Our corporate client faced a DOJ investigation. They had twelve key custodians that were scattered across three cities on two continents, each juggling multiple chat apps in three languages. Slack JSON archives and legacy email PSTs added another forty gigabytes of unstructured text. Reviewing any of it in siloed viewers would have been hopeless; what the case demanded was a single, chronologically threaded story of who said what and when—no matter where the conversation started.
Flying Experts, Capturing Truth
Lucent’s Incident‑Response roster kicked in within hours. Three CFCE‑certified examiners boarded the next flights—one bound for Atlanta, GA, another for Dubai, and a third for Washington DC—carrying Faraday gear, Cellebrite Premium kits, and notarized chain‑of‑custody packets. By the end of the second day every phone had been physically imaged, pulling back deleted payloads, secure enclave artifacts, and keychain tokens that logical exports overlook.
Back at Lucent’s U.S. processing lab, six disparate message schemas were normalized into a unified relational structure that preserved emojis, reactions, inline media, attachments, and handled time‑zone offsets. A custom Python “conversation engine” then stitched emails, chats, and SMS into cohesive dialogue blocks keyed to participants and a two‑minute temporal window. Reviewers could finally scroll a single narrative timeline instead of hopping between five disconnected viewers.
Accelerating Review by Knowing the Players
Counsel identified three Persons of Interest who appeared central to the alleged scheme. Lucent’s Active Learning model scored every conversation for proximity to those individuals, automatically promoting the most critical threads to the top of the queue. By Day 10,the reviewers had surfaced 137 “hot docs,” including Signal messages everyone believed were lost for good.
On Day 14, Lucent delivered DOJ‑compliant exhibit sets, a hyper‑linked chronology, and a privilege log—and then hosted a live Relativity demo for agency attorneys, walking them through two years of cross‑platform chats as if it were a single WhatsApp thread.
Why Lucent Made the Difference
Lucent’s prior success processing 9.5 TB in an earlier two‑week sprint reassured the client that this aggressive plan would work—and it did. Lucent pairs globally deployable, credentialed examiners (CFCE, GCFE, CySA+) with deep expertise in physical imaging—from iOS Secure Enclave extractions to Android’s file‑based encryption. All data lands in a secure Relativity environment, where senior analysts—not layers of junior reviewers—guide analytics and Active Learning models. The team embraces AI only when it accelerates insight, ensuring technology serves the story rather than becoming the story.
Lessons for Every High‑Stakes Matter
Speed wins when regulators set the clock. Global travel and round‑the‑clock processing compressed weeks of logistics into days.
Narratives, not silos, persuade. A unified conversation view lets reviewers—and regulators—grasp intent at a glance. Focus on the actors who matter.
Prioritizing by person, not just keyword, slashes review hours and surfaces the hottest documents fast.
Ready for one‑pane clarity against regulator deadlines? Email hello@lucentdiscovery.com to schedule a consultation.