FTC Second Request

The Challenge

After a proposed merger with a competitor, a U.S. corporation retained an AmLaw 10 law firm to assist with the pre-merger antitrust review conducted by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a regulatory body charged with the enforcement of U.S. antitrust laws. When the FTC issued a “Second Request,” a common practice that requires the additional collection of documentary material relevant to the proposed merger, the law firm knew it had a very small window in which to comprehensively review and produce a large volume of documents. After conducting an initial internal investigation and document collection, the firm identified approximately 30 document custodians, each possessing more than 30,000 pages of potentially relevant information. The law firm knew that in order for the proposed merger to have a good chance to close they would have no more than six weeks to complete the document review.

The Solution

The AmLaw 10 firm reached out to Attenex Corp. and its Review Partner, SQ Global Solutions, an India-based LPO with over 150 highly skilled, full-time attorneys and legal professionals. SQ immediately assembled a team of reviewers who were trained on the Attenex Patterns E-Discovery Software and the substantive legal issues raised by the proposed merger. The reviewers were responsible not only for determining which documents were relevant, but also for identifying documents that might be useful to economists retained to defend the proposed merger and, critically, for flagging privileged documents to prevent possible waiver.

Using Attenex Patterns, SQ Global Solutions’ reviewers each reviewed, on average, 2,500 documents per day. Specifically, by relying on the visual analytics and conceptual clustering features of Attenex Patterns, they were able to quickly eliminate large numbers of obviously non-relevant material. The first level review of documents was completed in four weeks. In addition, Attenex Patterns’ advanced capabilities, such as statistical sampling, provided SQ with a powerful tool in implementing its own highly sophisticated, and fully documented, quality control practices.

This further allowed SQ to provide the law firm with a guarantee of overall critical accuracy upwards of 99%. The partnership of Attenex with SQ Global Solutions resulted in an incomparably cost effective, timely and empirically accurate document review.

The Results

With hundreds of millions of dollars in shareholder value on the line, delays in compliance with an FTC Second Request cannot be tolerated. By the same token, sloppy handling of the documents, particularly regarding issues of privilege, can also be fatal. The nature and breadth of most Second Requests, however, usually requires that tremendous amounts of documents be reviewed in a relatively short period of time. SQ’s Senior Project Manager for the review noted that “with other tools, quality control measures are ad hoc. It’s hard to be more than just reasonably comfortable that what gets produced doesn’t contain any significant errors. But with Attenex Patterns we had complete confidence in what was going out the door.”

The powerful technological solutions of Attenex Patterns, coupled with the precise review methodologies of SQ Global Solutions, enabled the AmLaw 10 law firm and its client to attain a previously unachievable level of confidence in the defensibility of the practices used in conducting the document review and in declaring their substantial compliance with the Second Request.