How Legal Data Intelligence Can Help Navigate Governmental Investigations

A recent survey of corporate counsel by Norton Rose Fulbright found that 70% of respondents in North America were involved in at least one regulatory proceeding in 2024, compared to 61% in 2023.

Regulatory uncertainty looms large across corporate America as companies contend with multiple factors: dynamically changing state and federal regulations; the unpredictable consequences of the recent Chevron Doctrine reversal, which shifts interpretive power from federal agencies to the courts; and a lack of regulatory clarity in fast-growing industries like AI and cryptocurrency.

In 2024 alone, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) collected a record $8.2 billion in financial penalties. Indeed, regulatory scrutiny now extends across technology, privacy, data breaches, consumer lending, and employee relations—impacting virtually all regulated and publicly traded companies.

But it’s not just the threat of fines, penalties, and the reputational risk that keep legal and compliance teams up at night. They must also grapple with the onerous disclosure obligations attendant to governmental investigations and the imposing deadlines set by regulators to produce answers to their inquiries.

Consider, for example, how Ripple—in what it called an “extraordinary demand” and “disproportionate request”—was asked to produce over 1 million employee Slack messages in its legal battle with the SEC.

The challenges aren’t any less severe on the other side of the Atlantic. In the United Kingdom, organizations involved in Public Inquiries and Public Inquests need to review their disclosures with a fine-tooth comb to redact personal sensitive information in compliance with the GDPR. Furthermore, an additional process called Maxwellisation needs to be conducted to ensure fairness to individuals who have been criticized in the final report.

Fortunately, even as the data profile of investigations has become more burdensome and complex, new technologies built around generative AI have proven to be highly effective at cutting through data clutter. Emerging tools that are shaping the future of investigations include generative AI for narrative summarization, flagging for inconsistencies between witness statements and exhibits, real-time entity resolution across data types, and predictive modeling to assess likely points of regulatory concern.

From Reactive Data Processing to Proactive, Intelligence-Driven Decision-Making

Traditional workflows for collecting and reviewing data have not kept pace with these advances and may be too slow and inefficient in today’s fast-changing technology landscape.

A new white paper, The Application of Legal Data Intelligence to Governmental Investigations, explores how LDI enables legal teams to take advantage of these advances with purpose, vision, and a clear plan. The co-authors, who collectively bring decades of experience in regulatory environments in the US, UK, and Canada, delve into how Legal Data Intelligence empowers legal professionals to move beyond reactive discovery and toward proactive legal strategy—leveraging data patterns, stakeholder mapping, risk profiling, and predictive modelling to improve decision-making under pressure.