Technology and IP eDiscovery for source code and secrets.

Technology and intellectual property disputes place eDiscovery at the centre of the evidential exercise. Whether the claim concerns misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of a software licence, patent infringement in a UK Intellectual Property Enterprise Court or High Court action, source code escrow release, platform liability under the Online Safety Act, or breach of contract on a large systems integration programme, the record that matters is technical, and the standard of preservation is high.

We advise IP and technology counsel on the eDiscovery side of contentious and regulatory technology work across software, hardware, semiconductors, platforms, telecommunications, gaming and the wider digital economy. Our clients include rights holders, licensees, platform operators, competitors and, on occasion, individual founders and former employees.

Source code review is the discipline that most often distinguishes technology matters from general commercial work. We stand up code review environments with restricted access, air-gapped where required, and with the printer, USB and screen-capture controls the court will expect. Diffing between contested versions is done inside the review environment with the auditability that a subsequent expert report can rely on. Where an expert instructed under CPR Part 35 needs to reason across the code, they do so on our infrastructure with a documented workflow.

Trade secret and departing employee matters follow the pattern set out in our employment work but with an emphasis on the technical artefacts. USB history, cloud sync logs, personal repository access, print queues, and the timing correlations between resignation, access spikes and external transfers are reconstructed from Windows, macOS and mobile forensic artefacts and written up in a form that will support a springboard injunction or damages claim.

Patent litigation typically requires production of technical documents, product specifications, sales and financial records and, where infringement damages are in issue, granular usage or transaction data. We handle the collection and processing of those data sets in the formats the Patents Court and the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court actually accept, and we support the technical experts through disclosure and trial.

Platform liability and content moderation work sits alongside, drawing on our experience with large-scale user-generated content review, hash-matching against known material, and the redaction obligations that apply when regulators or courts request underlying material. Production is delivered in the formats the receiving court, regulator or arbitral tribunal directs, and the underlying data set is preserved for whichever secondary proceeding follows next.