ALG Solutions - Case studies
Telecoms sale
Challenge
As part of a significant M&A transaction, a telecoms company required extensive legal due diligence on a portfolio of telephone masts involving the review of a substantial volume of leases, licences and associated documentation within a very compressed timeframe. This involved reviewing a large cohort of documents with little uniformity, issue logging, external and internal engagement with multiple stakeholders and the generation of real time progress reports.
Solution
With the assistance of our AI tool we quickly identified specific clauses and risk issues across all documents. This allowed our experienced team of legal reviewers to carry out the legal due diligence within an accelerated timeframe reducing the review time by c.60%. To facilitate analysis of critical issues and differences in the bespoke documentation, our lawyers fed the due diligence results into ALGorithm, a proprietary database, which is capable of real-time reporting and which can record vast amounts of legal data in a cost and time efficient manner. The due diligence informed the client on key legal issues, such as assignability, termination rights and rights of renewal. We communicated directly with the client on all material issues encountered by using a cloud based collaboration portal. The portal included a dashboard, showing the client in real time how the various work streams were progressing. Cross departmental teams within ALG had access to this portal facilitating client communications in an organised and controlled fashion.
Benefits
- Efficient and cost effective outcome for the client - the appropriate legal resources were assigned to tasks based upon relevant expertise resulting in significant cost savings
- Project and budget transparency leading to an enhanced client experience
- Accurate and timely progress reporting with early systemic issue insight strengthening negotiation capability and risk minimisation
Regulatory Investigations - White Collar Crime investigation
Challenge
Our client held over ten million documents that were potentially relevant to a criminal investigation into another entity and was given an extremely challenging deadline to identify and produce all relevant evidence to regulator. Using traditional filtering and review methods, this would not have been possible and would have cost millions to complete.
Solution
ALG Solutions worked with our client to develop and deliver a custom built solution that leveraged the power of an AI platform which was trained by the ALG Solutions legal team to identify relevant evidence. This solution was transformative and had never been used in a criminal investigation in Ireland before. A key component of this process's success was the transparent engagement by the ALG Solutions team with the regulator to convince them that the use of this technology was appropriate. This solution and agreement with the regulator combined with ALG Solutions' specialist legal resourcing ensured our client was able to review 200,000 documents in a short number of weeks and could meet its regulatory obligation on time and on-budget.
Benefits
This solution:
- Reduced the number of documents requiring review by 98%;
- Saved our client approximately €3m that it would have cost if required to complete the review in a more traditional manner;
- Enabled our client to meet the regulators deadline months in advance of what would have been possible using any traditional document review processes; and
- Freed up client resources to concentrate on the strategically important issue in the mandate.
A loan sale
Challenge
Assisting a large financial institution on the complex disposal of its entire €3bn loan portfolio. The transaction structure evolved from a 'direct to market' sale to an initial intragroup sale, scheme of arrangement, liquidation and finally open market sale. The complexity of the transaction involved many phases with multiple internal and external stakeholders and cross practice coordination required.
Solution
The preparation of a detailed project plan from the outset to manage the multiple work streams, time line and transaction structure changes brought about the successful conclusion of the project over a two year period. The complexity required bespoke tailoring of our ALGorithm data management, review and document collation platform to manage, track and provide real time client reports on a fluid portfolio. ALGorithm facilitated the centralised capturing and issue reporting of vast amounts of due diligence data by our specialist legal resources and helped to streamline and automate the delivery of all project completion requirements.
Benefits
- Enhanced client experience and efficient and cost effective delivery
- Complete project and budget transparency
- Greater transaction insight to help inform pricing decisions
- Consistency and quality of output with the correct level of legal resourcing matched with the appropriate expertise
Regulatory Investigations – CBI investigation
Challenge
Our client was faced with a complex regulatory investigation into two separate but related financial institutions spanning a period of several years, including overlap with previous investigations. The investigation involved hundreds of potential witnesses and tens of millions of documents potentially in scope. This project had very challenging and at time overlapping deadlines across the two institutions and a high number of inter-related dependencies whereby any slippage on one work stream had the potential to cascade to other work streams and result in missed deadlines. There was the additional challenge of the size of the project team needed to deliver this project and the need to collaborate with our client's other advisors on the project seamlessly.
Solution
ALG Solutions (ALGS) brought a project planning focus that carefully scoped every deliverable, dependency and resource needed for this project and agreed this plan with all stakeholders. This program required the implementation of good project management governance, including active participation in multi-party working group sessions. ALGS provided structured reporting to identify and mitigate risks, issues and dependencies coupled with weekly stakeholder meetings to escalate, discuss and mitigate issues and scope changes as they arose during the project. Our solution also included the automation of key processes to ensure robust and effective cost control, as well as constructive challenge to client where key decisions were being delayed or ownership of action was unclear. ALGS also deployed the use of transformative technology solutions and bespoke workflow that greatly increased our clients ability to meet deadlines ahead of time and below budget. The technology solutions deployed included the use of Case Dynamics, an interactive chronology building tool that enabled us to manage extremely complex fact patterns with great ease. We also deployed the use of continuous active learning a form of artificial intelligence to reduce to volume of documents in review by over 80% resulting in significant time and cost savings while simultaneously increasing the accuracy of our evidence identification.
Benefits
Our client:
- Was able to rely on ALGS to project manage key aspects of the project
- Was able to meet all of its 28 separate production deadlines on time and to budget over a three year period
- Was able to proactively identify issues in advance to allow re-plan and re-allocation / prioritisation of key resources to ensure missed dependencies didn’t cascade to other work streams
- Was able to propose innovative technology solutions to the Regulator that enabled it to comply with its regulatory obligations with record speed