Global Energy Trading Company

Our client is a multinational firm with offices around the globe. They operate in a highly regulated industry with each office having to adhere to the local regulators requirements.

The Issue: Searching for and presenting key words within a strict time frame

The company was instructed by the regulator to search for and present 104 key words from their information base in 10 geographic locations. The key words needed to be related to a specific topic and the task delivered within a strict time restriction imposed by the regulator. All instances of the key words had to be checked by the organisation’s legal team, with only the relevant hits being exported for collation.

Our client set to work and started searching through their email data, locating the relevant key words. However their file data was proving to be more challenging, the firm were trying a number of methods to perform an efficient search but could not find an effective solution.

Frontier Technology was called upon to deliver the answer. At the time we were engaged, our client had only completed the email search in one territory. The remaining nine territories had yet to be started and half of the imposed time restriction had already gone. To complicate matters, a portion of the hits had already been checked by the legal team; these had to be removed from the new search results to ensure that time was not wasted checking the same information twice.

The Solution: Frontier Discovery Service

After a detailed consultation process, Frontier devised a solution that would deliver the validated key words within the time allowed. With over 30 TB of data to search our technicians immediately got to work! We initially created a recovery environment within the Frontier Hosting Centre and established a link to the client’s network. Our client then provided us with back-up tapes with all of the relevant email and file data that needed to be searched. This data was seamlessly restored in our hosting centre and the ingestion began.

During the archiving process, Frontier’s staff spent time training our client’s technical and legal team. We installed discovery on the desktops of those that needed to search and review the data. The discovery interface has been designed specifically for legal personnel, therefore our clients staff required little training and were quickly up to speed with creating, submitting and reviewing.

“I was reluctant to get involved with learning a new system, I just don’t have time. When I saw the system being used by a colleague, I realised that it works in a similar way to our other applications; there was no learning curve at all” Legal Team Leader

It took roughly a month to archive the 30TB of data, during the process we managed to reduce the firm’s overall data storage by 50%. During the data ingestion phase, a simultaneous search was configured to ensure that no files that had already been checked were rechecked. These files were removed from the full data search.

After all of the data had been archived, the legal team could conduct rapid reviews and “search within a search”.  Within weeks our client reported that all of the relevant information had been reviewed and sent to the regulator with time left to spare.

Our client is currently working with the regulatory authorities, which is why they wish to remain anonymous. However, they have recognised that Frontier Discovery Service ensured that they met the regulators demands in a restricted time frame and avoided very significant fine.

“We were so pleased to have got the job done. This case was different from anything that we have dealt with before; there were a lot of very stressed people in our offices. To begin with, we had no idea of how we would get things done within the allotted time frame. After a disastrous first attempt, we called in Frontier and soon realised that they understood our problem. Their consultants were professional and instantly had confidence in their abilities. They definitely delivered at a time when the pressure was on”.