In the digital age, investigations are more about followingtrails of bytes than breadcrumbs. But while there is inevitablymore information than ever to work with, examining it can pose aslew of challenges. Todays investigators have to adhere to variouse-discovery regulations, for instance, or navigate dataprivacy laws to collect evidence at home and aboard.
And then there is the question of the data itself. While one maybe more likely to get at the truth of a matter with more data athand, reviewing all that data poses a great challenge.
For Alex Southwell, partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher andone of several speakers at Exigers June 26 How Data Analytics CanTransform Todays Complex Investigations discussion, the biggestproblem rests not with data or law, but with human reviewersthemselves.
The problem is that many companies are trying to [performinvestigations] by using the old tools, by throwing bodies at theproblems, and the mismatch between problems and solutions iscausing dramatic inefficiencies, he said.
Also speaking at the event was Wayne Matus, managing director ofthe investigations group at UBS AG. Matus explained that humanreviewers oftentimes fail to find all relevant data or evencompletely agree on what data should be deemed relevant to aninvestigation.
If you take a look at human review and analyze it, you see thatpeople are really not very good at reviewing documents, he said.Some people can think of human review as the gold standard, butits fairly tarnished gold.
For Matus and other speakers at the event, the answer to humanshortcomings lies in modern technology.
By using data analytics and document review tools, thelikelihood of picking out what is significant in a data tranche isgreatly enhanced, Matus said. And not only is using such toolsfar less expensive than human review, but its also moreconsiderate of peoples privacy.
In investigations that include a persons private emails, forexample, Matus noted that human reviewers working withouttechnology would need to read every single document to determinetheir relevancy. But if you had a technological tool look at thoseemails, you are no longer infringing on [that persons] right toprivacy, he said.
And whats more, such tools can also find relevant informationin places that investigators may not have considered.
Brandon Daniels, managing director and president of ExigerAnalytics, recalled a time during a difficult financialinvestigation when he decided expand the investigations scope bycollecting all communication information relating to an individualduring a specific time period and running it through multipleanalytics tools.