Case Study
FTI Technology Delivers Fast-Paced Phase II Investigation and Privilege Review
When the EU Competition Commission launched a Phase II investigation into the establishment of a joint venture, the parties’ law firm needed support to review over 55,000 documents in just nine days.
Situation
The complexity of Phase II investigations in merger clearance oversight is increasing throughout Europe and the UK. The EU Competition Commission’s intervention rate in merger clearance has increased by roughly 30 percent in recent years, with a shift toward focusing more on internal documents and requiring their production in short timeframes.
This matter was no exception, and the law firm representing the proposed joint venture sought FTI Technology experts’ help in completing a disclosure exercise and privilege review in only nine days.
Our Role
Leveraging the expertise of FTI Technology’s managed review team, the law firm initiated a fast-paced forensic document review to identify EU legal professional privilege (LPP) and redact partially privileged information contained within documents.
With a set of search terms potentially related to privileged content, and a nine-day deadline, FTI supported the review with outside counsel, through steps including:
- Mobilising a team of qualified lawyers with appropriate background and language skills within 24 hours.
- Implementation of proven workflow efficiencies executed by high-calibre forensic specialists and review staff.
- Assessing solutions to determine which would have the greatest impact on streamlining and supporting a managed review workflow, evaluating for capabilities including threading and de-duplication.
- Establishment of privilege log fields to capture information required for the privilege log, including EU LPP category type, subject matter and context, among others.
- A detailed privilege review, in which 29 different coding choices were considered per document, in order to identify privileged content and simultaneously prepare the corresponding privilege log.
- Daily collation of review room questions and counsel responses via a decision log to ensure accurate and consistent privilege coding within the first-level review team, reducing need for re-review.
- Escalation of certain coded documents for secondlevel review, on a rolling basis.
- Completion of a redaction exercise to remove partially privileged content from the documents.
Our Impact
Fulfillment of Competition Commission Request
The team performed a privilege review of over 55,000 documents responsive to EU LPP search terms, for a Phase II investigation, within the nine-day government issued timeframe.
Thorough Privilege Redaction
Expert reviewers redacted 600 documents for partially privileged information, ensuring fulfillment of Competition Commission requirements, while not compromising legal privilege.
Rapid Rate of Review
Under extreme time constraints, the team completed approximately 1,250 first-level review hours and 250 quality control/team lead hours. Due to FTI Technology’s deep expertise in these types of matters, the team achieved a review rate of 45 documents per hour, a significant increase on industry standard rates for similar privilege reviews.
Robust Quality Control
Proven quality control workflows, daily reporting and decision logging ensured a highly transparent and defensible review process.