Business of Legal

What issues do you face today?

There is no lack of challenges in today’s global marketplace, and we thrive on helping clients beat them. Often, challenges overlap and require integrated strategies and actions. This is why clients come to Deloitte with some of their most complex forensic issues, including:

Legal department strategy and management. In-house legal departments are under significant pressures—both internal and external—to demonstrate value, manage risk, contain costs, embrace new ways of working, introduce technology, operate globally, and align with their organizations. It is a time of transformation.

Enterprise fraud and misuse management (EFM). Proactive assessment, response to, and monitoring of key risks are vital to helping companies manage the costs and impacts of adverse events. EFM is a technology-based approach that enables you to screen transactional activity for evidence of fraud in near real time and identify potential perpetrators. The approach considers multiple dimensions, including:

• The scope of the enterprise (channels, departments, suppliers, and functions)
• The ability to screen for fraudulent behavior or indicators in near real-time
• Advanced analytical techniques such as predictive analytics, social networking analysis, and geospatial analysis
• The data profile of your enterprise, including complex, unstructured data sets across domains, as well as spreadsheets and structured accounting data

Investigations. Adverse events often lead to complex investigations, and businesses often need assistance in handling allegations of fraud and corruption, regulatory inquiries and challenges, and litigation support. When such crises arise, global reach is a vital asset. Our clients trust that we are just a phone call away, not a plane ride away. After the crisis is over, there is often more work to be done, too. Beyond an effective response to adverse events, we can help you use the insights gained from the event resolution to help you uncover the root cause(s) behind it, implement remediation measures including internal controls that may have been absent or failed, and explore ways to prevent the problem’s reoccurrence. This approach can help your legal department proactively address potential future incidents before they become a crisis and free up resources to offer more strategic and value-added legal services to the business.

Litigation and disputes. Businesses often face legal conflicts that require significant time, deep subject matter knowledge, and advanced technology. In addition to staff attorneys and outside counsel, these complex, sensitive matters may require a team that can provide accounting assistance and delivers case assessments, damage calculations, financial analyses, expert testimony, or arbitration. Our litigation and dispute specialists do that across a wide variety of cases, leveraging Deloitte’s proprietary data mining and analytics, eDiscovery, and computer forensic tools.

Discovery strategy and information governance. Litigation, investigations, and fraud can create significant risk and expense for any business, so the importance of being prepared for the discovery aspects of such matters cannot be overstated. The specialists of Deloitte Discovery apply over two decades of experience to help assess corporate-wide discovery and information governance processes and response strategies. We work to help companies reduce the risk and costs of discovery through careful analysis that drives process and technology improvements. We can help you craft a long-term discovery strategy to support virtually any corporate culture. Based on that, we can custom-develop and help you implement a discovery playbook to provide a structured, defensible, and repeatable response plan to litigation.

eDiscovery. In a digital era where legal discovery continues to grow in cost and complexity, significant cost reductions are possible–but only through effective data management, use of eDiscovery tools, and in some cases outsourcing certain activities. Our eDiscovery specialists can provide end-to-end eDiscovery services, including managed services of selected activities such as document review and contract management, using established methodologies adapted to your company’s circumstances. Our team has extensive qualifications for and experience with assisting in the management of eDiscovery projects of various sizes and scope. Our workflows are powered by analytics that regularly produces significant cost reductions, and we incorporate leading practices and accelerators designed to facilitate speed, accuracy, and cost-efficiency.

AI-enabled enterprise contract lifecycle management. An effective enterprise contract management program enables organizations to have visibility into their contract population and react to business problems by promptly locating and analyzing key provisions across their universe of contracts. Deloitte can assist your organization in building, reviewing, and managing a contract lifecycle framework that helps sustain.

Third-party risk. Governments are aggressively expanding enforcement of anti-fraud and corruption statutes and sharing information with other governments. The importance of knowing the individuals and companies your organization conducts business which has never been greater. Our Business Intelligence Services team is a diverse group of skilled investigators who employ cutting-edge technology to help clients gain a deeper understanding of the nature of their relationships with third parties such as vendors, suppliers, licensees, and service providers. By digging beneath the surface of these relationships, we can help investigate a client’s critical issues and produce vital information about its third-party networks—information that can be used for future decisions and potentially to avoid or mitigate risks.

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Building a solid foundation

Leveraging core forensic capabilities built over two decades, we are equipped to help your organization with other specialized issues, including:

Computer forensics. We can investigate cybercrime, data exfiltration, and fraud from inside or outside an organization, determining how data was accessed and tracking it across computers, mobile devices, and the cloud.

Document review. During legal discovery, we can oversee, guide, and improve document review processes, using advanced prioritization analytics and combining filtering tools and conceptual clustering to prioritize and segment reviews, streamline quality control and document exclusion, and statistically demonstrate search term effectiveness.

Safety and quality. To help companies address the risk of product recalls or health issues stemming from product quality, we bring the scientific and cross-industry experience needed to cross-correlate data from consumers, suppliers, and dealers with customer complaints, social media analytics, and the Internet of Things. This can help your organization be proactive, potentially reduce recall scope, save on warranty and other costs, streamline processes, and improve customer satisfaction.

Integrity due diligence. Prior to making investment decisions or entering into new business relationships, we can provide your organization with objective and detailed information on target entities and their principals by searching for red flag issues such as financial difficulties, past or present involvement in material litigation, undisclosed business affiliations, political relationships, and links to sanctioned individuals or entities.

When your organization is involved in or contemplating litigation, we can conduct in-depth background investigations of opposing parties, experts, and other witnesses to identify information that can be incorporated into litigation strategy. Incorporating in-depth social media research into this effort can also reveal significant connections maintained by opposing parties, expert witnesses, and other fact witnesses, which may lead to potentially impeachable material and new facts relevant to the litigation.

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