we also now have the ability to create more information at a far greater scale than we ever had before, all of which might be potentially disclosable and therefore might need to be in a database, which has a cost associated with it, whether it’s what you pay for hosting or the cost of then reviewing those documents. So there’s a lot of like gen AI applications not in eDiscovery, in our general life that I think will end up creating volumes of information that lawyers will inevitably have to look at in one form or another. |
00:52:11 | DT: | Yeah, I’m sure someone, somewhere in the country right now, is considering the disclosability of someone’s ChatGPT history. |
00:52:19 | MH: | The prompts that you use, not just the output that comes from it, are the challenges that arise: is, “Well, how do you access that? How do you disclose it? How is it reviewed? Is each prompt an individual document?” |
00:52:31 | DT: | “Is the transcript a document?” |
00:52:33 | MH: | Yeah, there’s a lot of questions that we’re going to have to contend with in relation to gen AI. So it’ll be curious to see whether the relevant benefits of these tools are going to outweigh the costs as it relates to the discovery process. |
00:52:46 | DT: | Something I’ve observed over the last 18 months or so, is that the hype around generative AI has actually increased the appetite of legal practitioners for AI tools that have been available for years, that maybe were available eight years ago. But because there is a hype around AI – and as you say, AI are often conflated – there’s a desire to start using tools that have been available in the market for a while, more mature battle tested technology in their practice. Is that something you guys are seeing? |
00:53:20 | MH: | Absolutely. And some of that general intention is excellent because the legal industry and legal practitioners by extension have always been lumped in the basket of not being on the whole, particularly progressive in terms of technological adoption. We’re probably in an odd spot where I don’t entirely agree with that, but it’s a bit of survivor bias in the sense that anyone who’s engaging with us is clearly pro tech and so our sample size is perhaps a bit skewed, but there is definitely a momentum that’s coming off the wake of generative AI’s popularity that says, “can we use other tech? And how do we deploy that?” The risk that I’m seeing arising from that is there typically is very much a solution focus rather than a problem focus. So everybody’s like, “oh, I want to use a new tool. Let’s go and buy that.” Rather than stop and go, “well, what problem are you trying to solve?” And in some cases, it’s a process issue, not something technology would fix, or it’s cultural. And I’m excited because I think there are a lot of challenges that people face in discovery that can be solved with a good keyword search, some email threading, or clustering or translation, that… Gen AI? There’s no point in running that. There’s something that’s just as reliable, free and proven. Let’s just use that. If all you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail, it’s definitely a risk at the moment. |
00:54:44 | DT: | Yeah. It’s funny, I use another very similar hardware based metaphor, which is that a Swiss Army knife or a multi tool is a really cool thing to have in your pocket, but you don’t see a lot of builders use one to build a house. |
00:54:54 | MH: | No. Yeah, correct. |
00:54:56 | DT: | So, you know, there’s specific tools for specific purposes. Although. a general use tool, a lot of general use omni use generative AI tools like Copilot or GPT, can be great ways to prototype or proof of concept a new use case. |
00:55:09 | MH: | And I think the people that have historically used a lot of technology are very well equipped to go through assessing the problem, developing a suite of potential solutions, testing, iterating, and then adopting a solution. I think those that are coming to the tech party now off the back of Gen AI’s popularity are probably least equipped to know that that’s how you might go about selecting a solution. So we’re very much, “what problem are you trying to solve?” Gen AI might be a tool that we use to do that, or it could be something else. But again, that’s why people come and speak to us, is so that we can help them through that process in a very small section of the legal technology market. |
00:55:46 | DT: | Yeah. Well, Matt, we’re nearly out of time. Before I let you go, I like to finish every episode with a question directed to our listeners who are new to the legal profession, who are recent graduates, maybe soon to graduate law students. Some of them are likely to be on the front lines of discovery processes relatively soon as users of eDiscovery software, maybe they’re doing it right now. For those of our listeners who are interested in legal technology, interested in eDiscovery, want to upskill in this area and understand a bit more of what’s possible, what’s out there in the market, what are some of your tips for upskilling? |
00:56:19 | MH: | Look, in terms of upskilling, there historically hasn’t been much material on eDiscovery. It was something that you got as a lived experience, typically as a junior, probably like you and me, locked in one of those rooms with a banker’s box, rifling through paper. The experience for junior practitioners now is obviously a little bit more digital, but I’ve, over the last few years, gone to great lengths to try and create some information that gives a very simple and baseline understanding. So, we’ve released a whole lot of resources and training for free, mainly for our clients who are consumers of our services to find out what’s possible. Some of the Unis are doing some really good things. We’ve done some guest lectures over the years for some universities for, like, one of the civil procedure lectures is on discovery and a session on eDiscovery and how that practically plays out. But there’s still not a full course on eDiscovery available if anybody’s chasing that. But I do think as a career, there’s a lot of opportunity in the eDiscovery space. There’s no shortage of challenges that we’ve discussed today – volumes of data that are going to need to be managed and reviewed and produced. And there’s not a direct correlation just because the data is 10 times bigger. There’s not going to be 10 times more eDiscovery professionals. But I do think that there’s going to be a lot of opportunity for people to build a career in eDiscovery, either as a review manager in a law firm or as a technical eDiscovery expert. And I also think there’s going to be careers in eDiscovery that just don’t exist yet off the back of things like generative AI. And as we grapple with the role it’s going to play in the process. So I have not regretted my move away from practice 10 years ago. I was very nervous at the time, felt like I was doing something very silly, but 10 years on, I really enjoy working in the industry. I think there’s plenty of opportunity, both within a law firm environment and external to it. And for anyone interested in wanting to pursue it, there’s plenty of exceptional professionals in the Australian market that I think the best port of call would be to reach out to them and try and have a conversation with them about what their day to day looks like. And I’ll put myself in that same bucket and happily have a conversation with anybody interested in a potential step in that direction. |
00:58:33 | DT: | Fantastic. Yeah, I think you’re right. It’s not necessarily the case that job opportunities scale with petabytes. |
00:58:38 | MH: | Let’s hope not. |
00:58:39 | DT: | Let’s hope not. Yeah. But certainly, as the scale and complexity of these challenges increases, so too is the amount of time and the amount of thought and the amount of hours that we’re going to spend solving them. |
00:58:52 | MH: | Correct. |
00:58:52 | DT: | Matthew Hollings, thank you so much for joining me today on Hearsay. |
00:58:55 | MH: | Thanks, David. It’s been a pleasure. |
00:59:06 | DT: | As always, you’ve been listening to Hearsay the Legal Podcast. I’d like to thank my guest today, Matthew Hollings, for coming on the show. Now, if you love learning about discovery, why not do a dive into our archives and check out episode 15 with Paul Bartholomew and Jonathan Prideaux. In that episode, we discuss some other ways to incorporate technology to speed up your legal practice, including eDiscovery and technology assisted review. That episode is called ‘The Role of Technology in Creating Operational and Organisational Efficiencies’ and we suggest it entitles you to a practice management and business skills point. If you’re an Australian legal practitioner, you can claim one CPD point for listening to this episode. Of course, as you know, whether an activity entitles you to claim a CPD unit is self assessed, but we suggest this episode entitles you to claim a professional skills point. For more information on claiming and tracking your points on Hearsay, please head to our website. Hearsay the Legal Podcast is brought to you by Lext, a legal technology company that makes the law easier to access and easier to practice, and that includes your CPD. Finally, before you go, I’d like to ask you a favour. If you like Hearsay the Legal Podcast, please leave us a Google review. It helps other listeners to find us and that keeps us in business. Thank you for listening and I’ll see you on the next episode of Hearsay. |
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