e-Discovery And What It Means For Legal Practitioners In SA

We are living in a society where technology and the digital realm thereof is fast progressing and, as a result, infiltrating the daily lives of South Africans, often quicker than regulation and the legal profession can keep up. Due to the impact of digitization on the justice system, the concept of eDiscovery is now finally being adopted, which at first can be very challenging but extremely beneficial to all legal practitioners.

In essence, eDiscovery entails electronically obtaining evidence or data from various digital sources and platforms such as email, electronic messages, instant and social media. In essence, it relates to the access and collection of any form of communication in a digital format. We foresee that eDiscovery will become a preferred method of obtaining digitized evidence, information or data because electronically retrieved (in the form it was initially created) and therefore more reliable than hard copy documents which change the nature of the