First Advantage Litigation Consulting (FADV) has announced the acquisition of London based DLR Legal, a global managed review services business.  First Advantage already has a strong practice in managing projects involving multiple jurisdictions and multiple languages, and the acquisition of a document review company with specialist language skills and cross-border experience strengthens that practice considerably.

DLR Legal is based in London and Brussels, and was established specifically as a network of multilingual lawyers and paralegals. There is more to this than translation and review – DLR Legal is also able to bring people with appropriate jurisdictional legal qualifications to the project in hand.   This has obvious benefits, not merely for relevance assessments but for the crafting of specific searches and for legal analysis where this is required.

DLR Legal emphasises that it is not a recruitment agency which rounds up teams on demand if it can find them.  Instead, it spends a considerable amount of time locating, pre-screening, pre-interviewing and testing candidates before a project comes up.

I spoke to Drew Macaulay, Director of Business Development at First Advantage, who said that DLR Legal’s ability to field large teams at short notice was the factor which originally caught First Advantage’s attention when they needed to assemble a German-speaking team in London at short notice.  It took DLR Legal one weekend plus one working day, Drew said, to have  25 German-speaking lawyers ready to start work in London. It was not just the speed which counted, Drew added – the quality of their output was very high. The idea of an acquisition grew from there.

First Advantage has its own hosted document review platform, Global RPM, which has strong multilingual capabilities in addition to the other processing, analytical and workflow capabilities expected of modern eDiscovery applications. The  strengthened managed review services resulting from the DLR Legal acquisition allows First Advantage to offer multi-jurisdictional, multi-lingual discovery services whether or not the data is to be processed and/or reviewed in its own platform. Clients may choose to use FADV for the whole electronic disclosure process or just one or two elements depending on their own resources.

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