Jurisdictions involved in this assignment
UK, Netherlands and USA
The business and background
We were approached by a globally recognized organization that investigates sports match fixing to assist with the collection of relevant materials to identify the involvement of an individual suspected of initiating and facilitating illegal match-fixing.
What we did
This case necessitated analysis and extraction of multiple mobile phones, laptop computers and webmail/online storage (Gmail). Once collected and processed, the data was made available in a sophisticated eDiscovery document review platform (‘Reveal-Brainspace’). The review platform facilitated a combination of standard searches (keywords/phrases), and sophisticated searches (concept searching, email threading, image labelling). In addition, the advanced ‘Augmented Intelligence’ techniques incorporated ‘machine learning’ to prioritize documents into folders that contained only the most likely relevant materials (sometimes referred to as TAR (Technology Assisted Review). In this case, we also utilized ‘Sentiment Analysis’ to rapidly find those conversations with a particular emotional content (in this case ‘Negativity’), which was extremely useful in drawing together useful conversations.
The aim was to interrogate over 350,000 emails, images and documents to find the key individuals, and their level of involvement and then trace how and where payments had been made between individuals and organizations.
At the beginning of the case, there were also legal issues with confidentiality and privilege, in relation to the various items collected for review (laptop/mobile phone/webmail). To overcome these issues, our team provided a separate ‘Data Triage’ area for one legal team to perform their own review on certain documents/files (that we had searched for using a variety of terms and techniques). Once all parties were happy with this ‘Data Triage’ step, the balance of the data was made available for full review.
The outcome
A large amount of incriminating material relevant to multiple threads of the investigation was found, which allowed the organization to bring its initial proceedings to a successful conclusion (in addition, other avenues of investigation into further individuals were created).
