Coding and Unitization for a Top Consulting Company Assisting on the AHAB and Al-Sanea Cayman Islands Case
**Introduction:** In today's high-stakes litigation landscape, it is crucial for parties to build their cases using a vast amount of documents, emails, and data. The ability of your team to effectively manage this extensive evidence can significantly impact the outcome of the case, allowing for an understanding of its complexities and ensuring quick access to necessary exhibits.
**The Client:** A large group of plaintiffs initiated a lawsuit against two Saudi companies (including Al-Saena from the Saad Group) in a court in the Cayman Islands, alleging a considerable financial fraud. Over a dozen law and accounting firms collaborated on behalf of a consortium of 118 bank lenders. The Cayman Islands court mandated that the plaintiffs join forces and share the expenses for creating a document repository as part of trial preparation. This repository included complete bank statements for the defendants from all 118 lenders. An RFP was sent to leading document management vendors proficient in analyzing and coding financial records to create an easily searchable repository. Cenza was chosen as the winning bidder among 12 vendors due to our extensive experience and competitive pricing.
**The Challenge:** Upon being engaged for this project, we found that the Cayman Islands court had already established a trial date, leaving us with under 12 months to review, code, and input over 400,000 documents containing more than 6,000,000 financial transactions. The documents needed OCR, unitization, and coding with as many as 12 fields to ensure adequate detail for forensic accounting. The complexity of the claims necessitated an exceptionally high level of accuracy in the coding process to enable the plaintiffs to reconstruct the intricate web of fraudulent transactions.
**The Solution:** A project of this magnitude needs an efficient and adaptable workflow capable of managing significant volumes. Cenza customized and implemented its proprietary document-coding platform to support the global collaboration of the client working group. We formed an offshore team of 80 associates, including QA specialists, a workflow specialist, and a project manager, to manage the majority of document coding and review. In the initial phase, our coding team accurately reviewed and coded 400,000 records. Our internal quality control team conducted a secondary review of 65,000 documents flagged during the first review. Throughout the project, the offshore team maintained close cooperation with the client team to address and resolve all document and coding discrepancies. Ultimately, our team surpassed client expectations by achieving an accuracy rate exceeding 98%. The project workflow also allowed us to continually improve productivity as we progressed. After nearly five months and close to 7,000 hours of effort, Cenza delivered a comprehensive database, enriched with metadata, encompassing all 400,000 documents.
**The Impact:** In the realm of litigation, we have the opportunity to see our contributions directly influence our clients' success in court. In this instance, the Cayman Islands court issued a decisive guilty verdict against the defendants for swindling our clients out of $126 billion. The high accuracy of our coding efforts was instrumental in securing a victory for our clients at trial. Additionally, we achieved cost savings of over 30% compared to the clients' projected expenses for managing similar work onshore.