Financial services eDiscovery for the FCA and PRA era.

Regulated finance sits at the sharp end of UK eDiscovery. When the Financial Conduct Authority issues a section 165 notice, when the Prudential Regulation Authority opens a supervisory review, or when the Serious Fraud Office serves a compulsory production order, the response window is short and the standard of preservation is unforgiving. We advise banks, insurers, asset managers, brokerages and fintechs on the full lifecycle of regulator-facing disclosure, from the first indication of a matter to signed production.

Our financial services eDiscovery practice is built around the sources that actually carry the evidence in a modern investment firm. That means Bloomberg chat and terminal messaging, Symphony, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp on personal and corporate devices, voice recordings from dealing floors, structured trading data, order management system logs, and the surrounding email and document estates. Each of these has its own capture path, its own metadata model and its own regulator-acceptable production format, and getting any of them wrong is expensive.

We collect against ACPO principles and hash-verify at source, so that no exchange between the firm, its counsel and the regulator can be undermined on chain-of-custody grounds. Processing removes duplicates, threads and near-duplicates before review, which materially reduces reviewer hours on the large mailboxes and chat archives typical of a s.165 request. Search terms are tested and negotiated with counsel and, where appropriate, with the regulator, and the sampling that supports that negotiation is documented in a form that survives challenge.

Review is hosted on Relativity or RelativityOne, configured for privilege, legal professional privilege carve-outs, market-sensitive material, and the personal-data redaction obligations that sit alongside the substantive review. For larger matters we use technology-assisted review under a defensible protocol, with continuous validation and a written record that a regulator or a court can interrogate.

Production is tuned to the addressee. FCA and PRA productions follow the templates and delivery expectations those regulators actually work to, including phased or rolling production where an investigation spans months. For cross-border matters that touch the SEC, the DOJ, the CFTC or European supervisors, we produce in parallel formats and preserve the underlying data set so subsequent requests can be answered against the same evidence base.

The result is a defensible, auditable, and regulator-ready record. Instruct us early: preservation choices made in the first week determine what is defensible in the twelfth month.