Technology-Assisted Review Provides Fast Answers in India Investigation
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June 16, 2026
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After authorities in India arrested several individuals linked to criminal charges, their employer faced urgent pressure to understand its employees’ potential involvement. With investigations moving quickly and legal proceedings imminent, the company needed to determine the implications of digital evidence involved, what was known internally and assess any exposure. Given the scale, complexity and urgency of the situation, it engaged FTI Consulting to conduct a fast, defensible review of large volumes of multilingual and potentially sensitive data.
The dataset relevant to the case reflected India’s multilingual communication landscape, with messages frequently combining English, Hindi and regional languages through transliteration and code-switching (e.g., “Boss ne approval de diya for the invoice,” meaning “the boss approved the invoice”). These nuances presented significant challenges for traditional keyword search, making technology-assisted review critical to identifying relevant evidence.
Our Impact
- Within three days of commencing a continuous active learning (“CAL”) workflow, the algorithm prioritised a subset of documents predicted to be highly relevant, of which approximately half were identified as containing critical evidentiary significance. Without CAL, this process would have taken weeks or months.
- More than half of the documents prioritised by the CAL algorithm proved relevant upon review, and the recall rate reflected the model’s ability to surface the small subset of truly material documents from within the broader corpus.
- The company’s counsel presented a defensible, comprehensive narrative grounded in documentary record to investigative authorities, articulating with precision what the employees knew and did not know and the timelines surrounding their relevant activities and communications.
- By rapidly identifying key documents, counsel engaged authorities while the scope of the investigation was still evolving, a critical window in Indian criminal proceedings that allowed them to proactively shape the narrative rather than react to allegations.
Our Role
- Over a three-day period, FTI Consulting deployed and trained a CAL algorithm, which rapidly learned to distinguish and prioritise relevant materials, based on conceptual similarity to account for the multilingual nature of the documents.
- Our team of forensic technologists recovered the deleted data using industry-leading forensic tools, with complete chain of custody documentation maintained throughout.
- We documented reviewer protocols, training decisions and validation sampling to create an auditable record capable of withstanding evidentiary scrutiny.
- The company’s counsel received near-daily updates, facilitating preparation for court appearances and engagements with investigating authorities.
- When investigation parameters shifted, our experts updated the CAL algorithm with new examples, and it reprioritised the entire document population accordingly.
Published
June 16, 2026
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