My 18-year-old summer intern is very scared of me.
She spent the entire week watching me sit in front of my computer, in complete silence, motionless except for the occasional click of the mouse to move to the next electronic document, and barely breathing. She told me this could not be further from what she imagined a barrister’s life to be. And there was one thing she was particularly puzzled by: why were there so many documents?
There were, indeed, many documents – over 40,000 pages of them, all for one case.
The number of documents involved in modern-day civil litigation is substantial. When I started practising in 2004, an average half-day court hearing – say, for an interlocutory injunction application – would involve about 300 or 400 pages of documents. Nowadays, such applications easily go into thousands of pages.
The increase in the number of documents used in litigation is not only a result of technology that enables us to capture a larger part of human interaction and turn it into tangible records. It is also a reflection of the increased complexity of the commercial activities that Hong Kong, as an international financial hub, encounters.
“Increased complexity” is often cited but not often explained, and is best illustrated by examples.