Document reviews for the Post Office Inquiry were largely outsourced to law graduates with no professional qualifications, the inquiry into the Horizon miscarriages of justice has heard.

Gregg Rowan, a partner at City firm Herbert Smith Freehills, said that the ‘first level review’ of potentially relevant documents was typically conducted by individuals in Belfast, Johannesburg and Melbourne. They would often be presented with batches of 50 items at a time, he told a special session of the inquiry yesterday. 

The firm was the recognised legal representative for Post Office Limited in the inquiry into the wrongful prosecutions of hundreds of former sub-postmasters who were falsely accused of theft and fraud in the past 20 years.

Disclosure has been a major issue over the summer, with the inquiry having to be postponed after the last-minute admission by Post Office that relevant documents may not have been presented. HSF has already been replaced by Burges Salmon as legal representative.

Rowan revealed that the inquiry has issued 47 disclosure requests and to date HSF has reviewed more than 900,000 electronic documents on the Post Office database, producing 127,000 to the inquiry. He said the first level reviewers were briefed, usually in writing and orally, on the terms of the relevant request and its expected purpose.

Quality control checks were typically carried out by more senior team members before the selected documents were reviewed in London, Rowan said. 

He said this was a ‘thoughtful and careful exercise’, but inquiry counsel Jason Beer KC pointed out that by the time documents were forwarded on to the second review level, there was no way of knowing whether other relevant documents had already been missed and discarded.

Rowan said HSF ‘sought to engage extensively’ with the Post Office about its disclosure task, but this did not necessarily extend to the organisation dictating what search terms should be used. The Post Office was now a ‘more proactive and informed client’, added Rowan.

The barrister also dismissed the suggestion, made during a previous hearing, that the search process had been too ‘mechanistic’ to pick up on relevant material.

‘It is about more than search terms,’ said Rowan. ‘They are only one of several tools that we and others deploy on behalf of POL, albeit an important tool when dealing with large volumes of diverse electronic data.’

He denied that there had been a dispute with KPMG, the Post Office’s eDiscovery provider, about the use of so-called deduplication to conduct searches and eliminate irrelevant documents.

Rowan said instead there had been a ‘difference of view’ with the Big Four firm about who made the decision to deduplicate, adding that this was ‘regrettable’ but rejecting Beer’s suggestion it was unsatisfactory.

Inquiry chair Sir Wyn Williams did not comment on the day’s evidence but said he may release a short statement later this week on the disclosure failings. The inquiry heard that Williams’ revised deadline of 14 August for disclosing relevant material has already been missed. This will not now be completed until 14 September – two working days before the substantive hearing is due to resume.

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