Data-driven insights, value and efficiency
Effective data management is key in many large litigated and regulatory matters, and in the wake of cyber incidents. In turn, data itself is becoming more voluminous and complex as technology and data types evolve.
Wotton Kearney’s eDiscovery and Cyber Forensics team leverages the latest technology in big data, artificial intelligence and automation to provide data-driven insights, value and efficiency in litigated matters and cyber incidents in a defensible manner.
The team holds several globally recognised industry certifications.
eDiscovery
Our data professionals have significant experience in managing high-profile and complex legal matters, regulatory responses and investigations involving large volumes of data.
We will apply advanced analytics and AI technologies to each phase of your matter. This can span collection, validation and gap analysis, to early case assessment, data processing, document review and production, though to depositions, evidentiary hearings and trial preparation.
The combination of our experience, technical expertise and application of the latest technology have proven to be cost-effective with faster turnaround times.
Cyber forensic services
We provide fast, accurate cyber forensics and PII detection by partnering with Canopy’s latest purpose-built AI-powered technology platform. This will support you and your customers to meet non-negotiable data breach deadlines and give you confidence in the accuracy of your assessment.
By using the Canopy software, we can reduce the time, cost, risk, and effort associated with the defensible detection of sensitive data by streamlining data breach response at every step, from process through to notification. Importantly, engaging WK to do this work means you will maintain legal professional privilege, which can reduce exposures if action is taken later.
Recent work
WK represents a global construction contractor in a subrogated recovery matter. The matter involves several engineering and design companies regarding costs incurred by the contractor for rectifying and remediating damages during the construction and demolition of a historic hospital in NSW.
We were faced with the challenge of extracting and reviewing close to one million documents from project management software specific to the construction industry. We worked closely with the client’s IT and software provider to ensure the data was exported in a way that was defensible, while maintaining integrity of all relevant metadata. We also had to analyse and manipulate the data to maintain the relationships between documents.
Given how many documents needed to be reviewed, we leveraged AI and machine learning to find the relevant documents. The ECF team and lawyers worked closely together to identify the types of relevant documents. We then trained the AI models to help find other potentially relevant documents in the pool of one million documents.
Using AI and machine learning, together with our state-of-the-art eDiscovery platform, our lawyers saved over 95% of the time that would have been spent had the team reviewed all one million documents.
The insured is an Australian-based fund manager with a presence in Asia Pacific. The fund manager received a notice from ASIC to produce documents regarding contraventions of the Corporations Act 2001.
With short notice, we needed to review and produce relevant documents to ASIC while also meeting ASIC’s strict technical document production guidelines. Our ECF team received tens of thousands of potentially relevant emails from the fund manager to analyse and prepare for review.
Because of the tight timelines, we wanted to cull the data to ensure an efficient review of the documents. We first applied advanced eDiscovery techniques, such as deduplication, filtering, keyword searching and threading emails, to a smaller set of data for review. This process reduced the review set to roughly 3,000 documents.
After finalising the document review exercise, we analysed ASIC’s technical requirements and ensured that the documents were produced to meet the regulator’s strict requirements. The ECF team also worked closely with the lawyers to ensure all privileged material was handled appropriately.
We were engaged by the insurer to provide privacy advice to the insured, which is a premium island resort located in Queensland. In 2022, the resort was affected by a ransomware attack, which resulted in the encryption of its data. The threat actors also published, and eventually took down, some of the infiltrated data on a website. We were instructed to review roughly 120,000 documents for any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that could potentially trigger notification obligations under the Privacy Act.
Under time pressure, the ECF team worked with our Cyber lawyers to use the most advanced privacy and data breach software in Canopy. The ECF team tweaked the AI models to ensure that the key PII elements would be captured and reviewed using the sophisticated PII review platform.
After reducing the review set to only 10,000 documents, the ECF assisted the lawyers in facilitating the review. After finishing the review, the ECF team used big data analytics to conduct data mapping, manipulation, deduplication and consolidation of the PII entities for notifications.
We act for a large group of international insurers in a litigated coverage dispute with the insured where design and construction defects occurred across multiple aspects of a joint venture developed LNG plant. The insured is a global oil and gas company. The claims are alleged by the insureds to have a value of multiple billions of dollars and involve detailed consideration of the trigger of indemnity and the operation of various exclusions.
The ongoing matter involves the review of millions of documents, which include complex drawings, reports, emails, photos, videos and recordings. Because of the variety in data and document types from different parties, the ECF team used out-of-the-box data analysis techniques to prepare the data so it could be reviewed using a single document review platform.
While preparing the data for review, the ECF team developed automation for enhanced processing and uploading workflows for large tranches of complex data. This led to significant efficiency savings.
The ECF team worked with experts across the globe around the clock to ensure complex industry specific documents were reviewed in an efficient manner. Because of the complexity of the matter, the ECF team also assisted in drafting a document exchange protocol with the other parties involved to ensure an efficient and cooperative exchange of discoverable documents.
To assist with the review, we also leveraged advanced AI models to analyse different categories of relevant data to find other potentially relevant documents across the millions of documents in the data set.