The costs of IT for Disclosure in typical cases

The Woolf Report expressly anticipated that the use of IT for Disclosure would spread with the new Rules. It has not happened as Lord Woolf anticipated. There are two reasons for this:

We have put up a spreadsheet which compares the costs of the traditional "dictate and word process" approach with the cost of sending paper out to be scanned and coded by a specialist service provider for use in electronic form. If you have Excel you can adapt this to suit your case. Any realistic figures result in lower costs if the labour-intensive work is sent out to a specialist service provider - even for a single file of documents.

Sample values are given for the main elements of cost and time, both internal and external. These values can be changed, as can the percentage uplift needed to show the charge to clients.

You must have Microsoft Excel installed on your PC. Depending on the connection speed, there may be a pause whilst the file loads. Internet Explorer should display the spreadsheet in a frame; you can save it locally either before or after making your calculations. Netscape will not display the spreadsheet but will ask you immediately if you want to save it locally

In case of difficulty, or if you have comments or questions, please e-mail Richard Brockbank

Access the spreadsheet here

If you are running Microsoft Office XP with Web Office Components installed, you can see the spreadsheet more easily here