eCommerce Company Accelerates Regulatory Response with Lighthouse

Key Results

Early fact-finding with IQ Answers

Avoided weeks of traditional attorney work, resulting in massive savings and a crucial head start.

AI-Powered quality control with IQ Issues

Achieved 90% alignment with IQ Issues and counsel’s coding on initial document sample, eliminating the need for a second sampling round.

Custom AI Summarizations for second-level review

Designed and deployed a custom solution in one week to accelerate second-level review with comprehensive document summaries and key language excerpts.

The Challenge: Anticipating Regulatory Scrutiny and Conquering Complex Data

A large, multinational consumer platform received a regulatory information request from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) consumer-protection concerns involving a core offering. Facing a high-stakes investigation, the company’s outside counsel needed to move quickly to interrogate a large volume of data, be proactive with anticipated follow-up requests, and ensure defensibility from the outset.

The matter presented two time-sensitive challenges:

1. Fact-Finding: To meet critical regulatory milestones and get ahead of the FTC, counsel needed to immediately interrogate the data and establish key facts. This urgency was compounded by the desire to identify and vet potential custodians in anticipation of the FTC expanding the scope of the information request.
2. Tailored Solutions: A substantial portion of the relevant data was sourced from proprietary exports from two non-standard enterprise collaboration tools. These non-standard CSV-based exports were incompatible with industry-standard eDiscovery chat processing tools, creating a major roadblock for efficient and defensible review.

In total, Lighthouse received roughly 4TB of raw data, which translated to just under 1.4M documents requiring processing.

The Solution: A Two-Pronged Approach with AI and Custom Engineering

Lighthouse partnered with outside counsel to deploy a strategy that leveraged advanced AI for early fact-finding and custom data engineering to normalize the most challenging data sources.

IQ Answers: Accelerating Early Case Assessment and Fact-Finding

To address the volatile custodian list and scope, counsel utilized IQ Answers. This allowed the case team to move beyond the traditional “hunt and peck” method of keyword searching and instead use natural language prompts to interrogate the data early and efficiently.

With guidance from the Expert Search team, counsel was able to get at their specific goals for early assessment including:

• Further targeting key data types crucial to the response.
• Identify potential custodians who were not yet formally in scope.

This proactive, AI-driven exploration eliminated the need for weeks of manual attorney review typically required for initial fact-finding. Based on feedback from counsel, Lighthouse determined that one IQ Answers query and response saved 15-20 hours of review time. Thus, the use of IQ Answers allowed outside counsel to realize a savings of more than $400K in the initial case assessment phase.

IQ Issues + Summarization: QC and Second-Level Efficiency

Once the initial culling processes reduced the document population to 47K documents for review, IQ Issues was used as a Quality Control (QC) measure against first-level reviewers.

• QC Validation: Lighthouse provided a 200-document sample for counsel’s issue coding and generated AI issue codes for the same set. The results showed a remarkable 90% alignment for Responsive documents, significantly exceeding the typical target of 80% alignment. Because of this high precision, the typical second round of sampling was deemed unnecessary.
• Custom Enhancement: The case team requested a more robust output for second-level review—a comprehensive document summary and key language excerpts to support the issue codes. Leveraging close client collaboration and responsiveness, the Lighthouse team designed a custom solution on an accelerated timeline that added:
  
  • A full Document Summary
  • Key Language Excerpts tied directly to the relevant issues.

This customized approach was applied to 38K+ documents in the review corpus, and improved the efficiency of the second-level review by an estimated 38%, resulting in an estimated savings of $300K. On top of this, since alignment between the case team and IQ Issues was so high, it’s reasonable to believe these issue codes could eliminate the need for first-level review entirely, which could result in an additional savings of $45K, if not more depending on review volume.

Custom Data Engineering for Modern Collaboration Data

Receiving proprietary collaboration data in non-standard CSV exports rendered these data types incompatible with typical processing tools. To overcome this, the Lighthouse Innovation Data Engineering team developed a custom, defensible chat processing workflow to handle proprietary CSV exports.

The engineered workflow consolidated, cleaned, and structured the data into 24-hour conversational transcripts while embedding attachments and preserving all necessary metadata. This process allowed the complex, non-standard chat data to be transformed into defensible, review-ready datasets, overcoming a significant roadblock that would have stalled the matter for weeks. As an added benefit, this new workflow is now a reusable framework for future custom conversational exports.

The Result: Proactive Defensibility and Accelerated Review

By combining an array of LighthouseIQ modules with custom data engineering, the corporate team was delivered proactive, high-confidence results:

• The strategic use of IQ Answers for early fact-finding allowed counsel to anticipate regulatory needs and prepare for potential scope expansion, resulting in $400K+ in savings and a crucial head start.
• The deployment of IQ Issues provided a high degree of confidence and quality control over the first-level reviewers, evidenced by the 90% alignment score. Moving forward, based on this high alignment, first-level review could be completely eliminated, resulting in $45K in savings.
• The quickly developed custom summarization solution reduced second-level review time by over a third, resulting in an estimated savings of $300K.
• The innovative custom chat processing workflow successfully unlocked previously incompatible data sources, turning a complex data roadblock into a defensible, reusable, and review-ready asset.

The partnership ensured both the in-house team and their law firm maintained control over the data investigation, allowing them to approach the FTC with confidence and a clear, defensible response.