The Challenge
Our client, a professional association working in the financial services space, was required to produce documents for the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry (the Commission).
The Commission’s request was issued mid-December with response submissions and supporting documents required by the end of January. This short six-week period included the Christmas and New Year shutdown period, which posed additional resourcing issues for the client, and failure to comply with the request from the Commission would result in custodial and financial sanctions.
During this brief period, the client was required to:
- Identify and collect relevant documents;
- Review all the relevant documents; and
- Prepare detailed written submissions following consideration of those documents by their legal team further shortening the review window available.
Our Solution
1. Process the documents
- Our technical team removed all the duplicate documents within the dataset and made all remaining documents, where applicable, text searchable
- We developed effective and accurate key-word searches, and applied them to the de-duplicated data. Responsive documents were given a unique document reference number before being uploaded to the review platform.
2. Review of responsive documents in an online database
- The database was designed and setup to suit our client’s review outcomes including providing training to the review team on navigating the responsive documents.
- Our client’s team used analytics (email threading and near-duplicate detection), along with further key-word searches to review and “tag/code” documents relevant to their issues.
3. Produce a list of “relevant” documents
- We produced a hyperlinked list of relevant documents before closing the database.
- An export file was provided to the review team should future review be required.
- A post project review was held.
Client Outcomes
Our expert review team worked closely with our client to reduce their reviewable set of potentially relevant documents from 21,000 to 2,000 documents.
The responsive documents were uploaded the next day with training provided to the team who, with the assistance of our experts, completed a review of those remaining documents in less than the estimated 72 hours. This included the ingestion and review of additional documents which were provided during the review.
Once the review was complete, our experts undertook various quality assurance processes and provided our client’s review team with an exported hyperlinked list of documents within 24 hours. In total, the review of the documents was completed in less than 3 days saving our client a significant amount of time and money.