Catalyst CR Helps Client Complete Worldwide FCPA Investigation Involving 1.3 Million Documents in Over 12 Languages
With the stock market at record levels, a large private equity fund sought to spin off one of its holdings through an IPO. The company had activities in over 20 countries across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. The fund wanted to make sure that no potential issues existed under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or other anti-bribery legislation before filing for the IPO. To accomplish this objective, the company retained a Global 5 law firm to oversee an internal investigation. The investigation needed to be prompt as well as thorough given that the window for a successful IPO could close at any time.
Scope of the Investigation
The purpose of the investigation was to unearth any potential issue in any location where the company operates. This meant collecting 1.3 million documents totaling 400 gigabytes from operations in countries around the globe. While English served as the company's primary operating language, local language documents abounded. In all, the documents contained over a dozen different languages, including Russian, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Arabic, Korean, Japanese and Ukrainian. In many cases, individual documents contained multiple languages.
Selecting a Review Tool
The company and its counsel recognized that reviewing this data set presented significant challenges that would require a specialized review platform. The platform would need to be able to handle the nuances presented by a wide language set. Many of the languages (like Russian, Hebrew and Japanese) use scripts different from English. Some languages (like Arabic) get read from right to left. Other languages (like Chinese, Japanese and Korean) put no spaces before or after characters making it difficult to know where words begin and end. In the interest of time, the platform also had to allow the entire review to occur in a single repository.
In addition to handling the linguistic challenges, the review platform had to provide all of the features that corporations and their counsel have come to rely on when handling large document reviews. This included the ability to review documents in their native format. It also included the ability to use complex searches of hundreds of key terms (words, dates, fielded data, etc.) to cull documents and organize potentially relevant materials into logical batches for targeted review assignments. Finally, the team required the ability to easily export data out of the platform for storage on the law firm's network.
The law firm running the investigation evaluated a number of different potential platforms, giving each vendor sample data and key search terms to run against it. At the end of this evaluation, the firm selected Catalyst CR.
Organizing the Review
The nature of the investigation required that the law firm examine the practices and behaviors in each individual region. The law firm assigned specific attorneys to each region so that they could become familiar with the specific practices in the area (contracts, deals, custodians, etc.). This approach improved the efficiency of the review considerably, but required that the documents be organized accordingly.
Organizing the Documents
The team used several different approaches to organize the documents for review.
First, the team ran a variety of key term searches to organize the documents by region.
Next, the team ran a series of searches of up to several hundred carefully crafted terms to narrow the document sets down to the most relevant materials. Catalyst CR returned results within seconds. Many of these search terms were in English - the primary language used by the company and of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. To catch relevant local language documents, the team used fluent attorneys from the law firm to create both literal and figurative translations of the key search terms. The combined search was then run against the multi-language document set.
The team also used searches to organize documents by language. Using Catalyst CR's language identification capabilities, the team grouped relevant documents by language and assigned them to fluent speakers for review. The hot documents identified as part of this review were exported out of CR as PDFs and translated offline. Both the original document and its translation then were stored on the law firm's network.
Results
The team completed its review in under 12 weeks enabling the company to move forward with its plans.
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