Every commission or inquiry has a ‘document management protocol’. These are the rules that govern how materials should be submitted. It assists the commission or inquiry navigate the complexities of numerous submissions from different organisations and individuals that it receives.
There are also strict instructions regarding document production, specifically providing electronic documents with an electronic index including all metadata in a highly specified format.
How we Assisted a Client
For the recent Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry (Banking Royal Commission), we assisted a client with response submissions and supporting documents required in a short, six-week period over the Christmas and New Year shut-down period. Failure to comply would result in custodial and financial sanctions.
As the Banking Royal Commission’s document management protocol required electronic files only, we assisted with scanning the client’s hard copy documents using Optical Character Recognition to produce searchable electronic files. The files were then delimited, a process of bundling documents electronically by either client name or subject to minimise file searching and create a database of files that is easily searchable.
Our team also used objective coding to capture metadata from the documents (eg. document date, author, recipient, document type, etc). This metadata could then be uploaded into any review platform to increase the documents’ searchability, making document review more time and cost efficient.
We then processed the documents including keyword searches and adding document reference numbers. The responsive documents were then reviewed in an online database and produced a list of relevant documents.
The Result
The potentially reviewable set of documents was reduced from 21,000 to 2,000. The remaining responsive documents were reviewed by our Managed Review Team in less than 72 hours including the review of additional documents.
Once the review was complete, we provided our client’s review team with an exported hyperlinked list of documents within 24 hours in the format required by the Banking Royal Commission’s document management protocol.
Read the case study on how our Managed Review Team reviewed the documents in less than 72 hours.
