Introduction :
High stakes litigation today requires parties to build their cases based on an enormous quantity of documents, emails and data. The difference between winning and losing depends on your team’s ability to have ready command over the voluminous evidence so you can master the complexity and can have easy access to the right exhibits when you need them.
The Client :
A large group of plaintiffs had sued two Saudi businesses (including Al-Saena of the Saad Group) in a Cayman Island court based on claims involving a massive financial fraud. More than a dozen law firms and accounting firms were cooperating in bringing the case on behalf of a consortium of 118 bank lenders. By order of the Cayman Island’s court, the plaintiffs were required to combine their efforts and share the cost in assembling a document repository as part of the preparation for trial. The documents set included the complete bank statements for the defendants from all 118 lenders. An RFP was circulated to leading document management vendors who had the requisite expertise in analyzing and coding financial records in order to build an easily searchable repository. Based on our extensive experience and competitive rates, Cenza was selected as winning bidder among the 12 responding vendors.
The Challenge :
When we were retained on this project, the Cayman Island court had already set a trial date, which left us with a short window of less than 12 months to undertake the review, coding and database entry of more than 400,000 documents that covered more than 6,000,000 financial transactions. The documents required OCR, unitization and coding with up to 12 fields to provide sufficient detail for forensic accounting purposes. Due to the nature of underlying claims, the coding work on this project required an extremely high degree of accuracy so that the plaintiffs could properly reconstruct the complex trail of fraudulent transactions.
The Solution :
A project of this scope requires an efficient and complex workflow that can be scaled to handle huge throughput. Cenza customized and deployed its proprietary document-coding platform to facilitate the collaboration of the client working group that spanned the world. And we assembled an offshore team of 80 associates, including QA specialists, a workflow specialist and a project manager to handle the bulk of the document coding and review. In the first pass our coding team was able to accurately review and code 400,000 records. Our internal quality control team then conducted a second-level review of 65,000 documents that had been flagging during the initial review. Throughout the process, the offshore team worked in close collaboration with the client team to troubleshoot and properly resolve all document and coding exceptions. Over the course of the project, our team exceeded the clients’ requirements by maintaining an accuracy rating above 98%. The project workflow also enabled us to achieve steady gains in productivity as work progressed. After nearly five months and almost 7000 hours of team effort, Cenza delivered the clients and their counsel a database, enriched with meta-data covering the entire set of 400,000 documents.
The Impact :
In the world of litigation we have the chance to see our work contribute directly to our clients’ courtroom success. In this case, the Cayman Island courts returned a resounding guilty verdict against the defendants for defrauding our clients of $126 billion. The high accuracy of our team’s coding effort played a critical role in helping our clients prevail at trial. Not only that but we delivered savings of more than 30% compared to the clients’ anticipated cost for handling the same work on shore.
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