Save trees, save money, expedite lawsuit resolution

Most people do not know it, but a huge number of business lawsuits are filed with the purpose of disturbing the life of a competitor. It works because defending yourself in a lawsuit requires a lot of money, whether there is any merit to the suit or not. Courts are not keen to stop these lawsuits, as they have nothing to loose. Lawyers for the attacking party are happy with the dollars they receive.

One of the activities that take a lot of time and money to perform is the discovery. During discovery the parties ask each other for as much information as they can think of asking, whether it is related to the case or not. The reason for this is simple, asking for more documents can only increase the chances of discovering something interesting, even if it is not related to the case it could open the door for a new case and more money to the lawyers.

Today there is no obligation to present documents in electronic form. Therefore cases and cases of printed material change hands. The party producing the documents prefers to provide them in printed form, as that makes it more difficult for the other party to search and work with the evidence. The amount of wasted paper and effort in this area is staggering. In a small lawsuit it may amount to several hundreds of thousands of dollars. Millions in a medium size lawsuit.

What can be done? Easy answer: require that any documents found in electronic form are provided in the electronic form. That's it. Instead of printing 500,000 emails in one side, photocopying them and then scanning them on the other side, just compell every party to provide all electronic documents in their electronic form.