Organizations today are navigating an array of legal and regulatory issues relating to increased globalization. Despite projections that the coronavirus pandemic would stifle globalization in favor of regionalization, international trade, business, investing and cooperation are thriving. At the same time, the volume of corporate litigation and investigations continue to rise—a survey from Norton Rose Fulbright found that 40% of respondents expect an increase in disputes in the coming year. Research has also shown that increasing international business operations are correlated to increases in cross-border discovery. Document review and e-discovery are now sitting at an interesting cross-section of these trends, where organizations are experiencing legal and regulatory matters requiring multilingual review.

Today, multinational entities operating across geographically dispersed offices generate a diverse and varying data footprint. This includes a varied medley of foreign language communications and files, which are increasingly coming into scope in legal and regulatory discovery and investigations. Given that these types of matters are driven by a high-stakes litigation, regulatory inquiry or internal corporate investigation, organizations cannot afford to make mistakes. There are simply no resources to spare on poorly managed reviews, inefficient foreign language review workflows and undertrained or underqualified review teams. Legal or investigative teams facing these challenging matters often feel like they need a miracle to fulfill the discovery request or need at hand.

Organizations required to conduct review across thousands of documents in various languages face a seemingly impossible task assembling a multilingual review team. To effectively respond and ensure on-time completion of a review exercise, on-demand access to a pool of highly-qualified and trained foreign language reviewers is usually the only viable path forward.