Commercial disputes eDiscovery under PD 57AD.

High-value commercial litigation in the Business & Property Courts turns on disclosure. Practice Direction 57AD has replaced the old CPR Part 31 default and made the parties' choices about search, review and production a matter of active case management. Getting the Disclosure Review Document right, and being able to defend it at the CMC, is now as much a part of the pleaded case as the substantive claim.

We act on the eDiscovery side of commercial litigation for claimants and defendants alike, on claims that typically involve warranty disputes, shareholder actions, breach of contract, fraud, professional negligence, joint venture failures and post-M&A indemnity claims. Every one of these turns on documents that live in email, on shared drives, in project management platforms, in a handful of relevant custodians' laptops, and in the backup and archive layers behind them.

Our workflow starts with identification and preservation. We work with counsel to scope custodians, systems and date ranges, issue legal hold, and preserve at source before any user-driven cleanup can happen. Forensic collection is hash-verified and documented, so the eventual disclosure list rests on a foundation that cannot be attacked on process grounds.

Processing then removes the noise. Deduplication, near-duplicate identification, email threading and defensible date and search-term filtering typically strip a raw collection by 70 per cent or more before a reviewer touches it. Where the volume justifies it we deploy technology-assisted review, run continuous active learning under a protocol we can defend, and validate against control samples that are recorded and reproducible.

Review runs on Relativity or RelativityOne with issue coding, privilege, confidentiality and redaction workflows built to your matter. Legal professional privilege is treated as a first-order concern, not an afterthought, with second-level review and a documented privilege log that meets the standard the court now expects. Confidentiality rings and third-party data protection concerns are handled within the review platform, not through side channels.

Production is delivered in Extended Disclosure formats aligned to PD 57AD, in the load-file and native combinations directed by the court. Where the case runs to trial we support counsel with reference workflows, hyperlinked trial bundles, and rapid re-review on new issues raised in evidence. The result is a disclosure exercise that is proportionate, defensible and, when it needs to be, invisible in the judgment because it has done its job.