Companies are paying more than £500m a year of unnecessarily because lawsuit documents are still being disclosed manually rather than electronically, according to a poll of leading lawyers. Almost all those surveyed believed the cost of litigation had risen dramatically over the past five years, says the study by LexisNexis Butterworths, the database and research service company.

Lord Justice Neuberger, the judge in charge of modernising the court system, said moving towards an efficient and practical electronic disclosure system was key to making litigation simpler, cheaper and less time-consuming.