Have HSF been referred to the SRA?

For their involvement in the Horizon Post Office scandal.

Even now, they still manage to make a horlicks of ongoing discovery 

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/city-firm-admits-outsourcing-post-office-disclosure-to-law-graduates/5117142.article

What everyone ought to want to know is (hourly r8 charged by HSF for services provided by unqualified child in Jo'burg/hourly r8 paid by HSF for services of unqualified child in Jo'burg)

On large disclosure exercises in commercial litigation, the use of parablozzas and outsourced reviewers for first level review is entirely commonplace.

The overriding objective requires that these things be done at proportionate cost. Is the position different for statutory inquiries?

 

In commercial litigation you are trying to put either side in an equally fair place i.e. if the discovery is shit then both suffer from potentially relevant material not being discovered. For a statutory inquiry the point is to cough up what's relevant to get to the bottom of the issue. 

No surprise typically arrogant HSF are behaving this way.  

Whether graduates were appropriately qualified to review this stuff will depend upon the complexity of the issues and what was relevant. There is no inherent reason why a law graduate would be unqualified. 

the problem is not usually who does the search, but what instructions they are given

sometimes firms seem to take the view that those doing the search don't need to have a proper independent understanding of the issues in dispute, but instead can merely follow a set of instructions

that is where things go wrong because the instructions will rarely be adequate (how could they be unless the person drafting them first knew what documents there are?)

General comments Buzz not aimed at you sun.

 

It's not actually clear to me from the article whether this was a case of reviewers wrongly designating material as irrelevant, relevant material being stripped out by de-duplication (unlikely) or docs simply not being caught by the search terms applied. 

Since they've had to respond to 47 separate disclosure requests, I wonder whether they might have come unstuck with material designated irrelevant to an earlier request not then being reviewed a second time. 

Don't think the transcript is available yet.