Since the start of the year, there has been a steady trickle of announcements from companies specialising in litigation support technologies that are either entering or beefing up their operations in the UK. These include the UK debut of the US-based LIT Group, the restructuring of Millnet and, within the past few weeks, the formation of Trilantic by litigation support industry veteran Nigel Murray.

As technologies go, there is nothing new about litigation support - the systems and working practices for creating, searching and managing large bundles of trial documents, including discovery lists, in a digital rather than paper-based format have been around since the mid-1980s.


However, what all these companies, as well as other established UK players such as LDM and Kroll Ontrack Legal Technologies, are now focusing on is electronic document disclosure (EDD) or e-discovery.


E-discovery faces four separate issues - the first is that more and more information is produced digitally, such as on a word processor, and never makes it on to paper. Think of all those e-mails you receive but never print out, and documents such as Excel spreadsheets. As Kelvin McGregor of Kroll Ontrack recently put it: 'In an era when over 93% of all documents are produced electronically and 75% of those never make it to the printer, the "smoking gun" evidence for litigation or compliance purposes is now more likely to be found on a computer than buried in a filing cabinet.'


Secondly, unlike a traditional paper document, such as a typewritten letter, all electronic documents contain hidden digital data - called metadata - which in some instances can be more incriminating than the visible text within the body of the document.


For example, next time you receive a Microsoft Word document as an e-mail file attachment, check out the properties option in the file menu. Concerns about inappropriate data being inadvertently disclosed in metadata have resulted in companies such as Workshare developing a healthy business selling software to law firms that automatically strips out any metadata.


Metadata also creates another problem because not only will most of it not be disclosed when you print out the document on paper, but the very act of printing the document - or in some instances merely turning on a computer and opening a specific file - may change some of that metadata.


The third issue is therefore how to safely preserve metadata evidence from being accidentally corrupted.


Fourthly, as anyone with a busy e-mail account will attest, the final issue is the sheer volume of electronic documents now in circulation. For example, one back-up tape on a computer network can hold about 40Gb of data, which is the equivalent of 3.5 million A4 pages of information. Such a volume of information cannot be reviewed economically for litigation purposes by conventional means but only with the assistance of e-discovery systems employing powerful search engines and pattern recognition technologies.


This brings us back to the start, and explains why so many companies now see such systems as the next big thing in litigation support software.


Charles Christian is an independent adviser to the Law Society's Software Solutions guide