The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is to take on an electronic discovery system for the first time to prosecute a case of an alleged drug price-fixing fraud. The company that will be providing the technical wizardry behind the scenes will be Legal Inc. The company has, it said, created a ‘managed disclosure suite’ for the SFO, ‘in which the prosecution’s disclosed material, normally disclosed to defence lawyers by inspection of volumes of documents, can be viewed and analysed on-line by the teams of defence lawyers in a secure and independent environment’. The Gazette last covered Legal Inc in connection with its ‘drop-in’ electronic presentation of evidence (EPE) system, eCourt (see (2005) Gazette, 1 December, 9). At the time, Wood Green Crown Court’s Judge Ader was reported as saying that, in combination with simultaneous transcription system LiveNote, using such a system would ‘cut down the length of your trial by a great deal, and certainly the figure of a third would be appropriate’. Cutting the length and cost of complex fraud cases has been a goal promised by technology and reforms for some time. According to Lisa Burton, director at Legal Inc, the e-disclosure system could save a significant sum. ‘We estimate that a conventional disclosure of material on paper would have cost in excess of £2.5 million,’ she said, ‘whereas electronic disclosure will cost about £1.7 million across three years.’