A year after Deloitte entered into an alliance with e-discovery software provider Relativity, the two have now announced the creation of an end-to-end workflow platform geared towards managing and responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Deloitte's new disclosure solution was developed with the government agencies responding to FOIA requests in mind. But it's also potentially good news for attorneys who don't particularly enjoy standing around looking at their watch. Chris Knox, Deloitte's risk and financial advisory managing director and leader in the Federal Discovery practice, said that savvy attorneys have begun to utilize the FOIA in the vein of a pre-litigation discovery request.

One slight wrinkle? The government is dealing with an epic backlog of about 100,000 FOIA requests per year. That's not a problem that you can simply be addressed by just throwing more bodies at the wall.

“We're trying to amplify those humans, and one of the main things that we're doing is identifying and aiding in the extraction of sensitive information very quickly—so identifying personally identifiable information, personal health information and aiding the subject matter expert in quickly going through the collection and producing it more rapidly,” Knox said.  

If that sounds like something that also has applications in the vast and expanding landscape of national and international privacy regulations, then you're not alone. Deloitte's disclosure solution has yet to be rolled out onto a global stage, but Knox can foresee potential use cases that involve responding to requests made under the likes of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Under the GDPR, consumers have the right to request a copy of the data that a company has collected from them or ask for that data to be erased. Tools like Deloitte's disclosure solution could help companies expedite the process of culling targeted information from the herd.

“Specific to the beats are [responding to] data subject access requests… [and] identifying not only the individual's sensitive information but other individuals' sensitive information that might be contained in the collection as well,” Knox said.

Launching the service on Relativity was a marriage of convenience in more ways than one. Deloitte announced its partnership with the software provider—founded under the “Deloitte Alliances Program”—back in January 2018. The basic idea was to take Relativity's preexisting functionality and build upon it to create new solutions, something that immediately came in handy with regards to the disclosure solution.

Knox said that to create the new disclosure solution, some assisted automated redaction capabilities were incorporated into Relativity's platform, which automatically detects sensitive information.

“We built a more dynamic FOIA workflow structure on top of it. So it's a FOIA workflow assisted redaction engine sitting on top of the Relativity stack,” Knox said.

To be sure, Deloitte isn't the only one of the Big Four accounting and professional services companies looking to leverage legal technology. In August 2017, for instance, Ernst & Young acquired legal technology services provider Riverview Law, which licenses artificial intelligence products developed by Kim Technologies from DLA Piper.