Archives for the 'Legal Admissibility' Category
Legal Admissibility within Document Scanning
Many readers will have come across the BIP 0008 and BIP 0009 standards that attempt to cover the issues associated with the creation and management of electronic images for legal admissibility and evidential weight. As a leading scanning services provider we come across the Standard all the time.
Now I’m not one to argue with the eminent bods that put this Standard together because somebody has to do it. Neither am I going to pull the Standard apart in this forum. However, there are some serious issues that organisations need to consider when it comes to embracing the Standard or not.
To many organisations the need to prove the accuracy of a document in a legal environment goes to the heart of whether it can be destroyed after being scanned or indeed whether it should be scanned at all.
But in the course of working with many of our clients since this standard was published, there are two things that have become clear to me:
- Most clients struggle to interpret the standard at all and if they try, do not know whether they have done so correctly.
- The Courts are happy to accept scanned documents as evidence irrespective of whether they have BIP 0008 and BIP 0009 providence.
As a scanning provider we are confident that our processes conform with both the letter and the spirit of the BIP 0008 and BIP 0009 standard. However, the additional work that image owners themselves need to undertake, often negates this. In fact there is now a body of evidence that suggests relying upon this standard in Court as the plank of a case could actually harm the process since any slight deviation from the apparent standard could be exploited by the opposition.
On the flip side, we scan documents for a large number of legal firms, police forces, pharmaceutical companies, financial services organisations and even Courts themselves. In most cases these organisations do not attempt to prove the standard of creation of a scanned document but simply present PDF images as evidence. This is a common sense approach and to date I have not heard of a single case that has faltered because the BIP 0008 and BIP 0009 standard was not used. In fact, I seriously doubt whether any Court would understand the issue without the involvement of expert witnesses.
So, in my view, we need to see a much more pragmatic approach to a standard for presenting material. The ‘one size fits all’ approach has some seriously big holes at present and is so complex as to make it a major barrier to progress.
At the moment the Standard is somewhat akin to a school uniform worn by a teenage boy. All the elements might be there but there are dozens of interpretations of how it should look. But mostly they’re not pretty!
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