Document discovery service debuts in New Zealand
Award-winning law firm, Anthony Harper has launched Discovery Specialists, a new document discovery outsourcing service for small to medium law firms, barristers, insolvency practitioners, corporates and regulators.
Leveraging off Anthony Harper’s unique legal and technology expertise, Discovery Specialists is designed to take on complex and overwhelming document review tasks.
Managing Partner, Ed Dunphy says Anthony Harper's experience in the CBL Insurance litigation demonstrated the importance of being able to scale and adapt the task of discovery.
Joey James, one of the Partners leading the offering says, “By using a combination of human and machine intelligence, Discovery Specialists has developed a process which provides an efficient and high-quality review process tailored to the specific circumstances of each review."
“The value that can be delivered by available Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools is not binary, and requires an understanding of the claim document, which underpins the review. This is where our experience as litigators comes in,” he says.
Anthony Harper was named winner of Insolvency and Restructuring Deal of the Year at the 2023 NZ Law Awards for the liquidation of CBL Insurance Limited.
The case involved a document review of more than 6.5 million documents underpinning a claim for over $320 million. The claim, brought against the former directors of the company, involved nine causes of action, 13 King’s Counsel and 12 law firms.
The review process demonstrated the importance of a deep understanding of the claim documents when undertaking the preliminary author, key word, and key phrase filtering.
Dan Hughes, Head of Litigation at Anthony Harper says clear protocols were established for appropriately managing privileged material and providing secure cloud-based access for our hand-picked team of 30 reviewers.
At the heart of this process was Technology Assisted Review (TAR), utilising AI based continuous Machine Learning algorithms to seek out key documents more quickly.
“The award was not only recognition for this achievement, but also validation that the discovery processes we had developed could easily scale and adapt. We’ve completed discovery on a much smaller scale, involving 150,000 documents for example, and sometimes more complex with 30 interested parties,” Hughes says.
