Visual Analytics and CMML Reduce Review Set to .1% of Docs

Visual Analytics and CMML Reduce Review Set to .1% of Docs

A financial services client needed to perform an internal audit of email communications and electronically stored documents to determine who, if anyone, approved certain compensation agreements, what other key individuals within the company were aware of the agreements, and to establish a timeline of events.

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Challenges

• 4.1 million documents collected for review using custodian and date filtering

• Culling by keyword terms and domains still left 450,000 documents to review

• Not enough internal bandwidth or time to manually review the collected data

• The employee that approved the compensation is no longer with the firm

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Solution

The client provided four exemplar documents regarding the compensation agreements and key language was used from these documents to run several Concept Searches. The client started by reviewing the Concept Search results. They subsequently used the Cluster Wheel to review documents that were in the same neighborhood as other key docs. The client created several Focuses for their team to review from which contained communications between discrete individuals during what they now knew to be the relevant time period. The client also used Thread Analysis to better understand key, complex email threads that were in circulation for several months and proved to be pivotal in understanding who knew what and when. Throughout the review, the client ran CMML in the background to prioritize their documents for review. A quality assurance check was then performed to ensure that there were no other key documents in the workspace that their search and review efforts were not turning up. When it came time to present the findings to their Board, the client used the Communications and Conversations visualizations on their key document set to quickly and easily tell the story.

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Results

By integrating and leveraging the individual strengths of the tools in Brainspace, the client was able to limit its review to 5,000 documents, satisfied its obligation to their auditor on the technology and methodology used to conduct the internal investigation, and felt confident in their final report.

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