Competition and antitrust eDiscovery at regulator speed.

Competition and antitrust matters move at the speed of the regulator, and the regulator moves fast. A Competition and Markets Authority section 26 notice, an EU Commission Article 18 request, a dawn raid on a UK office, or an early leniency application all impose immediate obligations to preserve, collect and produce data on tight statutory timetables. Delay and defective preservation are not neutral: they invite adverse inference, information notices with teeth, and in some cases criminal exposure under the cartel offence.

We advise UK and international competition counsel on eDiscovery for market investigations, merger reviews, cartel proceedings and follow-on damages claims. Our work covers the moment a dawn raid warrant is served, the weeks of custodian collection that follow, the months of review, and the production timelines the CMA and the European Commission actually work to.

Dawn raid response is a live-fire discipline. We operate a UK response capability that can attend a raided site, image devices under the direction of counsel while the raid is in progress, and preserve the evidence that regulators leave behind. That includes not only the imaged devices but also the shadow copies, deleted-item recovery and mobile device capture that support later interviews.

For market and merger investigations, custodian selection and data-source scoping are done jointly with counsel and, where useful, with the regulator, to reduce the risk of overproduction and the associated cost. Chat platforms, project rooms, pricing systems, board packs and sales pipeline data all require different capture methods, and we document each choice so that the eventual production sits on a defensible record.

Review is configured for the specific investigation. That means coding for the competitive conduct at issue, for legal advice privilege and, in EU matters, for the more limited legal professional privilege recognised by the European courts. Leniency-stream evidence is segregated within the workspace, access-controlled and produced under separate protocols so that co-defendant discovery does not compromise the leniency position.

Production is delivered in the formats the CMA, EU DG Comp, EFTA Surveillance Authority and downstream civil courts actually accept, with the metadata and native combinations required for hyperlink-heavy investigation reports. For follow-on damages actions in the Competition Appeal Tribunal we roll the same collection forward, so that a data set built for regulatory response can support private enforcement without a second collection exercise.