Online data searches save time, costs

By ADAM GIFFORD

Carter Holt Harvey has approved a new service from law firm Chapman Tripp which allows companies doing due diligence or discovery to look at all the documents online.

"It's the easiest way to go. It saves time for everyone and it's more efficient," said Carter Holt corporate development manager Ewen Anderson.

The company was the first customer for the Dataspace service, using it to host the paperwork involved in the recent sales of its plastic products and industrial distribution businesses. Both businesses were bought by Australian companies.

"Where you have a number of parties involved, particularly if they are foreign parties, it saves couriering large boxes of documents overseas or having them come to New Zealand," Mr Anderson said.

"Once the documents are scanned in, the amount of interaction needed is reduced."

Chapman Tripp chief executive Alastair Carruthers said Dataspace was a document database set up on an extranet accessible only to approved parties.

He said it could save clients and interested parties hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in a transaction.

"Law firms typically host large projects. They can be deals where something is being sold, or they could be litigation where there is a need to trade information between parties.

"Up to now law firms have had dedicated space. In Wellington we have over 10 per cent of my office space set aside as project space. That means having a security guard and a law clerk to answer questions and find things, so there are labour costs.

"We would rather have our professionals engaged in analytical work and advice than having to watch to make sure people behave appropriately in data rooms," Mr Carruthers said.

Moving the process to a virtual data room allows the firm to cut down on disbursement costs.

"We are concerned to bring down out-of-pocket expenses which are not in themselves huge but can create a lot of time expense.

"We think we can set up a site for $10,000 to $15,000 basic fee plus certain other costs depending on the type of documents involved."

He said courts in New Zealand and Australia were encouraging use of technology, particularly in complex matters.

Dataspace grew out of another service Chapman Tripp has been offering for about 18 months, Fidelis, which allows clients to access opinions or sets of pleadings through an extranet.

"We have major clients where the firm has done a lot of opinion work over the years," Mr Carruthers said.

"Our systems for organising that information are pretty advanced, and because we are already archiving it electronically, we can copy it for clients.

"It saves them money and improves their thinking on future work, because they can check their corporate legal history before instructing us to prepare a new opinion.

He said Chapman Tripp had trademarked Dataspace and could consider commercialisation of it in future.

Chapman Tripp national IT manager Jason Cruickshanks said Dataspace was built in-house, using mainly Microsoft and Adobe tools.

Security uses Microsoft's SSL (secure socket layer) technology requiring the client machine to have a browser with a digital certificate installed.

Dataspace and Fidelis use the Web Publisher tool from Inmagic to index the database, allowing searching on key words which can be linked to scanned images.