In a data-driven economy, data enables commercial and economic growth, innovation, and social benefit.

Businesses of all sizes are trying to carve out a competitive advantage by leveraging digital information. But data management is challenging. Increasing volumes of data, more legal and regulatory requirements, privacy rules and threats of cyber breach compel businesses to rethink how they manage and protect their data.

In light of several recent Royal Commissions and ensuing increased regulatory control, it’s clear that eDiscovery involves more than litigation. The vast amount of data in the discovery process for investigations means that quick and efficient access to analyse relevant information for eDiscovery is vital.

What is eDiscovery

eDiscovery is any process where electronic data is sought, secured, accessed and analysed for the purpose of legal or administrative proceedings.

The time and cost of the eDiscovery process is profoundly impacted by how well you understand your business’s data management, storage and retrieval. Normally, the vast majority of eDiscovery cost is incurred during the review stage, but it is possible to greatly reduce it. Good information governance structures will ensure that you can quickly identify and extract relevant data. The less data you collect, the less that needs to be reviewed — and the less you spend.

Helping you meet demand and combine expertise across jurisdictions

Data storage systems are being stretched to the limit. Your firm can easily find itself swamped in requests causing you to revert to manual review. This problem is especially common with in-house platforms, which can struggle to keep pace with the surge in data volumes and requests. Using a more flexible and regularly updated software as a service (SaaS) platform makes it easier to respond to changing demands while reducing upfront investment.

With so many cases and evidence requests cutting across multiple borders, it’s important to have people on the ground who understand both the legal requirements and the technical operation of IT platforms and eDiscovery systems. The latest developments in the application of eDiscovery are faster, more responsive and more reliable.

Agility to quickly take advantage of these opportunities gives your firm an important competitive edge.

How we help

We work with business of all sizes to gain greater data visibility and improve information governance and cyber security systems. We help you to proactively align strategies around archiving, disaster recovery and data management — so you know where your data is, how to access it, protect it and retrieve it quickly and efficiently.

If your organisation is involved in a litigation, a government request for information or an internal investigation, we can assist you with eDiscovery. We provide expertise and resources to identify, collect, process and produce relevant data to legal teams, IT and other business stakeholders. We utilise leading technology, industry best practice and leverage the capabilities of a national team of experts with experience in IT, data management and analytics, legal, law enforcement and investigations. So you can focus on what matters.

Chris Watson
Partner
Chris Watson

Case study: Cyber eDiscovery Resilience

Client challenge
Client challenge
Client challenge
Our client needed to analyse a backup of all data connected with an individual involved in a high-profile international fraud case. This data included hard drive of forensic images, images of email servers and even backup tapes – in all, almost 10 TB of data spanning the past decade. The client had to find any evidence of wrongdoing and deliver it for legal review before producing it for a court. It would have been impossible and cost prohibitive to conduct traditional linear review of these masses of evidence.
The solution
The solution
The solution
The advisory engaged Grant Thornton’s Cyber-eDiscovery Resilience Team to provide a cost-effective solution for dealing with this much data to find relevant evidence sooner. The volume of data made an on-premise solution unviable, so we used Nuix Discover, an ISO 27001-certified cloud platform, to conduct an early case assessment of the data. Applying culling techniques such as deduplication, keyword searches, concept analysis, social network analysis and date range filters helped the advisory defensibly eliminate the vast majority of data that was not relevant to the case.
The outcome
The outcome
The outcome
Within two months, the early case assessment had culled the data set from 12 million items to just 1.8 million. This eliminated 85 per cent of items from needing to be hosted in a review platform and examined by lawyers, achieving a substantial cost and time saving for the client.
Find out more

Subscribe to receive our publications

Subscribe now to be kept up-to-date with timely and relevant insights, unique to the nature of your business, your areas of interest and the industry in which you operate.