Thank you for the question, Mr. Chairman. It's a very good question.
I sit before you with a giant binder that wasn't typed and photocopied. It was input into a system, other documents were reformatted, and then it was printed. If you or I go back to our office and look at an existing file we will find the draft, the final draft, the final final final draft of some documents. Most of us are not operating with systems that regularly purge drafts.
If you look at the number of emails that you received this morning that have a cc on them in terms of document disclosure, what we're seeing—and corporate Canada and private lawyers are seeing—is an absolute explosion. The first task in dealing with that avalanche of documents is what's affectionately known in our line of work as de-duping. So how many duplicate emails do you need to go through to get to the final one that represents the email train?
Given the nature of disclosure rule, that has lead to an exponential increase because of document management, because of the ways in which information is generated and the need to look at electronic information and paper information. The fact is that the court system has not made the transition that other systems have made to go online, neither federally nor provincially.
So we are working very hard to look at document management within government and document management within our own department and then using more electronic sources to do an initial screen so that we can get to the final email in that chain, because that's the one we need to focus on. It's not the 27 emails that lead to it. Unfortunately right now a lot of that is being done in the affectionate term “handraulically”.