Antitrust Litigation

Second Requests under The Clayton and Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Acts can yield complex, time-consuming, and costly document reviews that often include millions of documents. Capital Legal was engaged by a Fortune 500 company and its outside counsel to assist in a Second Request that involved over 900 gigabytes of potentially relevant data.

Challenge
In 2005, a Fortune 500 company filed a pre-merger notification that triggered a request for additional information by the Federal Trade Commission. The company’s outside legal counsel turned to Capital Legal for assistance managing the technical requirements of the Second Request.

As the project unfolded, initial estimates of potentially relevant data exploded. The quantity of information swelled from 150 GB to over 900 GB of electronic information and over 600 boxes of printed materials. Despite the dramatic increase in the volume of data requiring processing, review, and production, antitrust regulators were unwilling to make any significant adjustments in deadlines.

Case-Related Requirements
The antitrust team utilized a two-stage document review analysis. The first stage, conducted by a large team of attorneys working in a war room, reviewed each document to identify responsive and privileged documents. A smaller group of seasoned antitrust attorneys performed a second review to filter out privileged information.

Solution
Capital Legal, with its deep bench of experienced software engineers, completed the creation of a custom database and review platform for the management and coding of the electronic records at issue. In order to permit the defendant to meet court-imposed deadlines for the termination of discovery proceedings, our engineers designed an innovative content management environment permitting the review of the files in their native format. The native review tool circumvented the time consuming and costly additional effort of converting the data to an image format, the standard industry practice at the time. It also permitted reviewers to view the documents precisely as their clients had viewed them.

In the exercise of its core strengths, Capital Legal was able to expedite the re-processing of our client’s data in a legally sound manner, carefully tracking the chain-of-custody, and all available information about the documents. The data included over 100 imaged hard drives and more than 60 backup tapes. Forensic analysis of the data was also required.

The data was filtered, according to specifications, and loaded into the review application developed by Capital Legal for the client-utility. Responsive documents were numbered, branded and produced.

Capital Legal also provided invaluable analysis and insight to strengthen the substantive merits of the public utility’s case involving software development. The case was brought against the utility by a software developer for breach of contract for its failure to pay for the development of a customized database software application. The defense was grounded on the claim that the plaintiff software developer failed to provide a workable product. Capital Legal provided ammunition that helped to compel the return of fees the utility paid previously in its earlier attempt to obtain these services.