E-Disclosure - What does it mean to you?
Something or nothing?
E-Disclosure appears to have crept under the radar of most personal injury solicitors. We say this as we almost never see the issue of E-Disclosure dealt with in claimant’s standard disclosure lists; the relevant section in the list is rarely completed This is curious and will no doubt change given the entrenchment of Facebook in our society and the routine use of mobile ‘phones to take photographs and record videos.
We recently had a case where the paragraph relating to E-Disclosure was struck through in the claimant’s List of Documents but mobile ‘phone footage of events immediately prior to the accident was produced on a disc. The explanation given for the delay was that footage had been taken by a friend of the family, and its relevance was not immediately identified.
The interesting thing is that Practice Direction 31B applies to all proceedings started on or after 1 October 2010 that are subsequently allocated to the multi track. For any proceedings issued on or after 6 April 2009 multi track is the normal track, assuming they have an endorsement of value in excess of £25,000. In reality this is probably the track applicable for any claim that results in unpaid sick leave for the claimant in excess of a few months.
E-Disclosure is something that we are looking at very carefully at the moment. There are obvious sources of information such as Facebook and YouTube. There are, however, less obvious sources of information which require some lateral thinking on the part of defendant solicitors.
We are very interested in this topic and will blog about it again. In fact a search of the internet prior to writing this blog produced almost nothing specifically tailored to E-Disclosure in the context of personal injury claims. This is also a topic we will be addressing in our May Seminar. (See our separate blog.)