E-discovery
Blog Post
ILTACON Debrief: E-Discovery and Data Whiplash
ILTACON 2022 wrapped up just weeks ago, and if there’s one resounding theme that’s stuck with most attendees, it’s that the future is now. With the first two days keynoted by business futurist Patrick Schwerdtfeger, the conference firmly set a focus on disruption, transformation and technology advancement.
Blog Post
Recent Developments in the U.K. Courts Underscore the Perils of DIY E-Discovery
Two recent developments in the U.K. courts have brought the issue of self-serve e-discovery back into the spotlight. In late July, the England and Wales High Court issued a more than £500,000 penalty to a defendant for failing to fully produce relevant documents and fulfil e-discovery obligations in a patent litigation. Also in July, the Business and Property Courts approved the Disclosure Working Pilot, which as part of the permanent disclosure regime will strengthen requirements for “parties [to] engage at a much earlier stage in discussion and agreement as to how best to tackle the problem of ‘big data’.” Both decisions illustrate the importance of establishing and following defensible e-discovery best practices, particularly in today’s era when emerging data sources are complicating discovery workflows and an increasing number of platforms are being touted as providing easy, DIY e-discovery features.
Case Study
A technology company that develops artificial intelligence and autonomous transportation solutions engaged FTI Technology to lead e-discovery and document review in a dispute relating to departing employee theft of intellectual property. In addition to their e-discovery needs, legal counsel and stakeholders from the organization’s compliance team needed experts who could investigate and uncover specific data that contained IP across multiple data sources within the client’s environment and the opposing party’s environment. FTI Technology’s team of emerging data sources experts applied the firm’s proprietary Connect platform to drive quick access and insights into technical files and other sources of IP stored in Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
Blog Post
The AI and Investigations Paradigm: Faster, More Precise, Defensible
The average e-discovery matter today involves more than 6.5 million pages of documents. In complex, multi-national matters and high-stakes internal investigations, data volumes are often much higher. Outdated manual processes and reluctance to leverage advanced tools to find key information from within large, diverse data sets are resulting in excessive time, cost and complexity in bringing matters to a swift and defensible conclusion.
Blog Post
Linked Content Presents Challenges in E-Discovery
Linked content—dynamic documents shared as links rather than attachments—are emerging among the latest areas of debate in how emerging data sources impact e-discovery. Not only are courts and discovery experts beginning to discuss whether hyperlinked content should be treated the same as attachments in production, but practitioners are also increasingly encountering the legal and technical challenges of collecting, analyzing and reviewing linked content in real world cases.
Blog Post
Convincing Different Roles of TAR's Defensibility
More and more legal teams are using technology-assisted review (TAR) to expedite and lower the overall cost of their document review projects. Case law has illustrated the tool’s efficacy and its acceptance in the courts. Yet, some legal teams may still question its defensibility.
Blog Post
Discovery in the Cloud: An Investigator’s Close Look at Unexpected Risks and Challenges
After significant growth in 2020, cloud storage providers are continuing to experience increasing adoption within enterprises, and in turn spurring a rise in new legal and compliance challenges. The cloud storage market is forecasted to grow by more than 20% in the next five years across a range of established and emerging solution providers. With this growth, organizations are scrambling to make sense of how their reliance on providers like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Dropbox affects their governance and discovery processes.
Blog Post
E-discovery, data privacy and information governance risks are increasingly intersecting in today’s organizations. In turn, the ways corporations manage their data, approach compliance and react to legal matters must evolve quickly. FTI Technology’s teams are focused on addressing these new challenges and opportunities. The recent addition of Managing Director Brandon Lee to the team is a prime example of FTI’s ability to provide solutions and expertise that bridge the most pressing legal, regulatory and data issues. We recently interviewed Brandon about his new role and his unique strategy for supporting in-house legal teams.
Video
E-discovery in 2020: The Sudden Shift in Our Data Footprint
The pandemic has affected us all in many ways, personally and professionally. Like any major event, the impact of the pandemic and its ripple effects will be studied for many years to come. This holds true for e-discovery. What used to make up a minor portion of discoverable data has now come to the forefront. Cloud-based communication data is no longer emerging, it has emerged.
Blog Post
Q&A: Conor Gavin Discusses E-Discovery Trends and Segment Growth in Ireland
Demand for e-discovery and digital forensics capabilities is growing rapidly in Ireland. FTI Consulting is stepping up to the market’s emerging needs with the expansion of experts in the region and solutions to address the increasing complexity of litigation, investigations and governance in today’s climate. We recently spoke with Conor Gavin, a Senior Director in the segment’s Dublin office, to discuss his focus for supporting clients in Ireland and what he sees as the key issues for the year ahead.
Video
Understanding Technology Assisted Review: What To Use and Where
Technology Assisted Review (TAR) is discussed often but also difficult to fully grasp. It is referred to by many different names and comes with many nuances of what form to use and where. In this session, FTI's Depaak Chheda and Relativity's Bill Bailey share their deep knowledge and experience with TAR to help simplify approaches to use and reduce the intimidation factor.
Blog Post
E-Discovery in 2021 is a Brave New World
Anyone who’s been in the e-discovery industry for any length of time knows that change is the only constant. It’s a practice and industry born from the very notion of change, and has been evolving steadily since its early days two decades ago. What’s happened over the last year is that the rate of change is now quickly picking up momentum. Trends that were just emerging in 2019 took full shape and began disrupting the space in 2020. More advancements—in the demands of e-discovery and the innovations brought forth to meet those demands—are on the horizon.
Blog Post
Canadian regulators kept busy in 2020. Within the Competition Bureau, under the helm of new director Matthew Boswell, numerous new initiatives and guidelines were introduced to ramp up the nation’s competition oversight. In parallel, data privacy authorities shared new provisions for cross-border transfers impacting personal and sensitive data and legislators introduced a sweeping new privacy bill to refresh the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).
Blog Post
In a Year of Chaos, General Counsel Step Into Infinitely Expanding Roles
Chief legal officers are facing unprecedented change. The challenges of 2020 have redefined an already changing role for the general counsel, and a second annual study of leading chief legal officers indicates they are rising to the occasion, becoming busines drivers in the own right and serving as crucial guardians against myriad emerging risks.
Video
Advanced Workflows With Brainspace
Brainspace offers a vast array of visualizations to create efficiency in e-discovery and investigations. In this installment of the FTI Insights webinar series, practical application of Brainspace’s visualizations are shared to help streamline reviewer workflows.
Case Study
E-discovery and Electronic Evidence Review for Financial Services Client
When an international retail banking institution needed a single, trusted e-discovery provider backed by a global team of renowned experts to improve consistency across their functional areas and reduce their overall e-discovery costs, our experts were able to help.
Blog Post
Never Have I Ever: The Newest Game in E-Discovery
Over the last several months, our teams here at FTI Technology have been fielding an increasing influx of questions about emerging data types. We’re often asked, “have you ever heard of, collected from, produced…” about an ever-growing list of emerging data types. This reason for this is that the massive proliferation of apps and cloud services in use at corporations today is beginning to creep into scope in e-discovery matters.
Video
Why Should European Legal Departments Consider Insourcing E-discovery?
Exterro’s The State of E-Discovery 2020 research, which compiled data from several different legal reports, found that 50% of legal departments now have built-in e-discovery services.
White Paper
The General Counsel Report 2021
Learn how major events impacted the role of general counsel and how the learnings from 2020 can be applied to effectively navigate 2021. The report features candid responses from over 30 surveyed general counsel.
White Paper
E-discovery in 2020: The Sudden Shift in Our Data Footprint
The pandemic has impacted us all in many ways, personally and professionally. Like any major event, the impact of the pandemic and its ripple effects will be studied for many years to come. This holds true for e-discovery. In this FTI Report we examine the impact of rapid change in our discoverable data make-up. We take a close-up view of what it means for legal teams---how to adapt, adjust and take action as analyzing rich media as well as fragmented chat strings become key to e-discovery and investigation efficacy.
Case Study
FTI Consulting Leads Massive Internal Documents Inquiry in Multibillion Euro Merger
In an ongoing Phase II merger clearance investigation, FTI’s client needed to respond to a Request for Information (‘RFI’) received from DG Comp that required the identification, preservation, searching, and production of internal documents from thirty-eight employees over three years.
Blog Post
Roundtable Discussion: How a High-Stakes FTC Quick Look Inspired E-Discovery Workflow Innovation
The E-Discovery Consulting & Services practice within FTI Consulting’s Technology segment recently completed e-discovery for a Federal Trade Commission quick look as part of the second request for a merger between two healthcare industry companies. Using Brainspace’s Technology Assisted Review (TAR) model, the team developed novel workflows to enable efficient e-discovery in the face of a number of unique circumstances. We recently chatted with the team involved on the case, which was led by Senior Managing Director Wendy King and included Managing Director Jon Murdock and Senior Director Myron Williams, to understand how the matter was different from other second request inquiries. They discussed the challenges involved and shared details around the new workflows FTI developed as part of the engagement.
Case Study
In a merger between two healthcare industry companies, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a quick look as part of the second request process. Working under a compressed timeline, outside counsel engaged FTI Consulting to quickly structure a review and stabilize the Brainspace Technology Assisted Review (TAR) model so the parties could determine the risk level of overproducing and prepare the dataset for production to the FTC. A first set of documents had been submitted to regulators, with a second production due just as the COVID-19 pandemic reached the U.S. and self-isolation orders were being implemented.
Blog Post
E-Discovery Predictions Revisited
So far, 2020 has been…. an “experience." The challenges our industry had braced for, the opportunities we planned to seize, have been suddenly upended in ways we never would have anticipated. At the end of last year, our team shared a few predictions for what was to come in 2020. They weren’t wrong, but the landscape in which they are coming to fruition has changed significantly from what we envisioned. Now, looking at the wake COVID-19 has left behind to date, it’s a good time to revisit those predictions and revise them to match the way the world, the legal industry and e-discovery have changed this year.
Video
Interview: Gráinne Bryan on FTI Technology in Ireland
In this interview, Chris Dale of The eDisclosure information Project spoke with FTI Consulting’s Grainne Bryan to discuss her role in Dublin and the addition of FTI’s Technology segment to FTI’s growing Irish establishment, part of a wider organisation which brings together technology skills in Madrid, France, Germany and South Africa.
Blog Post
Why Global Reach and Local Expertise Matter in Cross-Border E-discovery
The interconnectedness of people, organizations and nations around the world has never been more apparent than it is today. The ongoing and rapid increase in globalization has driven change and growth in countless industries, transformation in business processes, diversification in economies, and yes, even widespread pandemics. It has also led to a spike in cross-border legal and e-discovery matters—a trend that is continuing on an upswing. Navigating international e-discovery in the best of circumstances is a challenge for even the most sophisticated attorneys. It is more so now, as legal teams struggle to adapt their work in the midst of this global health crisis.
Video
Proactive Compliance Monitoring Through Advanced Technology
Managing compliance in today’s fast-paced connected world has grown increasingly challenging. Legal and compliance teams within highly regulated industries are too often responding to incidents after the fact, where the goal is damage control as opposed to prevention. Join experts from FTI Technology and Relativity as they share new approaches for proactive compliance monitoring. From this session, attendees will learn best practices for using advanced technology to mitigate compliance risk.
Blog Post
In the Midst of Significant Change, E-Discovery Providers Need Agility and Foresight
Collaboration and new forms of communication are steadily gaining on traditional channels. Worldwide revenue for this market reached more than US$38 million last year, and is growing more than 15 percent year-over-year in EMEA. In an e-discovery context, this increasing adoption of collaboration applications and tools—including Microsoft Teams and OneNote, Slack, Telegram, Zoom, etc.—is a prelude to stark change.
Video
Maintaining Remote E-Discovery Workforce Continuity, Featuring Senior Managing Director, Wendy King.
Learn how FTI approaches e-discovery personnel, process and technology as our workforce accelerates its shift to remote work. You can use these learnings to apply them to your own teams and management of clients.
Webcast
Navigating Through Uncertain Times in e-Discovery – Challenges and Opportunities
Join FTI Consulting's Brian Stuart and a panel of experts at Relativity Fest London, as they discuss the changing legal and e-discovery landscape, the issues they are seeing in the field and how they are driving their businesses forward to accelerate out of the crisis.
Webcast
Hear from Tom Jackson and a panel of experts discuss the impact the global Covid19 pandemic is having on the e-discovery industry, how e-discovery professionals have adapted so far, and what changes could be likely post-coronavirus.
White Paper
Five Steps To E-Discovery Workforce Continuity in Our New Normal
At FTI, we have adapted our e-discovery offerings to adhere to pandemic-related stay-at-home orders and distancing policies. In this guide, we share the steps we have taken to maintain continuity with the hope you can apply them to your own organization and teams.
Blog Post
Maintaining Continuity as We Adapt to The New Normal
At FTI, we have adapted our e-discovery offerings to adhere to pandemic-related stay-at-home orders and distancing policies. In this guide, we share the steps we have taken to maintain continuity with the hope you can apply them to your own organization and teams.
Blog Post
Q&A: Geoff Budge Leads Technology Practice in South Africa, Offers Business Guidance for COVID-19
Managing Director Geoff Budge has been working with FTI clients in South Africa for more than three years. Now, he is building a team of experts and solutions for the newly-established Technology practice in South Africa. His team will focus on expanding in the region and delivering the Technology segment’s client-centric, flexible model across e-discovery, information governance, risk, data privacy, security and legal operations solutions. We talked to Geoff about this move, and his thoughts on the biggest issues corporations in South Africa are facing during the current pandemic.
Webcast
Proactive Compliance Monitoring Through Advanced Technology
Managing compliance in today’s fast-paced connected world has grown increasingly challenging. Legal and compliance teams within highly regulated industries are too often responding to incidents after the fact, where the goal is damage control as opposed to prevention. Join experts from FTI Technology and Relativity as they share new approaches for proactive compliance monitoring. From this session, attendees will learn best practices for using advanced technology to mitigate compliance risk.
Blog Post
Q&A: Renato Fazzone Discusses Expanding Footprint and Client Service in Germany
The recent appointment of Renato Fazzone as Senior Managing Director and Germany Head of Technology established our permanent presence in the German market for our Technology practice. Backed by more than 15 years working in e-discovery and litigation support, as well as advising clients on corporate fraud and antitrust matters, Renato is eager to expand our offerings and expertise to clients in the region. We recently sat down with him to discuss his vision, the top issues impacting German corporations today, and how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting FTI’s offerings.
Video
Building a Playbook for Successful E-Discovery Implementation
Learn practical approaches to building an e-discovery playbook specific to your organization.
Blog Post
Q&A: Successful E-Discovery Starts with Comprehensive Case Management
In e-discovery, counsel and review teams are juggling a lot of moving parts. Between collecting data across numerous locations and data types, assessing key facts, establishing workflows and determining which analytics to apply, e-discovery teams have little time to worry about the logistics of project management. At FTI, Emily Seabury and Elizabeth Noble are among the team of case managers behind the scenes, making sure everything runs smoothly from start to finish. They and FTI’s broader client teams aspire to always be anticipating the next steps to reach a client’s goal, so that the client need never to ask for an update or flag something that needs to be done. We sat down with Emily and Elizabeth to discuss our case management system, and why it is so crucial to ensuring successful outcomes for client matters.
Video
Gain Efficiencies In Investigations Through Advanced Methods and Technologies
Best practices for increasing adoption of advanced technologies within your organization.
White Paper
Case Narratives and The Next Generation of Discovery
As e-discovery technology advances, expert teams are utilizing new processes to improve on the existing workflows and to drive greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness in factual case strategy development. In turn, attorneys that partner with researchers will serve their clients better, faster and more cost effectively during this critical phase of litigations and investigations. This will lead to improved client satisfaction and allow attorneys to maintain their positions as trusted advisors, all while continuing to deliver consistency and quality.
Blog Post
Q&A: David Meadows Joins FTI, Eyes Innovation in E-Discovery and Investigations
Newly appointed as a Senior Managing Director, David Meadows is bringing his e-discovery and computer forensics expertise to FTI Technology’s E-Discovery Consulting & Services and Digital Forensics & Investigations practices. Based out of the Chicago office, David will help clients leverage advanced analytics to reduce cost and risk around their data challenges. He sat down with us to discuss his new role and his thoughts on innovation.
Blog Post
2020 Forecast: Expect Landmark Changes in E-Discovery, Data Privacy and Investigations
Across our practice areas, we asked our experts to share their predictions for what will shape legal, compliance and information governance in the coming year. Below is a roundup—across new laws, emerging technology and key industries—of what they expect will make the biggest impact to businesses worldwide.
Case Study
FTI Helps Biotech Company Meet Second Request Deadline for Major Merger
A major biotechnology company was seeking Federal Trade Commission regulatory approval of $1.2B merger. The agency issued a Second Request requiring a rapid response. The amount of relevant data to collect and review amounted to several terabytes. Also, there was an additional challenge in that the company’s systems were located primarily in the cloud, with data housed within multiple non-traditional platforms including Slack, Confluence, Workplace by Facebook, Asana, Box and more. The FTI team was able to work quickly with the diverse data sources to target, collect, and review over 12 million documents, helping the corporation to achieve compliance within the deadline set by the FTC.
Webcast
The Business of Law 2020: The FTI-Relativity General Counsel Survey
What does the future hold for law and business in 2020 and beyond? Chief legal officers provide a unique perspective, and to analyze that perspective, Relativity and the FTI Technology business unit of FTI Consulting commissioned a study by Ari Kaplan Advisors, surveying general counsel on a wide variety of legal issues affecting business and the legal profession. Limiting the study to chief legal officers, the survey covered topics ranging from the technical competence of legal teams to preparedness for cyberattacks. Attend this webcast to understand what these results imply about the future of the legal industry.
White Paper
Merger Clearance Investigations - Increased Rigor and Emphasis on Internal Documents
Historically, when two companies have proposed a merger or acquisition, European competition authorities evaluated various economic and market analyses to determine whether the transaction would establish too dominant of a position for the companies in any given market. Now, regulators, particularly DG Comp and competition agencies in the UK, Germany and France, are increasingly interested in the review of contemporaneous internal documents.
Video
Managing International E-discovery with RelativityOne
At Relativity Fest in London, FTI Consulting’s Wendy King spoke with Chris Dale of the e-disclosure information project about FTI offering Relativity across four continents. As most of our matters span multiple jurisdictions, this means we have a solution for clients that is scalable so they are able to focus on what they need to do without worrying about limits on infrastructure.
Blog Post
In Two Decades, E-discovery Has Changed and Stayed the Same
E-discovery is a continually changing practice. For approximately two decades now, it has played a tremendous role in shaping the legal world. As e-discovery’s influence and prevalence has grown over the years, the technologies, economics, processes and expertise around it have in many ways become unrecognizable to what they were in the early 2000s. Still, much about the field has also remained the same.
Blog Post
Tips and Tricks for Streamlining Complex Cases
E-discovery matters are more complex than ever before. While the legal industry now has access to powerful tools that can significantly reduce the time invested in manual processes, lawyers are at the same time facing exploding data volumes and an ever-growing spread of data sources and evidence types.
Blog Post
Client Service in Case Management: Q&A with Elizabeth Noble
Senior Director Elizabeth Noble is an unsung hero. As a case manager for some of our largest and most complex e-discovery matters, she is a strategic driver for the backend work that ensures a case goes smoothly. We sat down with her for a discussion about her role, and the importance of case management in saving time and money in e-discovery.
White Paper
This year’s State of E-discovery report pulls from the latest economic, case law, and professional e-discovery and legal industries to paint a picture of an industry at an inflection point. With the information contained in it, you can make the strategic decisions you need to ensure you stay ahead of the e-discovery curve.
What if you could understand the key facts of your matter at the beginning of the project and use that knowledge to drive your strategy?
Video
The Growing Need for FTI's E-discovery Services in France
Thomas Sely is Senior Director at FTI Consulting in Paris. In this video Thomas discusses the demand for forensic technology in France, where FTI has been expanding its technology practice. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the uncertainty around Brexit had made it important for FTI to have a team in continental Europe – it set up an office 10 years ago in Paris, and is expanding its investigation and litigation support team.
Video
Wendy King Talks About how Relativity Works with FTI Consulting
Wendy King talks about the always-available infrastructure of RelativityOne which allows FTI's consultants to focus on clients’ needs using whatever tools are suitable for a matter. Wendy places a particular emphasis on the training and support which FTI Consulting gets from Relativity.
Video
Daryl Teshima Talks About FTI Consulting’s Relationship with Relativity
In this interview, Daryl Teshima talks about the significant benefits for clients in offering both industry-leading e-discovery and document review platforms Ringtail and Relativity in order to give clients the widest possible choice and also offers FTI's experts a toolkit for solving problems big and small.
Video
FTI Consulting’s Find Facts Fast Approach to E-discovery
There is a danger of treating discovery as a purely formal process, something done simply in order to meet an obligation. As Craig Earnshaw puts it in this interview with Chris Dale, the identification of facts often appears as a mere by-product of that formal process.
Video
Craig Earnshaw on the Changes in E-discovery Over His Long Career
Craig Earnshaw has been working in FTI Consulting’s Technology segment for 10 years and had already spent ten years in the then-nascent e-discovery and Computer Forensics world before that. In this interview he talks about the changes which he has seen over that time, identifying three main changes. One is what he calls the "frequency of requirement" – the increasing need to look at data on a computer system for any disputes/investigations exercise. Second, he points to a rise in the number of lawyers who understand and practice in areas which require a knowledge of e-discovery practice. Third, Craig points to the range and diversity of companies delivering software and services to corporations and law firms.
Video
The Changing E-discovery Expectations of Corporate Clients
The traditional model was that clients instructed lawyers in a matter – a litigation case or a regulatory inquiry for example, and the lawyers then instructed experts at FTI Consulting to deal with the management of electronic data. That, however, is changing explains Sam Farley in this video – it is not just litigation anymore and the instructions are no longer coming only from lawyers. Organisations are gaining greater control over the process as a whole and coming to FTI Consulting for longer-term organisational and pre-emptive advice and not just for a specific case or matter.
Video
The Benefits of FTI's Partnership with Relativity
FTI Consulting’s Glenn Barden speaks to Chris Dale about FTI's adoption of market-leading e-discovery platform Relativity.
Case Study
Continuous Active Learning (CAL) from FTI Technology Aids Baker McKenzie
Baker McKenzie was challenged to quickly and cost-effectively conduct a legal review of more than 200,000 documents to help determine case strategy. The law firm was on the cutting edge of using various technologies and processes – from visual analytics to offshoring legal review to lower-cost review lawyers in other countries – to build in efficiencies and keep e-discovery costs low for clients.
Case Study
How to "Find Facts Fast" in an Internal Investigation
Advanced technology – continuous active learning (CAL) – and a seasoned team of "find facts fast" investigators work in tandem to find key data quickly.
Video
RelativityOne Matters in Galaxies Far, Far Away
The force can be with you and your team if you implement a consistent playbook across all of your matters, from any geography. Yet organizing the people, process and technology to consistently and cost-effectively handle data in accordance with local culture and data privacy laws may be a challenge. Attend this webcast for a practical discussion of how people and processes can align with RelativityOne to execute on a global playbook.
Blog Post
The legal industry is hungry for guidance on how to deal with the explosion in cloud-based applications and new data types that are creating headaches for organizations of all sizes. While the threat of big data has cast a shadow over IT and legal departments for several years, the real challenge is proving to be the variety of data, and it is quickly defeating traditional collection and review tools and strategies.
Blog Post
Part 2: The Evolution of Predictive Coding in Australia
Paul Hunter shares some comments on what lawyers in Australia need to keep in mind as predictive coding gains adoption in the region.
Blog Post
The Evolution of Predictive Coding in Australia
Phil Smith, a director in FTI Technology’s Melbourne, Australia office, is an expert advisor to clients looking to implement predictive coding. He shared some insights on how the technology is evolving in Australia and FTI’s efforts to help clients update strategies and streamline e-discovery reviews using technology that is still nascent in the region.