Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 12:30PM Prosecuting business: it's not easy--but there is a method.
Getting from a kazillion documents to less than 500.
As a minimum standard for acceptable behavior in business, one must fulfill all the regulatory and legal obligations that are incombuent on an executive or firm--not to do so means risking the threat of a trial; in the instance of Goldman Sachs, recently, it lead to a SEC complaint and then to a congressional investigation.
All that's needed is one or two damning documents in a trial to make or break a case. Ever wonder how the business of finding those critical pieces of evidence is done? In a fascinating, one-page article in this week's FORTUNE [CSI: Wall Street, by Scott Cendrowski] we find out. In this instance, it's an insider's view of how key documents in a case like the SEC's case against Goldman Sachs were isolated.
Start with the hard-drives.
It ends up involving a four-step process to find the "hot docs": First, many hard-drives, chock-full of millions of eMails, documents, instant messages, and the like are fed through a filter that looks for anything remotely germane to the issue at hand. In the GS instance, the process started with about 10 million documents.
Get the key words straight.
Next, teams of attorneys and document experts refine the search in a second pass at the documents that seem promising by the use of critical words and key phrases. In the case of the Goldman Sachs matter, obvious terms include "CDO" and "Paulson." Also, at this stage, social and work relationships are identified and focused on. The output of this stage results in the a case starting with about 2.5 million documents and ended up with, say, about a million.
Let's resort to the use of humans.
Beginning at this point with about 1 million pieces of evidence--documents, really--humans typically in the form of lawyers start reading, mostly from computer monitors for relevant information; it's not unusual for the process to continue for weeks--around the clock. These million documents eventually get winnowed down to about 500 or less--yielding the most promising material from which to mount a case.
I'll see you in court!
In the end, fewer than 500 messages, documents, and notes get gleaned from the end-process and make it to court in the form of critical pieces of evidence!
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Reader Comments (1)
Wow! I guess emails need to be sent in code now.