Situation

Our client was assisting a company issued with a notice by the ACCC. The company conducted their own review and collected approximately 200 GB of potentially relevant data. This data was delivered to our law firm client, who had two weeks to review, produce and deliver relevant documents to the ACCC. The production needed to be in a specific technical format, and there was no option for our client or the company they represented to request an extension of the deadline.

Solution

Our technical team immediately collected the data and commenced data processing, indexing the documents, and removing duplicates overnight. The processing workflow identified approximately 350,000 documents for review. Given the two-week deadline, several workflows were developed and rolled out simultaneously:

• Initial keyword searches to identify both relevant and completely irrelevant document groups

• Continuous active learning was deployed to prioritise the order of review so that potentially relevant documents were more likely to be reviewed sooner

• Statistical sampling and quality assurance workflows were utilised throughout to validate the accuracy of the interrogation and review workflows

• Rolling keyword searches were deployed to identify documents potentially subject to claims of privilege with conceptual used to identify other documents of a similar nature.

• Ultimately, approximately 150,000 documents were identified as relevant and produced for the ACCC by the deadline.

Impact

Our work in developing and simultaneously executing multiple technology workflows allowed our client to:

• Comply with the tight deadline specified by the ACCC, including the specific technical format required by the regulator

• Reduce the cost to the client of compliance as the workflows reduced the number of documents that needed to be reviewed by the legal team by over 90%

• Trust the accuracy of the workflows due to how sampling and quality assurance workflows were used to validate the relevant document bundles.