KPMG has signed a deal with Nuix for electronic discovery software licenses to enhance its eDiscovery service offering.

Eddie Sheehy, Nuix Chief Executive Officer, said KPMG required very fast, powerful processing and have integrated just that into its service offering by adding Nuix to the official KPMG workflow.

“In a world where many corporations face vast amounts of data, increasing regulatory requirements and litigation that demands immediate and thorough investigations of terabytes of digital information, speed is of the essence. Our software has been able to provide great results for KPMG’s eDiscovery product,” said Sheehy.

KPMG’s decision hinged on the results of speed trials conducted by KPMG and on Nuix’s ability to integrate with other technologies within the KPMG workflow.

Rod McKemmish, KPMG Forensic’s Director said that during initial speed trials, KPMG Australia reported indexing a 59GB Exchange Database (EDB) file – including 1.8 million emails and attachments – in 1 hour and 24 minutes.

“Performance improvements beyond this appear to be possible when we scale beyond a single hardware device and apply the power of our advanced infrastructure.

"When one combines the power of high end processing with the forensic precision and in-depth analysis capabilities of Nuix, the results are impressive,” said Mr McKemmish.

KPMG Australia has employed the Nuix electronic discovery desktop platform for the past three years. This latest deal marks a significant upgrade to KPMG’s Enterprise Discovery platform. This is the same platform recently purchased by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to handle their corporate discoveries and investigations.

The Nuix platform has been integrated within a workflow that begins with Guidance Enterprise to collect digital information into a dataset, then uses Nuix to filter, search, de-duplicate, index and process the information and then output it to Discovery Radar, KPMG’s review platform.

Sheehy said, “Datasets are getting bigger all the time, and the turnaround time of investigations gets shorter as one or both sides make use of the technology at-hand. If one side has Nuix and the other doesn’t have anything as good, the one that does has the advantage.”

“Early case assessment is becoming increasingly important,” said Mr Sheehy. “If you understand where your case stands at the earliest point possible, you can take control of the process and make decisions that will reduce legal costs and increase the possibility of a positive result. The companies that win are companies that know their position early on and can strategise accordingly.”