New Telegraph

Include e-discovery in court rules – Judge

A judge of the High Court of Kogi State, Justice Alaba Omolaye- Ajileye, has called on heads of courts in Nigeria to amend the rules of their courts to give room for the inclusion of electronic discovery (e-discovery). Omolaye-Ajileye made the call in a paper delivered yesterday in Abuja at a specialised training for prosecutors of environmental offences jointly organised by the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (NIALS) and the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency (NESREA).

In his paper captioned: “Digital Evidence and EDiscovery in Prosecuting Environmental Cases,” Justice Omolaye-Ajileye stressed the importance of electronic discovery in litigations involving electronically-stored information (ESI) in this current age in facilitating effective administration of justice.

He noted that; “In this digital age characterised by the proliferation of digital devices, which have facilitated the creation, storage and communication of electronic information of all kinds, electronic discovery has become an essential and inevitable fabric of the litigation processes around the world.” According to the jurist, the emerging dominance of the information technology landscape will make the discovery of electronicallystored information (ESI) an increasingly-important tool to attain the truth in cases in our courts. He added that with ediscovery, litigants can re-trieve information from a wide range of electronic sources, including, but not limited, to social media accounts, messages, emails, documents or any other valuable data. He lamented that only the National Industrial Court has provisions guiding e-discovery in the court’s civil procedure rules while what other courts have provisions for the inspection and discovery of hardcopy documents, which he said falls short of the requirements of ediscovery.

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