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ESI Questionnaire
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August 2010
The legal case surrounding the construction of Wembley Stadium is a good example of why the Judiciary need to do something about the volumes of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) that is now being disclosed regularly in court proceedings.
The sheer scale and costs of the case are quite depressing with quotes such as: -
“The biggest construction lawsuit in UK history” costing an estimated total of £45,000,000; “with over £1,000,000 spent on photocopying alone”: -
“Just one of the designers answering one question cost £16,900, taking eight people 19 days”: -
“The whole exercise for just two of the design practices was estimated to take up to 45,000 man hours to answer all the questions, equating to a cost of £5 million.”
A lot of the time and cost referred to in the last quote would have been spent trawling through and collating the huge volumes of emails, drawing and document files that make up the project’s record, just trying to find any relevant information. This relevant information would be a tiny fraction of the huge quantity of information that would have been disclosed to the court prior to the case beginning.
ESI Questionnaire
To try to cope with and limit/define these huge volumes of information disclosed in court cases the Judiciary have recently published an ESI Questionnaire which is likely to be introduced into practice in October this year.
The ESI Questionnaire is a form that will have to be completed by parties wishing to disclose electronic information as evidence in a court case. The objective of the ESI Questionnaire is to try to define a set of criteria to be used to define the finite list of information to be disclosed and to give an order to that list of information, so that it can be searched/ reordered in a manner useful to both sides in a dispute.
The AEC Industry
This problem of the proliferation of Electronic Information is a particular issue for the AEC Industry. The combination of email and CAD mean that the proliferation of uncontrolled information generated during a construction project is growing exponentially. This growth in turn increases the time taken to conduct a legal case, thus increasing its costs. The Wembley case is an extreme example of what can happen.
This increase in the cost of legal action is accompanied by a reduction in the certainty as to the outcome of any case. The chances of missing some relevant piece of evidence in the huge mass of information disclosed (Finding the `needle in the haystack`) is increased. Thus the uncertainly of pursuing any legal action at all has increased dramatically.
Cadweb.net
The increased cost and uncertainty of a legal action referred to above, have both been substantially reduced when Clients have used Cadweb.net to manage their project information. Cadweb.net records only the contractually meaningful information which is on average 6,000 – 8,000 document transactions for every £1,000,000 of project spend.
(So, for example, on a £10,000,000 project Cadweb.net will record between 60,000 and 80,000 document transactions by the end of the project.)
The information stored on Cadwe.net is all, audited: legally admissible: quality controlled and searchable. So that it forms a defined set of Information, easily disclosed to other parties and complies with any ESI Questionnaire.
Not only does Cadweb.net hugely speed up the disclosure process, thus saving time and legal costs; it also clarifies the evidence upon which the case will be decided; highlighting the specific areas of dispute. This helps to resolve the dispute much faster, as the outcome/resolution is more apparent to both sides much earlier in the proceedings.
Cadweb.net does this automatically throughout the life of a project, so that when the compilation of an ESI Questionnaire is required, the use of Cadweb.net will make this step a formality.
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Ends
For further information please contact Francis Newman on 0208 964 5040.
Notes to Editors
- Founded in 1995 Cadweb is the longest and oldest, established project extranet provider in the UK. Cadweb is now recognized as the de facto market leader in it's field with a long and growing list of blue-chip clients. Project Extranets provide an internet based central searchable repository for project information whereby project data can be stored and retrieved by all members of a construction project.
- Cadweb.net provides an internet based, central, highly searchable repository for all project information, whereby project data can be stored and retrieved by all members of a construction project.
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