Case Study
FTI Technology Leads Data Strategy and Document Review in Financial Services Class Action Litigation
The Financial Services and Markets Act is one of the U.K.’s most comprehensive and strict regulatory regimes, placing significant responsibility on financial institutions for a range of market activities. When a global bank became the subject of class action litigation under this regulation, it was charged with misleading investors and causing financial losses that could have otherwise been avoided.
In-house counsel engaged FTI Technology to lead the identification, collection, hosting and review of data spanning more than a decade and sourced from across six jurisdictions. This included data strategy over the matter lifecycle together with structured fact-finding and dislosure through managed document review.
Situation
In this matter, the financial institution was defending claims under Section 90, Section 90A and Schedule 10A of FSMA, with claims alleging that the bank issued potentially misleading information in rights issue prospectuses spanning more than a decade. The client would potentially need to collect and review tens of millions of documents over a multi-year period and numerous jurisdictions.
The client’s in-house legal team needed rapidly to engage with an expert advisor to work alongside their external legal counsel under legal privilege to undertake the following key tasks:
- Mobilise a dedicated response team to provide immediate support to inform critical decisions regarding potential settlement vs. defence against the claim.
- Oversee and execute the identification, collection and processing of data spanning more than a decade and sources from six jurisdictions.
- Perform structured data analysis to organise, interpret and surface potentially relevant documents for legal review.
- Conduct document review in close coordination with external legal counsel.
- Support the preparation of final production documents and privilege logging.
Our Role
FTI Technology established unique methodologies to support the matter, combining a flexible team structure of experienced reviewers, technical and analytics experts and managed document review workflows to quickly surface key documents and case facts.
The approach included:
- A flexible team encompassing expertise across financial services, FSMA regulation, analytics and document review, including analytic researchers entrenched in the matter to provide matter knowledge, detailed insights and alignment across each phase of the review.
- Targeted collection using known custodians, governance forums, key dates and other key information, gleaned from the bank’s in-house recordkeeping systems.
- Analysis of all documents to identify and extract only relevant information to the current litigation, to substantially reduce the overall dataset to a workable document population.
- Deployment of numerous analytic models and continuous active learning workflows to concurrently provide fact finding, early case assessment, deduplication and data minimisation.
- Development of chronologies based on key facts identified and preparation for interviews with regulatory authorities and custodians.
- Continuous feedback loop with in-house and external counsel for seamless coordination and quality control across output, review consistency and disclosure accuracy.
- Compliance with disclosure requirements, including redaction of customer data, commercially sensitive material and other privileged information prior to disclosure.
Our Impact
- Reduction in first pass review population
In close collaboration with counsel, FTI Technology implemented a disciplined, risk-based review strategy designed to avoid becoming over-inclusive for first-pass review, while maintaining a thorough approach to ensure no critical information was overlooked. - Enhanced quality of review and reduction in overturns
A flexible team structure made it possible to avoid barriers typically imposed during conventional first and second level document review. FTI Technology’s team became deeply familiar with the content, delivering an exceptionally high quality review. The low overturn rate between first pass review and external counsel’s final decisions demonstrated the reliability of the workflows and the consistency of the review team. - Enhanced cost efficiency
The combined impact of FTI Technology’s work in defining a streamlined and effective methodology led to a reduction in the number of documents and effort needed for first-pass review, while the enhanced quality of review and reduced number of overturns lead to a material reduction in second pass review effort.