One of my best moments of last year was interviewing Gerard Ryle of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists about the Panama Papers. Nuix was one of the software tools used to analyse that data and it was easy to see that the whole investigative endeavour was like a very large eDiscovery project.

Now we have the Paradise Papers, acquired by a similar route and processed in much the same way. Here is a link to the Süddeutsche Zeitung Q&A (in German).

One paragraph is headed How were the Paradise Papers evaluated, which translates as follows:

The Paradise Papers consist of dozens of different file formats: emails, PDFs, text documents, images, database files. To navigate this mess of data, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, like the Panama Papers, relied on Nuix software, which is also used by international law enforcement agencies. The program enables easy searching in all databases and comparison with lists of important people and companies. In addition, the ICIJ provided the data to all partners involved in the search on a specially programmed research platform. This way, all journalists around the world were able to work parallel to the material around the clock.

The object lesson for lawyers? The skills and tools which you originally acquire for eDiscovery open doors to a wide range of other activities which, whether or not they are the traditional province of lawyers, make use of the same attributes and technology.

Home