INQUIRY = innocent = closure (not ENQUIRY)

There are two terms which are often mixed up in law and that is "Inquiry" and "Enquiry". The former is most important as it is an investigation especially where there has been a fatality. An Inquiry therefore looks into the facts of a situation, establishes the circumstances and produces its findings and possibly recommendations for future directions in law. What an Inquiry does is provide closure and improvement in rules and regulations which do not lead to consequences, ie that which is to be avoided again in the future where possible.

Lord Saville, the news reported this evening, has concluded his Inquiry into the Bloody Sunday massacre in Ireland in 1972. The Saville report interviewed 922 witnesses - so it can definitely be deemed "thorough" even although there were conflicting accounts, and took 12 years to complete at a cost of just under £200 million, a snip at £191 million. Justice obviously has no cost implications [Lord Woolf], another £9 million could have been spent on "?" for completeness!

However, watching the television tonight a sense of a good result was on display - INNOCENT - all 14 shot dead out of the 27 shot - murdered and injured.

But bear in mind, where there is a fatality and an issue of murder, there is GUILTY as a verdict. This is of necessity missing from an INQUIRY as it is not meant to establish BLAME, for which you would need a prosecution and a trial.

An "Enquiry" on the otherhand is something you do in conveyancing law when doing background checks in order to sell a property, ie preliminary enquiries eg checking that a road is not going to be built through the property in the next few years, or that an adequate drainage system is linked to the property, or even that there is a right to light as an easement which is a benefit or burden depending on which side of the fence you are on.

Well done, to Lord Saville. Closure

NB: Breakdown of the £191 million bill - figures released in the Daily Mail

£.13,566,941 Inquiry counsel fees
£.13,361,677 Eversheds (law firm)
£.19,330,660 Office rent and utilities
£...2,931,897 Computers, purchase costs
£...5,610,347 Computer consultants
£.25,790,164 Computer operation/maintenance
£......253,764 Furniture
£ ......322,413 Lord Saville's travel
£ ........19,627 Lord Saville's Expenses
£ ........35,507 Counselling for victims' families
£ ........62,486 Media monitoring
£ ......391,077 Historical consultants
£191,200,000 TOTAL including all other tribunal costs plus Ministry of Defence legal costs of which lawyers bills were £100,203,621 - there may be further costs still to come in.

By comparison: some 12-15 years ago I worked on the £24 billion global merger of Guinness-Grandmet- LVMH which became Diageo plc. There were 3000 files but no sophisticated computer system - the legal bill was nowhere near £191 million. I have also worked on a £200 million misrep action in the Official Referees court which used leading edge document imaging technology Norwich Union v Tarmac (1) Schal (2): we acted for the 6th and 7th third party, Ladbrokes (the case settled early). Using computer technology, and my system was a bespoke prototype at the time which I was enhancing as we went along, it did not cost these sums of money, the equipment alone cost under £75,000. Having worked on other database projects in the 80's (Vortex / North West Water / Radius) you can buy bolt on window database compatible software, ie Foxpro is one which provides a good 40 fields of upto 8 different types of field system, popup's, wrap around etc. These are not terribly expensive but if you want a simple bolt on database which can word search or theme search, do boolean searches and OCR (optical character recognition)/ICR (intelligent character recognition) with fuzzy search up to 8 mispelt characters using todays technology, databases and scanners, the price should come down quite a lot - the home market now has these machines at around £100 and even I recently had a home based Lexmark system which I picked up for £60. Whilst systems do have to be slightly different for legal use WORM not WARM (write once read many over write any ready many) (so that documents cannot be altered once scanned), I am surprised at the costs in relation to computers and can only suppose that some form of database over a manual system was used (or both) - it seems excessive but then the Inquiry was over a duration of 12 years. My £24 billion 3000 file manual system worked 100% well over a 1 year period of which I was absolute responsible for 400 files feeding into 3000 files and could locate any document in a maximum of 15 minutes, albeit substantial amounts of the file system were built 2 years earlier for an aborted deal. Office space used 1 small room (400 files) and 2 large rooms (x 3000 each we had a duplicate) for Guinness team. Still, 922 witness statements, should have meant that the system worked quicker - a search can produce 1000's of documents in under 5 minutes, almost seconds, if the fields are set up properly or if the OCR/ICR searches are working well - you just need to then ensure the printer is compatible with the search! (another story). You can of course out-source objective codification part of the exercise (name, to from, type of doc etc) and bring in junior counsel for the subjective codification keeping costs down - a colleague on a UNIX system had objective codification done for him as outsource at £1 a document - saves a lot of time rather than dealing inhouse. My system dealt with it inhouse for Ladbrokes, with a team of 4, it took 4 1/2 weeks to codify 85 lever arch files out of 240 files and with junior counsel working alongside. I wonder how many files this project had, but the costs should have been loaded early in the project and computer problems sorted early on too. Was it a prototype and was it like mine, a common provider system, between more than one party to the Inquiry? I cannot conceive how £2+ million was spent on computers and £25+ million on computer services. Some legal projects can be massive and document control crucial to the outcome of the project, but at £191 million - this was a gravy train by lawyers and others. With a computer based system and I presume it is a document image system that has been used it pays to bear in mind that the "chronological list" system used in court is the "natural cause" way to put time in its place by pagination, and causation is always located earlier rather than later in the system: cause always comes first, effect follows unless there is metalipsis which is a reversal of cause and effect - effect and cause (does not happen often). Just how big was this Inquiry? Just on the figures released comprising £191 million, I think I need more information, please!

Good News Recycling - Incentive v taxation = benefit not burden

I was most pleased to see the midday news today, where there was an article informing about a recycling bins "incentive" scheme which gives out vouchers to residents who recycle and the dropping off of the taxation scheme for recycling.

My own similar scheme suggested a return to householders by way of their community charge, but vouchers is an acceptable modification as an incentive.

Rubbish is put out on the street for free and is potentially a cash cow industry which should be promulgated for the common good in society, but also with an incentive to engage society.

An interesting newspaper article on the subject is:

Published in Letsrecycle.com, Council News of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead on 7 June 2010 entitled "Government to spell out recycling incentives policy" (Click Here)

On an unrelated topic: another idea of mine that I tried to get off the ground a few years ago by writing to several oranisations for them to chat about at committee level was:

Loyalty Cards - quite often you have a number of loyalty schemes in your purse with a small number of points on each of them, not enough to buy something you want or perhaps only a very small item. With the recession biting and hitting the third sector in relation to funding and funding crisis, I pondered and thought what about companies that operate loyalty card schemes such as Boots Advantage Card or Nectar etc, organising to allow charities to have a card whereby lots of individual users could transfer their points to a charity card (particularly for small grassroots charties) to purchase larger items such as TV's or smaller items for tombola and raffles, or even for specific one off assistance to group members for example the homeless. A few loyalty points on a lot of cards could value add up to a large amount of benefit to cash strapped local based charties to buy TV's, music equipment, projectors and office supplies and bring out the altruist in folks who may not need the points for themselves per se. Just a thought ... what does it take to make it happen? How big could the benefit be? How much of a difference could it potentially make to a small group of people?