Large energy firm

How we helped

• eDiscovery
• Data Governance

The best defense is sometimes a rigorous review of every email and document. When a large energy firm was charged with defending a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the AlixPartners eDiscovery team was hired to provide collection, review and production assistance. Our team gathered data from over 100 custodians across multiple countries on four continents. We used specialized analytical tools to reduce the review population and increase efficiency, and applied email threading across a 13-million-document universe in order to identify unique emails and attachments.   

Typically, the discovery process is hemmed by arbitrary datasets: Email review populations are often arbitrarily sorted by date or custodian. In this case, the reduced population contained data in different languages, so we used language identification to parse documents to the appropriate team. To increase reviewer speed and accuracy, document sets were provided to reviewers sorted by content similarity.   

With our approach and toolkits, we identified and suppressed 30% of the total population, limiting the case to relevant communications and data. This smarter sort method in turn increased reviewer speed and accuracy. We also used categorization to intelligently sample the non-responsive population for material similar to other responsive documents that may have been missed during the first round of review. Analytics provided our client with significant cost savings by removing several million documents from the document population and increasing reviewer efficiency while reducing the number of coding errors.  

The bottom line was that the client was able to trust and rely on our eDiscovery process and get ahead of challenges.