40+
Second Requests
Supported
90%
or greater reduction in documents requiring review post collection
Chambers Ranked
Successful negotiations with agency staff and meaningful modifications
Supporting M&A activity across
government agencies and complex industries.
Technology
Consumer Products
Agriculture
Healthcare
Energy
Shipping
Financial
Entertainment
Natural Resources
Transportation
Telecommunications
Department of Justice
Federal Trade Commission
European Commission
Competition Bureau Canada
New York Attorney General
New Hampshire Attorney General
Discuss Your 2R Needs
Single Service Provider Solution
An innovative way to handle Second Requests with our teams supporting both sides of the deal.
Having supported acquiring parties, those being acquired, and both sides of the merger – we fully understand the concern about promptly complying to produce documents for the government. We’ve worked on “bet the company” type transactions and understand the importance of both parties operating in lockstep to reach the agreed-upon compliance state.
In certain transactions, it makes sense for both parties to use the same service provider. Our approach is a shared resource built with ethical walls, separate teams to support each party to the deal, and transparency built into our workflow and reporting processes. We can set up separate workspaces on the same server or separate servers if preferred.
Our Chambers Ranked staff has a proven track record supporting multiple Second Requests simultaneously. Every member, from forensics to client services, delivers the exceptional support on which we’ve built our reputation.
Why Use Innovative Driven for Second Requests?
Defensible & Timely Custom Workflows
Complex matters require various eDiscovery solutions and services. Our proven workflows identify the relevant data sources, limiting the time and effort to export the relevant information. This proactive and consultative solution quickly gathers the data agencies want at substantial cost savings and facilitates the relationships of all parties throughout the process. We also leverage best-of-breed technologies throughout compliance, including defensible predictive coding tools, programmatic redaction applications, and machine-learning approaches to identifying privileged documents
Linked Attachments
With data operations in remote server networks, many traditional company “attachments” are stored in the cloud. Our proprietary workflow identifies those linked attachments (e.g., in Google Drive or SharePoint) and matches them with their extant counterparts elsewhere in the collection. Clients leveraging this workflow are ahead of questions from staff, and clients can be confident they are reviewing and producing all relevant data.
Agency Negotiations
Government agencies require each company under investigation to provide information about how it intends to use eDiscovery tools before applying them to identify responsive materials. Our experience drafting TAR protocols also makes us adept at participating in TAR workflow negotiations with staff and attesting to the workflows’ defensibility. Our protocols haven’t been challenged and are generally accepted as best practices.
Enterprise Databases, Structured Data & New Forms of Nontraditional File Types
Corporate data volumes continue to increase exponentially and are often stored in enterprise databases or other structured data repositories. We work with clients, counsel, and IT to streamline running the reports to meet agency specifications that forego unnecessary collection and processing reams of data.
Case Studies
Challenge
A top-tier Am Law 100 global firm, recognized for its work in mergers and acquisitions, engaged Innovative Driven to support an acquisition representing a multi-billion-dollar market expansion opportunity subject to an accelerated closing timeline. Any delay in regulatory review risked pushing the transaction beyond the negotiated window and jeopardizing the agreed-upon valuation.
The Federal Trade Commission issued a broad and highly technical Second Request requiring rapid, defensible analysis of more than 2.5 million documents. The scope and complexity of the request made the discovery response both a critical regulatory hurdle and a potential gating factor for deal viability. Counsel engaged Innovative Driven to lead the discovery response and design a regulator-ready workflow capable of meeting aggressive deadlines without compromising defensibility.
Solution
Innovative Driven architected and executed an end-to-end Second Request discovery strategy tailored to the specific competitive and factual issues raised by regulators.
Key components included:
- Negotiation of a defensible technology-assisted review (TAR 1.0) protocol aligned with FTC expectations for transparency, sampling, validation, and reporting
- Design and oversight of a TAR workflow calibrated to highly heterogeneous data and limited early relevance signals
- Rapid model training supported by disciplined quality control and continuous validation
- Large-scale, time-sensitive review operations with structured reviewer teams, privilege review layers, and coordinated quality assurance
- Feedback loops to align reviewer decisions with model learning and FTC production requirements
After substantial compliance, Innovative Driven deployed Forest AI to rapidly synthesize and prioritize the 400,000-plus documents ultimately produced. Customized generative AI workflows analyzed the documents to identify factual relevance, competitive-impact themes, and potential deposition value. Forest generated concise summaries, extracted key quotations, and clustered materials by issue to support immediate client advocacy before the FTC and prepare for witness interviews.
Results
The integrated TAR and AI-assisted synthesis approach enabled counsel to meet the FTC’s accelerated schedule while maintaining a defensible, regulator-approved process, and allowed for earlier surfacing of key documents with significantly less overhead
Key outcomes included:
- On-time compliance with an expansive and technically demanding Second Request
- Approximately 35% reduction in overall discovery and compliance costs
- Significant narrowing of the deposition preparation universe to a focused set of high-impact documents
- Mitigation of discovery-related delays that could have jeopardized transaction timing
By combining disciplined TAR governance with advanced generative AI-driven document synthesis, Innovative Driven delivered a streamlined, regulator-ready discovery process that helped clear the path for the transaction’s timely closing.