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Investigative Analytics Group
Experience, Dedication, and Diversity
Corporate management and legal counsel often face formidable challenges to seeing the big picture in significant matters involving large collections of electronic data. Not only are there vast amounts to data to contend with, but also some data may be inconsistent, misleading, or simply missing. Cataphora's Investigative Analytics Group brings years of specialist expertise and a collection of powerful software tools to help with these kinds of problems.
Cataphora's Investigative Analytics team works directly with customer management, legal counsel, or third party consultants throughout the lifetime of an investigation to:
- Formulate or Validate case theory
- Assist in witness preparation
- Support the case team during a trial or evidentiary hearing
Answering questions that you could not ask before
The team comprises business, legal and technical experts who can help customers identify the most critical issues and to deliver answers to the most important questions - including questions that could not even be addressed prior to the development of our specialized techniques.
Mining electronic data for evidence requires the most sophisticated tools available. Brute force review of the entire document set is often impractical and rarely effective. Reviewers' or investigators' concentration may waver over the course of long days of effort; memory is imperfect and crucial links may not be made between documents seen far apart in the process; and there is no collective memory to readily link one reviewer's insight with that of another.
Computerized keyword search and categorization techniques have their place, but cannot identify patterns of behavior and communication, and cannot unearth evidence of missing data. Nor can simple statistical techniques - such as reporting email volumes - provide the kind of crucial insight that comes from sophisticated analysis.
An expert team with the best tools
Cataphora's Investigative Analytics team has years of experience of such investigations. It has at its disposal a suite of advanced statistical, mathematical and linguistic techniques - including unique technologies patented by Cataphora - that allows it to conduct sophisticated analysis of the behavior and communication patterns, within or across organizations, of the people of interest. Cataphora is equipped to work with variety of data sources including email, documents, instant messages, voicemails and public information to uncover the subtle connections that can be derived from analysis of the data. After first establishing the baseline normal behaviors for an organization, it then becomes possible to home in on significant anomalies and exceptions to the pattern that may merit closer investigation.
The Investigative Analytics Group combines extensive practical experience, legal knowledge and technological know-how to ensure that every matter is conducted with the highest level of efficiency and discretion.
Cataphora advantage
At Cataphora, we are in our sixth year of providing practical and often game-changing insight into investigations. Our team of investigative experts has worked on a wide variety of investigative matters of domestic and international scope, involving Fortune 500 corporations, AMLAW 100 and boutique law firms, and government agencies.
Our experts include lawyers, engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, and former members of the intelligence community. Our software can handle foreign language data from around the world and Cataphora's staff has expertise in over thirty languages that is often leveraged by the Investigative Analytics Group. This language expertise, coupled with knowledge of many different national cultures, makes this group extraordinarily well equipped to handle complex investigations that span borders.
Typical Case Outline
Once client data has been processed we run a number of standard reports that target different aspects of the case, including
- Completeness of the collection
- Ranking of the actors in order of importance
- Domain analysis of the dataset
and others. We make these reports available to the client and meet with them (usually by conference call) to discuss and analyze the results. Using the knowledge that the legal team has about the case, along with the case research done by the Cataphora Investigative Analytics Group, we begin the process of helping the client formulate a case theory.
At Cataphora we try to integrate all available sources of information so that the client can get a complete picture of the case. For example, our automated processes analyze:
- Travel records, expense reports, and related data to determine the locations of important actors
- Appointment entries and contact lists to determine if any communication was taken to a channel for which we have no direct records of (e.g. in-person meetings, phone calls, etc.)
- General email patterns to establish norms. These allow automated detection of suspicious deviations from normal patterns that might indicate periods of potentially missing information. If these periods happen to coincide with important events in the case, we use our C-Analytics Suite to further analyze the situation.
In tandem with this analysis, we have meetings with case attorneys to understand their view of the case and to address questions that they might have. Attorneys are well versed in the right questions to ask, but are not always equipped with the tools that allow them to answer those questions based on the data present in the corpus. Cataphora's role is to provide lawyers with those tools to help them gain a better and more complete understanding of the matter.
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