LITIGATION AND PRACTICE SUPPORT
35
WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER
Litigation Support in a
Municipal Law Department
Litigation Support in a Municipal Law Department
The legal services department of the City of Vancouver moved
to internal litigation support about four years ago. This is the story of
where we started, where we are now, where we are headed and what
we learned along the way.
About the Department
We operate like a small law firm rather than a corporate law
department that manages cases handled by outside counsel. We have
about 25 lawyers, roughly half of whom are litigators defending the
city before courts and tribunals. On rare occasions, we refer maers to
outside counsel.
Our cases run from very small to the small side of medium;
we do not have the volume to justify expenditures for things like
predictive coding.
Disclosure in Canada differs slightly from that in America,
although we do loosely follow the Electronic Discovery Reference
Model framework. We face different and fewer sanctions, and
the Sedona Conference Working Group 7 material has had only
tangential effect.
Getting Started
Our approach to documenting discovery was behind the times.
(Litigation is retrospective by nature, and the majority of the city's
documents are held on paper even now.) With neither the equipment
nor the budget to convert paper to an electronic format, hard copies
were exchanged with other parties. Given the reality of a municipal
budget, proposals to purchase litigation support soware were politely
but firmly rejected.
by David Hill of City of Vancouver
