Robert Brown provides a lesson on multi-lingual e-Discovery
Traditional e-Discovery exercises are often based on an assumption that the documents of interest are in the English language. However, in today’s globalised business environment, companies have multinational corporate parents, subsidiaries, suppliers and customers, and frequently conduct business in languages other than English.
This situation is exacerbated by the increase in cross-border disputes and regulatory investigations, which leads to companies needing to locate and retrieve data from local offices and subsidiaries in multiple countries. Alarmingly, many organisations have no strategy in place for dealing with non-English documents. For example, if, at the disclosure stage, a company claims they have disclosed everything of relevance, without taking adequate measures to search any foreign language documents, and later review reveals documents that are relevant but have not been disclosed, the repercussions can be serious. It is, therefore, imperative that legal professionals are prepared to deal with multilingual document review projects as a matter of course.
Effect of language on review
When it comes to a large scale document review project, the processes impacted by
