Case Study
FTI Technology’s Emerging Data Sources Experts Create Custom Solution to Collect Project Management Data from Azure DevOps in Breach of Contract Dispute
When an agriculture company became the subject of breach of contract allegations from one of its IT service providers, it needed to access technical project management information to prove its counterclaims in the dispute. The company and its service provider had used Azure DevOps as the project management platform for the work that was the source of the litigation, presenting the legal team with the challenge of collecting data from a complex non-traditional source. Outside counsel engaged FTI Technology’s emerging data sources experts to ensure critical evidence could be accessed and collected in a fulsome, forensically sound manner.
Situation
The agriculture company was pursuing a broad digital transformation initiative and had hired an IT provider to help modernize the company’s finance and operations functions using Microsoft Dynamics 365. The two companies entered into a master services agreement and a series of statement of work agreements. A dispute arose when the service provider alleged that the company failed to pay for services rendered and had breached their agreements. FTI Technology’s client disputed the allegations on the grounds that the work was either not completed or not completed to the satisfaction of the stakeholders and the parameters of the work agreements.
The necessary evidence to support the company’s counterclaims were housed within Azure DevOps work items, given the platform’s use for collaborative project management, requirement management and issue tracking for the work between the company and its service provider. Each work item included contemporaneous notes about the description of the issues, the status, and comments from the stakeholders.
As the standard export from Azure DevOps contains only information including item title, dates and status, a customized workflow was needed to collect the additional descriptive information such as comments, concerns, and the time it took to complete a request.
Our Role
FTI Technology worked closely with the client’s outside counsel to define the scope of collection encompassing all work items relating to three key disputed projects between the client and its service provider. The scope also included collection of all essential details about the projects across Azure DevOps items including epic, feature, requirement, test case, bug, change request, risk, issue, review, code review and response.
Once the scope was defined, FTI Technology’s emerging data sources experts created a custom workflow to ensure comprehensive collection and enable an efficient and insightful subsequent document review. Each work item was to be rendered as a single page web document, so all the essential information, along with related images, could be rendered into one comprehensive document for review. Each of the attachments were linked to the corresponding work item using parent-child relationship categorization. Metadata was also extracted and added as document properties, and the legal team was provided with a load file including this overlay, so documents could be easily and accurately supplemented with the key information.
Within two weeks, FTI Technology delivered a sample set to outside counsel to support case development and preparation. FTI Technology provided the following additional support and expertise throughout the matter:
- Advising the legal team on the additional information available within Azure DevOps to support the client’s case. This led to expansion of the collection scope, so that further insights could be gleaned from each work item relating to the projects in dispute.
- Provided supplements to each document containing all information about the items as key value pairs within a separate database that could be easily searched by keyword as needed, to bring relevant supporting information to the surface quickly.
- Testing for loading the data into the e-discovery platform to catch errors, such as deleted attachments, that could impair review. All errors were tracked throughout the process and flagged in the summary report, and corresponding metadata was also tracked to be tagged to the parent document.
Our Impact
Within one month of the matter’s outset, FTI Technology had delivered the full collection, allowing the legal team to begin reviewing documents almost immediately.
FTI Technology’s emerging data sources team was able to quickly respond to the client request. Given the team’s existing knowledge about Microsoft’s systems combined with familiarity in nuanced emerging data source discovery, they were able to quickly understand the inner workings of the Azure DevOps system and how that would impact data collection as well as the overall litigation process. This combination of subject matter expertise, digital forensic collection experience and understanding of the review platform led to the delivery of a defensible, complete and on time collection to support the client’s case.