Spending considerable time and effort constructing a manual list of documents adds unnecessary expense and burden to the discovery process.

A recent article of mine in LawTalk highlighted how removing the requirement to manually list documents can reduce the considerable cost and burden of the discovery process. Most documents these days do not need to be manually listed, as the listing information is already there.

As the volumes of electronic information increase, the manual listing of documents will continue to be a laborious and costly part of the discovery process.

The Rules endorse removing manual listing

The New Zealand High Court discovery rules (which commenced in February 2012) require parties to investigate ways to remove some of the unnecessary costs associated with listing documents. The rules encourage parties to use native electronic versions of documents together with the extracted metadata from native electronic documents instead of manually listing documents

Capturing information in its native electronic file format and removing the need to manually list documents will help reduce the unnecessary cost and burden of your discovery process.

As I highlight in the article, it is not doing away with the listing of documents, but removing the timely and costly exercise of manually listing documents.

You can read my full article in LawTalk here.