How Balfour Beatty used Reveal to Save an Average of $60k per Internal Investigation

Problem Statement

Balfour Beatty’s internal investigations often involved collecting data, sending it to outside counsel, and waiting weeks for findings. This type of workflow came at a substantial cost, ranging from $20K to over $100K on average per investigation. The cost incurred was dependent on the complexity and data volume. Additionally, the firm would incur significant eDiscovery related processing, hosting, and project management expenses

Key Challenges

• Lengthy timeframes for investigations due to reliance on outside counsel
• High cost associated with processing, hosting, and project management
• Large data sets made it difficult to find relevant documents efficiently
• Inability to find information such as geographic locations and sentiment

How Challenges Were Addressed

Using Reveal’s AI-powered features, Balfour Beatty has dramatically streamlined the investigative process. After collecting and processing the necessary data, the team set up quick review sessions with their divisional attorneys or general counsel, using a combination of unsupervised machine learning tools. Reveal’s data analytics features enabled users to filter by date and custodian while also deploying sentiment analysis to narrow their search. This combination of data analysis and review allowed the team to identify other key real-time information such as geographic locations or negative sentiment in communications. Reveal’s “Find Similar Concepts” feature also proved to be especially valuable in uncovering relevant documents the team might not have otherwise identified. Balfour Beatty also used AI tags to code responsive documents which automatically created AI classifiers tailored to each investigation. These classifiers helped surface additional evidence, giving users a comprehensive view of the situation.

The ROI Results of Using Reveal

Balfour Beatty’s use of Reveal’s AI-powered features have significantly reduced their reliance on outside counsel, allowing the team to self-perform investigations with enough actionable information to make informed decisions. This ultimately led to the company saving a substantial amount of money while also completing the investigations in hours or days, as opposed to weeks.

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