Clash of the information age and civil litigation process?
E-discovery has wrought a measure of confusion as the Canadian legal system struggles to adapt to the rapid injection of the Information Age into the civil litigation process. Behind much of the confusion is the sense of an intuitive link and/or conflict between the discovery of electronic documents and modern notions of privacy.
To some extent that’s overblown: the truth is that most federal and provincial privacy statutes defer to the court process.
“It’s important to remember that so-called privacy legislation is really data protection legislation that deals primarily with the commercial use of private information,” says Janet Allinson of London, Ont.’s Siskind Cromarty Ivey & Dowler LLP.
