eDiscovery

Legal disputes, compliance or audit audits as well as special investigations can be triggered by an internal or external impulse. Examples are an internal suspicion against one or more employees, a whistleblower's tip or an investigation by a public prosecutor's office, for example.

Such investigations and disputes often include a review of so-called unstructured digital data, for example office documents and e-mails, in order to make contents, processes and courses of events more comprehensible. We call this service "Evidence and Disclosure Management" (EDM), synonymously we also speak of "eDiscovery".

Conducting such an investigation quickly becomes a Herculean task for companies, because relevant data must be identified, forensically secured and subsequently evaluated. The specific know-how is often already tied up elsewhere, generally not available in the company or standardised processes and technologies are not established. Without technical tools, it is often not possible to conduct an investigation in a cost- and time-efficient manner. For example, a central searchability of different data sources such as email inboxes, notebooks, departmental drives or mobile phones is usually not available in companies.

Especially in larger investigations, the efficient and cost-sensitive review of large volumes of documents poses a challenge. Here, it is necessary to combine highly efficient review teams and current technology based on machine learning.

Furthermore, it is mandatory to observe data protection regulations in special investigations, the disregard of which is proven with severe fines based on the General Data Protection Regulation (DSGVO). The data processing of our eDiscovery projects takes place in KPMG's security-certified Forensic Datacenter in Frankfurt/Main.

Our experts will be happy to support you in carrying out the entire process, from the initial data protection check for the selection of relevant data sources to the review and the provision of the essential results.