Situation

Our client was engaged to assist on a large construction dispute before the Supreme Court of Victoria. Due to the nature of their end-client’s operations the data identified as potentially relevant to the dispute amounted to approximately 1.5 million documents. The data was collected as it was stored on the client’s proprietary document management systems and was not structured or ordered in any way that would assist with the review. The legal team needed to get a handle on what they were dealing with and begin to prioritise critical documents for review.

Solution

Our experts worked to process the data as quickly as possible, extracting all documents from their respective sources and created an index of all material. Identical documents were identified and removed from the document set. We created custom dashboard reporting within the workspace that allowed the team to gain some insight into the data with reference to things like date ranges, document types, email domains and authors. The legal team could then test different search parameters using this information along with the use of advanced and complex key word searches. Various forms of analytics were also used to further interrogate the data to remove potentially irrelevant, and prioritise potentially relevant, documents. This workflow was iterative and occurred over a period of months in direct consultation with our technical team. In the end the legal team were able to identify a priority review set of just over 100,000 documents for a more detailed review.

Impact

Our investigative workflow and reporting framework allowed our client to:

• Have autonomy in the culling process, testing and running their own search parameters and leaning on our team when needed

• Gain early and easy insight into the data types and volume, allowing them to manage the expectations and timelines for stakeholders like the Court, the client and the other parties

• Significantly reduce the volume of documents that need to be interrogated, in turn reducing the time and cost associated with conducting that review

• Adopt a workflow and approach that was proportionate and reasonable to the complexity and quantum of the dispute and represented value to their client