POL00041859 - Letter from Womble Bond Dickinson LLP to Freeths LLP re PO Group Litigation Disclosure. Extensive comments on various categories of documents, as well as three page schedule on different documents with additional comments.
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womblebonddickinson.com WOMBLE
BOND
DICKINSON
22 June 2018 Womble Bond Dickinson (UK) LLP
‘Oceana House
39-49 Commercial Road
‘Southampton
SO15 1GA
Freeths LLP —
[oo vettinaton Street I G RO
West Yorkshire ee
LS1 4LT ‘
- Our ref
By email only AP6/AP6/364065.1369
Your ref:
HQ1601238 / HO17X02537
Dear Sirs
The Post Office Group Litigation
Disclosure —- General Comments
We refer to your letter of 15 June 2018.
As an overarching response to your letter, we note that the disclosure which you are now providing your
comments on was provided on 19 January, 25 January, 28 February and 18 May 2018. Your clients
have had over five months to provide its comments on the first stage of disclosure and since no issues
were raised with the approach adopted, the approach which was assumed to be acceptable to you and
therefore adopted in the subsequent stages of disclosure. Whilst our client has taken time and effort to
respond to each of your concerns, it should be kept in mind that dealing with these long after the event
has caused additional costs to be incurred.
1. Hardcopy documents
11 Post Office has been ordered to disclose the following hardcopy documents:
4.1.1 Documents which fall within the scope of paragraph 4 of the First CMC Order;
1.1.2 Documents relating to the Potential Lead Claimants which were stored in the Contract
Advisor's hardcopy files (pursuant to paragraph 9 of the Second CMC Order); and
1.1.3 Documents which fall within the classes of documents set out in Schedule 2 to the
Third CMC Order.
1.2 In relation to the disclosure ordered pursuant to each of these Orders:
1.2.1 First CMC Order - it was identified that hardcopy versions of these documents would
typically be held by either the former agent debt team, contract advisors or in Box-It's
archiving facilities. Enquires were therefore made with each of these source locations
to identify relevant documents. Disclosure was provided of the relevant documents
which were located.
1.2.2 Second CMC Order - hardcopy documents were limited to those which were stored in
the Contract Advisor's hardcopy files and copies of these files, which still existed, were
obtained, searched and relevant documents disclosed.
1.2.3 Third CMC Order — we refer to paragraphs 1.2, 4.4 and 5.1 of our third letter of 18 May
2018 which explains in detail the steps taken to identify hardcopy documents.
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2.2
2.3
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As explained at Appendix F of Post Office's EDQ, in the ordinary course of business hardcopy
documents are normally destroyed by Post Office after 6 years. Whist this process is now on
hold, if a postmaster was engaged with Post Office more than 6 years ago then the hardcopy
documents relating to them may have already been destroyed. The same applies to policy and
process documents which have not been in use for more than 6 years.
In relation to the Postal Museum, we have been provided with an index of the c.52,000 boxes
which are held in this archive. The index contains details of the box number, date on which it
was entered into the archive and a brief description of the contents of each box (ie. "303715
WKLY DOCUEMNTS WKS2 24/3/10 WK38 16/12/09 WK43 20/1/10 WK40 30/12/09" and "DAILY
WEEKLY AND MONTHLY ACCOUNTING RECORDS FAD CODE BRANCH NAME
OPERATIONS MANUAL"). From these descriptions it is not possible to accurately identify the
entire contents of each box.
As explained in our letter of 11 June 2018, we have identified a number of boxes stored in the
Postal Museum which contain branch accounting documents relevant to the Lead Claimants.
Your second letter of 14 June 2018 confirmed the date ranges which you would like to inspect.
There are 3 boxes which contain documents within the date ranges of Abdulla's appointment.
None of the documents held for Sabir or Dar fall within these date ranges. We should be in a
position to provide disclosure and inspection of these documents by 29 June 2018 and propose
that inspection of these documents is provided in hardcopy due to the nature of the documents
(eg. till receipts).
In respect of your position that hardcopy documents which were removed from postmaster's
branches by Post Office should be disclosed pursuant to either Stage 1 / Stage 2 Disclosure or
as adverse documents, please could you explain the Court Order and class under which these
documents should have been disclosed or why they should be disclosed as adverse documents.
We are conscious that disclosing branch records for all 560 Claimants will be a large disclosure
exercise which would not be for the benefit of the Common Issues Trial or Horizon Trial. This
would also curtail the benefits of adopting Lead Claimants and targeted disclosure of documents
which relate to them.
Duplication
In relation to the disclosure of 43 copies of POL-30484, we note that the disclosure of the same
document multiple times has been caused by multiple copies of the same document being
associated to a single parent. For example, documents POL-0030856, POL-0030861, POL-
0030872, POL-0030885, POL-0030911 are duplicates but all children of the parent document
POL-0030757. This disclosure of multiple documents is therefore caused by the way in which
Post Office embeds documents and our desire to not provide incomplete disclosure by part
disclosing families. Further, there will be disclosure of the same document multiple times if it has
been attached to different emails (eg same child but different parents). Withholding disclosure of
documents which have been attached to emails will not assist the parties and is not in
accordance with usual disclosure practice.
To reduce the volume of duplicated documents which are disclosed, upon documents being
uploaded to the data room each document is assigned a MD5 hash code and a process of de-
duplication is run. Since the start of Post Office's disclosure exercise, this has removed
approximately 9.7 million documents from the pool of documents which could be disclosed.
Duplicates are also removed as far as possible during the manual review process. Techniques
such as textual similarity analysis have also been adopted so as duplicate documents are
reviewed together and removed as necessary.
Whilst steps have been taken to try and ensure that duplicate documents are not disclosed
unless it is necessary to do so, and Post Office will continue to adopt these procedures in future
disclosure exercises, there are also tools available to you which will reduce the costs of reviewing
Post Office's disclosure. For example, as explained above each document is allocated a MDS
hash code which allows duplicate documents to be identified and grouped together. If you do not
wish to review multiple versions of the same document then it would be possible for you to
exclude such documents from your review using this coding. Similarly, analytical techniques
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such as textual analysis enable documents which are a certain percentage of textual similarity to
be grouped and reviewed together or excluded from your review. We would expect these
techniques to be used to reduce the costs of reviewing Post Office's disclosure.
3. Relevance
341 The disclosure which has been given to date has been based upon the Generic Pleadings and it
was therefore difficult to determine the relevance of documents which were specific to Lead
Claimants when, at that time, their pleadings had not yet been provided. In relation to documents
which related to a Lead Claimant's branch but during the tenure of a previous or subsequent
postmasters, these documents were included as relevant as it was unknown whether the Lead
Claimants’ cases would extend to matters concerning the knowledge passed on from the
previous postmaster or the circumstances in which a temporary postmaster was appointed on the
suspension of a Lead Claimant. Since you have identified such documents as being irrelevant
they will be removed from future disclosure exercises.
3.2 Now that the individual pleadings have been provided the question of relevancy will be easier to
determine, however it should be noted that judging relevancy of documents which relate to the
Horizon Issues Trial remains near impossible since the Claimants have not yet set out the basis
of their claims against Horizon. Post Office is therefore required to adopt a wide definition of
relevancy to ensure that it meets its obligations to disclose potentially relevant documents.
4. Privileged documents
44 It is appreciated that you brought to our attention the inadvertent disclosure of privileged
documents. Whilst we agree that you will have incurred some costs in dealing with this material,
we do not believe these costs to have been material and therefore, do not understand the
concerns which have been raised in your letter. Post Office does not intend to provide disclosure
of such documents and has implemented further checks to ensure they are not disclosed.
5. Altered Native Documents
64 Document POL-694 is a scanned hardcopy document and therefore there is no native profile to
be altered. The document has been scanned and disclosed without alteration.
6. Redaction
6.1 Please could you confirm the redacted documents which you take issue with so as we can review
your concerns.
7. SharePoint Sites
74 To clarify, Post Office was required to provide disclosure of documents sourced from SharePoint
sites subject to the parties using reasonable endeavours to narrow the scope of data to those
sites which are likely to hold proportionate volumes of relevant documents. In this context,
relevant document meant documents which relate to a Lead Claimant. We note your reference
to our fifth letter of 2 February 2018, but do not understand the relevance of this letter to our
discussions on the scope of SharePoint sites within Stage 2 disclosure, given that letter
concemed Stage 1 Disclosure.
7.2 The proposal in our letter of 14 May 2018 was that following Stage 2 Disclosure the parties
should discuss whether the additional SharePoint sites which you requested disclosure of should
be extracted and reviewed for relevant documents. We also reminded you that purpose of
extracting and reviewing these SharePoint sites was to locate documents which related to the
Lead Claimants (since the purpose of extracting these sites was for Part 1, Stage 2 Disclosure
which concerned disclosure of documents that refer to a Lead Claimant). In your letter of 10 May
2018 (being 6 working days before the disclosure deadline) you requested that 15 additional sites
be included within the scope of disclosure however, no explanation was provided as to why these
sites may contain documents which are relevant to the Common Issues Trial and relate to the
Lead Claimants.
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7.3
74
8.1
8.2
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Your clients were first made aware of our proposals to reduce the SharePoint sites in February
2018 (see our first letter of 26 February 2018), however a substantive response to these
proposals was not received until 6 working days before disclosure was due. This failure to
engage should not be used as a reason to place time pressures on Post Office to provide further
disclosure.
Schedule 1 to this letter contains details of the sites which you identified and our comments on
the proposed extraction and review of documents from these. It would be appreciated if you
could confirm whether disclosure of documents from these SharePoint sites is still sought and if
so, the reasons why.
Second Sight Documents
Disclosure of these documents was provided on 28 January 2018 however, it has taken until 5
months after this date for you to raise your concerns and seek further disclosure. So as to
reduce the costs of disclosure, the documents hosted by Post Office are placed into archiving. In
order to provide the further disclosure which you seek it will be necessary for Post Office to
reload the documents which will cause our client to incur costs which would not have been
necessary had these matters been raised at an earlier time. Further, responding to your
questions after such a length of time has required our client to undertake an extensive review of
the steps which were undertaken in this disclosure many months ago.
In response to your queries:
8.2.1 The electronic documents which were returned by Second Sight at the end of the
mediation scheme were uploaded to Relativity. There were a total of 50,749
documents which through the application of deduplication was reduced to 31,309
documents. These documents were subject to a manual review.
8.2.2 In addition to the electronic documents, Second Sight also returned 2,494 hardcopy
documents to Post Office. These documents were scanned into Relativity and also
manually reviewed. The total number of documents subject to a manual review was
33,803 documents.
8.2.3 The manual review identified:
(a) 28,263 documents to be disclosed;
(b) 1,877 documents which were privileged;
(c) 162 documents were not readable; and
(d) 9 documents which had already been disclosed in the Lead Claimant Individual
Disclosure and which were not disclosed a second time.
8.2.4 In relation to the not readable documents and XML files, 68 of the documents which
were marked as not readable are still hosted in Relativity. As addressed above, re-
hosting these documents will cause Post Office to incur additional costs.
Nevertheless, Post Office shall arrange for these documents to be hosted and the 162
not readable documents manually reviewed for disclosure. We anticipate being in a
position to provide any further disclosure by the end of July 2018 (after Stage 3
Disclosure has been completed). Please note, we will not be able to provide
disclosure of encrypted documents since these cannot be reviewed for privilege.
[Advanced Discovery have confirmed that the cost of re-hosting the 162 documents will
be £350 and WBD will require approx. 4 hours to review these documents]
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9. Known Error Log
9.1 We note your comments on disclosure of the Known Error Log. On 1 May 2018 we confirmed
that disclosure would be provided in HTML format. This option was selected as it was possible to
extract the documents within a short time frame and enable the Claimants’ expert to have access
to the Known Error Log as soon as possible. Disclosure of the Known Error Log was provided on
10 May 2018, when no objections to our proposed approach had been provided. If disclosure of
the entire Known Error Log in a different format is requested, please can your request be
accompanied with detailed reasoning as to why it would be necessary for this disclosure exercise
to be redone.
10. Transaction Data
10.1. The ARQ data which you have requested disclosure of is the same as the filtered data which was
disclosed on 19 January 2018. Therefore, you have already been provided with this data.
11. Horizon Technical Documents
11.1. We refer to our letter of 1 May 2018 in which we confirmed that document NB/LLD/111 was.
withdrawn without any content being added to it. The document is a blank template which has
not been disclosed due to it containing no information.
12. Spreadsheets
12.1. As mentioned above in paragraph [8.1], so as to reduce the data hosting costs Post Office has
already archived the documents which have not been disclosed including these spreadsheets.
Your clients have had over 3 months to confirm that they did not agree with the approach
adopted in relation to spreadsheets but failed to do so. Please could you explain why it would be
proportionate for our client to review and disclosure over 300,000 spreadsheets.
13. Horizon Technical Documents and Fujitsu Contract
13.1 Due to the volume of documents and short timetable in which disclosure is being provided, the
112,272 technical documents have not been manually reviewed.
13.2 In relation to the privilege keyword search terms, the 10,758 documents which have been
identified as being at risk of containing privileged material are documents that are of a highly
technical nature and often over 20 pages long. A review of these documents would therefore
require 215,000 pages to be manually reviewed which we would estimate to require at least
1,200 hours of work by a qualified solicitor. Rather than undertaking a manual review process of
these documents, we would welcome your suggestions on how the keywords can be amended.
Alternatively, if there are a small number of documents which have not been disclosed but the
Claimants’ expert wishes to review, please let us know and we can review documents on an
individual basis.
13.3 In relation to the encrypted documents, since we have not be able to review these for privilege
disclosure has not been provided. If there are a small number of documents which have not
been disclosed but the Claimants’ expert wishes to review further enquires can be made with
Fujitsu.
14. Email Accounts
14.1. As explained in Section 3 of Post Office's EDQ, until c.2012 Post Office employees used Lotus
Notes. On the separation from Royal Mail, Microsoft Exchange was introduced and Post Office's
employees’ emails which were stored in Lotus Notes were transferred into Microsoft Exchange.
When Microsoft Exchange was introduced Post Office also introduced email archiving - initially by
Proofpoint and from February / March 2016 onwards by Mimecast. The emails stored in
Proofpoint were transferred into Mimecast. Of the 11 custodians whose data was not held in
Mimecast, 9 of these left Post Office prior to 2012 and it has been identified that their data is no
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longer available. Post Office was unable to find records of either Ki Barnes or Robert Sinclair
being employees and therefore, no email accounts would exist for these individuals.
14.2 Your letter requested disclosure of instructions given to Ki Barnes’ for her to attend Mr Bates’
branch. To locate such documents would require us to investigate who gave those instructions,
extract that individual's email accounts and then locate the requested documents. Given that Ki
Barnes attended the branch sometime around June 20071 it is unlikely that these documents
exist. Further, such documents are unlikely to be admissible at the Common Issues Trial given
Mr Bates' contract commenced in 1998. If you still seek disclosure of these documents, please
could you confirm the reasons why.
15. Extraction of SharePoint Sites
15.1 Despite engaging Microsoft to resolve the extraction issues, the position remains that there has
been no tangible progress to extract the Sharepoint sites. It is understood that the issue is being
caused by the volume of documents in the Sharepoint site and neither Advanced Discovery nor
Microsoft have been able to shed any light on the definite cause of the issue or resolution. If it
would assist for Elevate to discuss the issues with extracting these sites with Advanced
Discovery they are welcome to do so.
16. N, L and T Drives
16.1. We refer to paragraph 9.3 of your letter dated 15 June 2018, in relation to the N, L and T drives.
By way of an update on progress in relation to each of the three drives:
L Drive
16.2 The vast majority of the data from the L drive was transferred into a Sharepoint site (Post Office
Ltd - https://poluk.sharepoint.com/sites/POA001). We have previously tried to extract the data
from that Sharepoint site as part of Stage 2, Part 1 Disclosure, however, Advanced Discovery
encountered technical difficulties which precluded this (referred to in paragraph 16.1 above). We
remain unable to disclose any data from that Sharepoint site as a result.
16.3. There is a small amount of data remaining in the L drive, however, this is largely contained in the
individual folders of members of Post Office's in-house legal team. The vast majority of this data
will therefore be privileged. We therefore do not propose to extract or review these documents;
the amount of work involved in extracting the data would be disproportionate to the minimal
number of relevant non-privileged documents likely to be contained in that drive.
16.4 Similarly, Post Office's legal team also uses drives known as the S and Z drives to store
documents. As with the L drive, the vast majority of this data will be privileged and we therefore
do not propose to extract the documents contained within it for the reasons above. For the
avoidance of doubt, we do not consider that the S and Z drives are within the scope of Stage 2,
Part 1 Disclosure in any event.
16.5 During our investigations to locate the identity of the L Drive, it has come to our attention that
Post Office's Security team practice is to store documents in a combination of Sharepoint sites
(which, where possible, have already been disclosed under Stage 2, Part 1 Disclosure [SITE
NAMES)), rather than the L drive, and a drive relating to anti-money laundering, known as the Y
drive. We have been able to locate the Y drive and work will begin shortly to extract the data and
run keyword searches to locate documents which may be relevant to the Lead Claimants. A
further update shall be provided on the number of documents which are responsive to the
searches and whether it is reasonable and proportionate for a manual review of all responsive
documents to be done.
N Drive
16.6 During our investigations to locate the identity of the N Drive, it has come to our attention that
Post Office's NBSC team practice is to store documents in the P drive. The P drive has been
located and work will begin shortly to extract the data. A further update shall be provided shortly
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on the number of documents which are responsive to the keyword searches and whether it is
reasonable and proportionate for a manual review of all responsive documents to be done.
T Drive
16.7. We have located the two parts of the T drive used by Post Office's Remuneration team and work
will begin shortly to extract the data. We will provide an update on timescales for disclosure of
this data in due course, including an update on whether it is reasonable and proportionate to
review all documents which are responsive to a keyword.
16.8 In relation to the Application team, Post Office has already provided disclosure of this team's
documents which were stored in the SharePoint site [site name] which is the primary storage
location rather than the T drive.
17. Gaps in disclosure
17.1 Your position is noted.
18. Technical Issues with Disclosure
18.1. We confirm that we shall continue to apply the terms of the electronic disclosure protocol agreed
between us. The issues which you have raised could have been easily rectified by co-operative
engagement between our firms or Elevate and Advanced Discovery. For example, rather than
Elevate spending half a day to change the Claimant Numbers we could have provided a new
Disclosure List and Load File which would have resolved the problem. If during future disclosure
exercises you have problems with either the Disclosure List or Load File, please could you
contact us so as we can work with you to resolve these issues.
19. I Adverse Documents
19.1 Please find enclosed an unredacted version of the Helen Rose Report including Appendix 1.
19.2 The duty to disclose adverse documents requires Post Office "to disclose, regardless of any
order for disclosure made, documents it knows to be or to have been in its control and
adverse to its case on the claim, unless they are privileged;" (emphasis added). If there are
documents which are adverse to Post Office's case but not known to Post Office then there is no
requirement for Post Office to actively seek out these documents.
19.3. To ensure that Post Office and our firm complies with the obligations to disclose known adverse
documents, procedures have been put in place so that during the manual review process any
documents which do not fall within a Model C class but are adverse are tagged as such and
disclosure of these documents has been provided. In the event that further adverse documents
come to light during the course of Stage 3 Disclosure, then disclosure of these shall be provided.
Yours faithfully
Womble Bond Dickinson (UK) LLP
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SCHEDULE 1
Finance https://poluk. I 25868 Finance team site which contains documents Please could you confirm why this Sharepoint site
sharepoint.co generated by or for the finance and governance should be included within the scope of Stage 2
m/sites/A874 teams. These documents relate to the Post Disclosure given that it is unlikely to contain
Office's business finance rather than the documents which are relevant to the one of the 6
financing of branches. Lead Claimants.
Supply Chain https://poluk. I 24468 Supply chain operations team site which contains I Please could you confirm why this Sharepoint site
Operations Team sharepoint.co information required for the day to day workings should be included within the scope of Stage 2
Drives misites/A997 of the cash centres, cash in transit and stock Disclosure given that it is unlikely to contain
depots. documents which are relevant to the one of the 6
Lead Claimants.
ND Strategy https://poluk. I 5399 Site contains documents relating to the Network Please could you confirm why this Sharepoint site
sharepoint.co Development Strategy. should be included within the scope of Stage 2
m/sites/NDSt Disclosure given that it is unlikely to contain
rategy documents which are relevant to the one of the 6
Lead Claimants.
NTProjects https://poluk. I 2238 Site contains documents relating to the Network Please could you confirm why this Sharepoint site
sharepoint.co Transformation Programme. should be included within the scope of Stage 2
m/sites/A908 Disclosure given that it is unlikely to contain
documents which are relevant to the one of the 6
Lead Claimants.
Post Office https://poluk. I 1823 Site contains videos which explain current These documents would not be responsive to the
sharepoint.co happenings in the Post Office business. keywords which have been agreed between the
m/portals/Po parties and therefore would not produce any
st-Office disclosable documents.
POL NT Database I https://poluk. I 1067 This site contains documents relating to the Please could you confirm why this Sharepoint site
Project sharepoint.co Network Transformation Programme. should be included within the scope of Stage 2
misites/A489 Disclosure given that it is unlikely to contain
documents which are relevant to the one of the 6
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Lead Claimants.
sharepoint.co
misites/ITFin
ance
SAP user guides and details on IT projects.
LRG Lead Team https://poluk. I 801 This site is used by the Legal, Risk and Please could you confirm why this Sharepoint site
sharepoint.co Governance team to store documents. should be included within the scope of Stage 2
misites/LRGL Disclosure given that it is unlikely to contain
eadTeam documents which are relevant to the one of the 6
Lead Claimants.
Gareth Payne https://poluk. I 695 Gareth Payne is part of Computacenter's Please could you confirm why this Sharepoint site
Alerting Test sharepoint.co technical team and the site contains documents should be included within the scope of Stage 2
m/sites/A999 relating to Post Office's internal system testing. Disclosure given that it is unlikely to contain
GPTest documents which are relevant to the one of the 6
Lead Claimants.
MS Payout https://poluk. I 367 This is an obsolete site last used in 2016 which Please could you confirm why this Sharepoint site
Implimentation sharepoint.co contains documents relating to the third party should be included within the scope of Stage 2
misites/A113 payment processes. Disclosure given that it is unlikely to contain
9 documents which are relevant to the one of the 6
Lead Claimants.
Financial Services I https://poluk. I 21 Contains documents explaining how to start, Please could you confirm why this Sharepoint site
Portfolio sharepoint.co manage or change projects which relate to should be included within the scope of Stage 2
m/sites/Finan financial services. Disclosure given that it is unlikely to contain
cial Services documents which are relevant to the one of the 6
Portfolio Lead Claimants.
IT Finance https://poluk. I 13 Site contains IT Finance Budgets, SAP codes, Please could you confirm why this Sharepoint site
should be included within the scope of Stage 2
Disclosure given that it is unlikely to contain
documents which are relevant to the one of the 6
Lead Claimants.
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POLSAP / HRSAP I https://poluk. I 4 N/A As explained in our letter of 26 February 2018,
ServiceRisk sharepoint.co the cost of extracting sites which contain less
m/sites/POL than 10MB of data is not proportionate to the
SAPHRSAP. volume of documents contained within them.
ServiceRisk Please can you explain the reasons why
disclosure of this site should be provided.
F&P database https://poluk. I 2 N/A As explained in our letter of 26 February 2018,
sharepoint.co the cost of extracting sites which contain less
misites/F&P than 10MB of data is not proportionate to the
database volume of documents contained within them.
Please can you explain the reasons why
disclosure of this site should be provided.
TEST https://poluk. I 1 N/A As explained in our letter of 26 February 2018,
sharepoint.co the cost of extracting sites which contain less
misites/TEST than 10MB of data is not proportionate to the
19 volume of documents contained within them.
Please can you explain the reasons why
disclosure of this site should be provided.
ATeam https://poluk. I 1 N/A As explained in our letter of 26 February 2018,
sharepoint.co the cost of extracting sites which contain less
misites/ATea than 10MB of data is not proportionate to the
m volume of documents contained within them.
Please can you explain the reasons why
disclosure of this site should be provided.
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