When documents are being initially loaded into a document management system, pre-action or at the early stages of litigation, the exact scope of the dispute, or of any potential dispute, may not be precisely known and, against that background, while some documents may be clearly relevant to the dispute, there may be other documents which, while not apparently immediately relevant, could possibly turn out to be relevant. For example the may be documents which relate to a property which is the subject of the dispute, or to a Land Registry title number for a property which is the subject of the dispute, whose relevance to any dispute is not immediately apparent but which might possibly turn out to be relevant in the light of, for example, the other side's Statement of Case when filed. It may be convenient to load such documents initially to a special section named NOT IMMEDIATELY RELEVANT.
In most litigation there is a Disclosure of Documents stage at which the parties are directed to send each other copies of all relevant documents they have (which are not privileged) and, at that stage (if not before at the Statements of Case stage) it needs to be considered which documents are and are not in fact relevant - so that documents in the NOT IMMEDIATELY RELEVANT section will either be deleted or, alternatively, moved out of the NOT IMMEDIATELY RELEVANT section to another section. Either way the NOT IMMEDIATELY RELEVANT special section will not be needed after the Disclosure of Documents stage has passed.
Some document management systems only set the document date if there is a positive indication of date in EXIF or email metadata or in the filename - otherwise it is left not set. Other document management systems, such as Bundledocs set the date for all loaded documents - using the loaded document's file-system last modified date, which is often not a relevant date, if there is no positive indication of date. If you do not want to spend time, at this stage, manually setting correct dates when you do not yet know whether or not each document is relevant, you need to indicate in some way where dates set many not be accurate dates. In this case you could set all dates which are not accurate to 1900-01-01. An easy way to do this in bulk in Bundledocs is to use the Bundledocs Excel add-in - type in 2 to the DisplayDate field.
There may be composite documents, for example there might be an email with attachments, or a letter with enclosures, or an Epitome of Title document (which consists of a schedule followed by copies of all the deeds, searches, etc. listed in the schedule). It may be that the whole composite document is relevant (e.g. the whole Epitome of Title composite document would be relevant if an issue in dispute was whether a purchaser of property, for whom the Epitome of Title document was produced, was aware, or should have been aware, of a deed within it) whereas if the issue in dispute is simply how a particular deed within it should be interpreted (not whether the particular purchaser for whom the Epitome was later produced was aware of it) then it may be that only that particular deed is relevant. Where one or more documents within a composite document are relevant by themselves but the composite document as such is not it would, nevertheless, normally still be the composite document as a whole which is sent at the Disclosure of Documents stage but the composite document would thereafter be loaded into a special section named COMPOSITE WHERE COMPONENT EXTRACTED - set to Excluded status - and a copy of the extracted document would be loaded to another section.
This information page is designed to be used only by clients of John Antell who have entered into an agreement for the provision of legal services. The information in it is necessarily of a general nature and will not be applicable to every case: it is intended to be used only in conjunction with more specific advice to the individual client about the individual case. This information page should not be used by, or relied on, by anyone else.
The information on this page about specific computer techniques is provided for information purposes only. Every reasonable effort has been made to ensure that the information is accurate and up to date at the time it was written but no responsibility for its accuracy, or for any consequences of relying on it, is assumed by me. You should satisfy yourself, before using any of the techniques, software or services described, that the techniques are appropriate for your purposes and that the software or service is reliable.
This page was lasted updated in May 2024. Disclaimer