Parties can live with a good call or a bad one, but they need the balls and strikes called promptly. The United States District Court for the District of Maryland has established.
The case for eDiscovery
The world is awash with data and has officially entered the Zettabyte era[1]. Hundreds of billions of emails are sent/received on a daily basis and it has been calculated that more than 97% of business documents are created electronically. South Africa is not immune nor exempt from the digital revolution. In short, the very nature of what constitutes information and documentary evidence, types and sources, and how they are dealt with has changed.
eDiscovery is right here right now
It is against this backdrop that the publication of A Guide to eDiscovery in South Africa by Terry Harrison and Ismail Hussain SC,[2] will prove to be invaluable in answering the question, “How can South African lawyers understand and embrace electronic documents and deal with their discovery in the 21st century?”
As we well know, the volume of data being generated is growing rapidly. eDiscovery involves almost all information capable of being stored electronically, across multiple formats. It is not limited to conventional formats such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and email. It includes text messages, social media interactions on WhatsApp, Twitter, Skype and Zoom meetings. Add in LinkedIn, FaceBook and Google searches. In short it is the electronic aspect of identifying, collecting and producing electronically stored information (ESI) in a litigation case or investigation.