E-disclosure: in search of an ideal world? Louise Buchanan reports
The extent to which a defendant has to search its back-up tapes for further electronic documents was recently considered by the Court of Appeal in Fiddes v Channel 4 TV Corporation & Another [2010] EWCA Civ 516. The decision is unusual in that, unlike a number of earlier decisions on e-disclosure, the applicant’s request for further disclosure was refused.
Background
Mr Fiddes had initiated libel proceedings against Channel 4. In the context of those proceedings, the claimant made an application for specific disclosure of deleted emails from back-up tapes. The defendants accepted that, had the e-mails not been deleted, they would have been disclosable.
The claimant alleged that the defendants’ approach to the disclosure process had been unsatisfactory. In particular, he referred to the fact that one document, which had been described as a “contemporaneous diary”, appeared in fact to have been amended at a later stage by the third defendant, an employee of Channel 4. Furthermore the third defendant’s laptop, on which the amendments were made, had been stolen from the third defendant’s home on
