The Litigation Journey (and 7 things you need to know about disclosure)

07 October 2014 by Daniel Kavan

Last week I attended a half-day seminar in London called The Litigation Journey. The session, organised by the Commercial Litigation Association (CLAN), was one of the best legal conferences I’d been to, mainly because it took a “TED talk” format where each of the many varied speakers was limited to a maximum of twenty minutes, which was about right for my attention span!

My Kroll colleague John Murphy presented the 100+ litigators in the room with some fascinating case studies on the recent trends in fraud investigations and painted a picture of what a typical fraudster in an organisation might look like.

I followed by presenting the seven things every litigator needs to know about disclosure. In summary, these were:

  1. Predictive coding works.
  2. Predictive coding works!
  3. Edisclosure is not just for big cases.
  4. An edisclosure provider can help you budget.
  5. Outsourcing doesn’t mean relinquishing control.
  6. Savvy clients expect creativity.
  7. Disclosure lists, should take seconds, not days.

You may have noticed that numbers 1 and 2 are the same. It was my attempt at emphasis, inspired by Tyler Durden in Fight Club. I needn’t have worried about emphasis though, because judging by the number of questions on predictive coding from the floor, litigators are indeed interested and understand the importance of using such technology in disclosure exercise.

In the five-and-a-half years that I’ve been working at Kroll Ontrack, I’ve given hundreds of demonstrations of our technology, and shown many whizz-bang features, such as visual analytics, near duplicate comparison and concept searching. But the thing that tends to light up the face of a litigator the most, is when I show them that creating a disclosure list only takes a few seconds by using the very basic feature of “Export Document List”. It is said that it’s the simple things in life that are the best, and this simple feature can save hours or even days, compared to the traditional way of dictating a document list. “I wish I had this on my last disclosure exercise,” is what I often hear in response.