Sunday, March 23, 2014

E-Discovery Legal Issues Are Still Ignored In India

Electronic discovery or e-discovery in India is a field that is still not pursued by many law firms in India. There are only handfuls of law firms that can provide e-discovery services in India. Further, there only one or two cyber law firms in India that have been providing legal services in this field.

The main reason for absence of lawyers and law firms in the field of e-discovery is lack of techno legal expertise in this regard. Perry4Law is the exclusive techno legal e-discovery and cyber forensics law firm of Asia that has been providing e-discovery and cyber forensics services to both national and international clients. Perry4Law is also managing exclusive techno legal e-discovery blogs in India and providing exclusive techno legal e-discovery legal services in India and foreign jurisdictions.

The scope of legal e-discovery services in India has increased tremendously in the past few years. In fact, e-discovery and cyber law due diligence has become mandatory for required for Indian companies and Indian companies cannot ignore them anymore. For instance, the cyber security breaches in India would raise crucial cyber law and cyber security issues in the near future and they cannot be simply ignored as cyber incidences anymore. This is so because many techno legal obligations have been attached with such cyber incidences in India.

Take the example of Target Corporation that faced cyber attacks and data breach recently. For reasons best known to Target, it failed to take remedial action in this regard. Now target is facing litigation threats around the world and it may be prosecuted in India as well very soon for failing to comply with techno legal requirements of applicable Indian laws.

The cyber forensics trends and developments in India 2013 by Perry4Law and Perry4Law’s Techno Legal Base (PTLB) have proved that India has failed on the fronts of e-discovery and cyber forensics. The law enforcement and revenue authorities of India have not taken aid of e-discovery and cyber forensics in their investigations so far.

For instance, Enforcement Directorate (ED) of India could have used e-discovery and cyber forensics methods to detect possible legal violations by Bitcoin websites. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has already committed the cyber forensics blunder in Aarushi’s murder case trial. The IPL match fixing case may also be jeoparadised due to lack of use of cyber forensics best practices. The forensics analysis of Nokia’s computer used to download software in India has still not been done till date. The HDFC bank was also required to follow sound e-discovery and cyber forensics procedure to avoid legal liability. Unfortunately, none of these events have actually taken place in India as e-discovery and cyber forensics have been neglected in all these cases.

All these negative developments clearly indicate that e-discovery and cyber forensics best practices are required to be adopted by various national and international companies operating in India. However, in the absence of various techno legal compliance on the part of Indian and foreign companies operating in India, there is an urgent need to formulate effective and robust techno legal e-discovery and cyber forensics regulatory regimes for India. There is also no doubt that India needs to strengthen cyber forensics and cyber crimes investigation capabilities that are in bad shape as on date.