Forensic Services

Forensic technology team instructed on long running dispute

FRP delivers eDiscovery services for international law firm

Background

An international law firm required eDiscovery services to assist with ongoing litigation. The information they held included data from a number of previous litigation proceedings that had taken place over an eight-year period. Some of these historical data sources were technically sound, with consistent files and metadata. However, others had been provided in an unstructured format and exported from a range of systems.

The firm instructed us to deliver eDiscovery services along with access to our document review platform, Relativity, as well as associated project management support and training services.

Action

Our forensic technology team adopted a methodical approach to the datasets, uploading those with technical indexes into the Relativity platform first, which gave the law firm early access to the documents. The team then worked with the previous third-party data providers to gain more information and resolve technical queries, such as gaps in the metadata provided.

In some instances indexes and metadata needed to be manually rebuilt or updated, so that the client could search and review documents easily within Relativity; in other cases the team developed workaround solutions to remove a large number of duplicated files that had failed to deduplicate during standard processing due to the different data sources. With a significant volume of hard-copy data, the team used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology on scanned documents to make them searchable. The team also identified, extracted and converted into a suitable format a number of important audio files which could then be reviewed offline by the client.

Once the data was normalised, our team spent time with the client to understand the requirements agreed in the Disclosure Review Document (DRD). They then designed searches and workflows that would cover the agreed search criteria, trained the legal review team onsite and guided them through the document review process.

Outcome

Following the work carried out by our forensic technology team, the law firm were able to identify and collate a significant amount of relevant material during the document review, which was used to help achieve an out of court settlement.

FRP trained the legal review team onsite and guided them through the document review process. Adrian Coates Forensic Services

Related team

Adrian Coates

Adrian Coates

  • Director
  • Forensic Services
  • London

Harry Trick

Harry Trick

  • Senior Manager
  • Forensic Services
  • Leeds

Dimitrios Diamantidis

Dimitrios Diamantidis

  • Infrastructure Analyst
  • Central Services Group
  • London