welcome to another episode of our focus on forensic series i'm Hiba from the forensic investigations corporate intelligence and litigation support practice at a and I'm Luish working together with Hiba given the success of our last episode on forensic technology let's deepen our understanding on how technology has become invaluable in accessing defensible data to assist our clients in regulatory investigations and with inquiries from authorities authorities in Luxembourg and across Europe have become very active whether in relation to antitrust financial markets anti-money laundering and in some countries anti-corruption or greenwashing whether or not it starts with a dawn raid some enquiries involve providing large volumes of data the requested documents and data can sometimes go back many years and include electronic and paper documents emails entire folders or hard drives the process of locating preserving analyzing and at times delivering the relevant data to the authorities can be burdensome and complex and even introduce some risks applying a robust process using forensic technology will make it more efficient one of the biggest misconceptions we often hear is that engaging forensic experts and using appropriate technology to handle the data is too expensive however we have seen without exception that the costs of not using a proper forensic procedure and the appropriate technology end up much higher than trusting forensic experts from the start in this video we want to share some key dos and don'ts based on our experience from real cases don't assume that all important and relevant data is immediately available companies host many different data management systems within the organization it is important to know which data is readily available which has been archived and where it is stored and physically located clients underestimate the time it may take to locate and access the data and the delay may be perceived by the requesting authorities as being uncooperative therefore do engage a forensic team that understands all the nuances and characteristics of corporate data that incorporate email messaging platforms like Microsoft Teams or Slack recently we advised a client on doing targeted collections of Office 365 data using Microsoft Purview to ensure all direct and indirect channels of communication related to the persons of interest were considered after being initially missed don't assume your internal IT teams are forensic investigators do not put that pressure on them as competent as they are internal IT teams do not manage corporate systems in anticipation of a potential investigation a proper forensic process for data preservation collection and analysis requires a different set of skills therefore do understand the importance of the process to preserve and collect data by engaging forensic specialists every year we have clients who prefer to put their internal IT teams in charge of collecting data in the context of an investigation and very often they end up engaging us later because something went wrong missing inconsistent or accidentally modified data that does not mean internal IT IT teams are not skilled just that the tools and the approaches are different don't attempt to review the data manually going through hundreds of thousands of emails attachments various communications technical or financial documents on your laptops in Outlook Excel Word etc is time consuming inefficient and opens the door to accidental changes to the data risking suspicions of having tampered with data you also risk losing valuable time in the process to then produce the relevant data sets therefore do use the available technology and rely on forensic experts to ensure efficiency and traceability for example by using our document review platform Relativity the noise is eliminated the data is centralized in one place and accessible to users in different locations such as your internal legal team and your external legal council preliminary identification of the most important and relevant documents using conceptual analytics and machine learning models can be very helpful to then focus your review the forensic technology team at Arent is supported by powerful marketleading tools such as MC case and relativity these help us reduce time and costs and reduce repetitive tasks we understand the value and implications of data in an investigation so let us worry about the technical aspects to better support your legal teams and legal councils stay tuned for the next episode
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