expertise in
Global Investigations
Proven, practical approaches and expertise meeting discovery obligations of global investigations while meeting data privacy, secrets & security regulations — all with an emphasis on delivering total value.
Representative Global Investigations Expertise
Cross-border data privacy, secrets and security regulations. Foreign language reviews. Multi regulator coordination. Timezone and tight deadline constraints. Global investigations, whether internal or regulator-led, share traits that add complexity, cost and risk if not properly managed. Consilio has deep expertise working with law firm and corporate clients to enhance legal and regulatory compliance and lower downstream eDiscovery costs — from the negotiation of keyword terms to cross-border collection of data to managing cross-border reviews.
F100 Multinational Corporation Subject of Global Investigation into Potential FCPA Violations
The Issue
A multinational corporation with nearly half a million employees and operations in over 150 countries found itself under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for possible bribery of foreign officials and falsification of corporate books and records. Shortly after raids on its foreign offices, the corporation disclosed potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to U.S. investigators and initiated its own massive, global internal investigation.
Our Approach
Significant up-front effort was required by all parties to accurately scope the project’s requirements, to ensure that goals and timeframes were aligned and to understand how value would be measured.
Four key parameters defined the magnitude of the engagement:
- The consultancy involved the capture and preservation of hundreds of millions of documents from locations around the world. Expertise in the translation of multiple languages including non-Latin alphabet languages, decryption of encrypted and encoded data, and the precise navigation of data and privacy laws, was also required.
- To protect its proprietary assets during the investigations, the corporation tasked its outside counsel and Consilio with an evolving list of strict requirements to manage and control access to its data.
- The engagement presented significant geographic and time zone challenges. Consilio gathered data in nine countries and supported two concurrent investigations separated by 12 time zones.
- Unlike most engagements where litigation support is provided to a single entity, in this instance Consilio supported three separate law firms, two accounting firms, and ultimately, the multinational corporation.
The Results
Although the corporation ultimately made a guilty plea, the impact of the plea and its associated fines was mitigated by what the U.S. Department of Justice cited as their extensive efforts in preserving and making available documents from foreign countries. It found the corporation’s effort to be exemplary and one that could serve as a model to other multinational corporations. Consilio, in supporting the law firm conducting the internal investigation, was responsible for significantly improving the outcome for the corporation. The corporation benefited from an estimated 40% reduction in the total fines it could have received, a savings of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Consilio team:
- Created three independent data centers for use by four investigative entities
- Gathered and managed data collected from Germany, China, Belgium, Russia, Greece, Italy, Singapore, the United States, the United Kingdom, complying with each respective country’s data protection laws
- Developed custom security controls for document review
- Deployed robust, custom security protocols to rapidly decrypt and process emails in bulk
- Deployed custom techniques for determining coding in CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) so highly-accurate data capture, indexing and searching could be performed.
Read or download the full case study.
