Situation: A major biotechnology company was seeking Federal Trade Commission regulatory approval of $1.2B merger. The agency issued a Second Request requiring a rapid response.

The amount of relevant data to collect and review amounted to several terabytes. Also, there was an additional challenge in that the company’s systems were located primarily in the cloud, with data housed within multiple non-traditional platforms including Slack, Confluence, Workplace by Facebook, Asana, Box and more. The FTI team was able to work quickly with the diverse data sources to target, collect, and review over 12 million documents, helping the corporation to achieve compliance within the deadline set by the FTC.

Challenge

As a technology-driven organization, the client Biotech corporation was operating primarily in the cloud and managing data across multiple systems and emerging digital platforms. All of these platforms housed data relevant to the second request, requiring the client to collect and review from each. However, the number and type of these newer technologies meant collecting the data defensibly would be difficult. Even more difficult would be rendering the data in a format where it could be analyzed and reviewed by the legal team.

Solution

FTI Technology’s Emerging Digital Sources team deployed a combination of integrated proprietary and third-party tools and followed cloud data acquisition best practices to identify, collect, process and load for review nearly 12 million documents from over a dozen platforms in under 12 weeks. Targeted de-duplication upon collection meant irrelevant data never entered the processing workflow, which allowed the FTI team to reduce the reviewable data set by over 90%. Some highlights of the work included:

  • Significant reduction of the data set collected from the Box platform due to identification of duplicate documents at collection while maintaining key custodial metadata critical to review
  • Targeted and direct acquisition of millions of rows of data in Salesforce, allowing for streamlined analysis and production
  • Collection, processing, and review of complex data formats from collaboration platforms including Workplace by Facebook, Confluence, Slack, Asana, and Midaxo

Impact

FTI Technology’s emerging digital sources team collected, processed and loaded for review nearly 12 million documents from over a dozen cloud platforms in under 12 weeks

  • Client saved millions of dollars via reduction of reviewable data set by over 90% due to focused data identification, de-duplication and collection
  • FTI team significantly reduced time from data identification to review
  • Client achieved compliance with the second request on deadline and under budget