Initial findings of our e-discovery review
Source: gov.uk (2025-02-03)

Our Interim Director of Legal Services Matthew Wagstaff provides an update on our ongoing review of our use of e-discovery software.

We use software to help identify evidence and other relevant material for use in our criminal investigations and prosecutions.

This ensures we can process very large amounts of digital material across our cases and is line with the approach taken by most law enforcement agencies.

At present, the SFO is reviewing our current and past use of this software.

A sufficiently large amount of work has been undertaken as part of this review so that I can now provide a substantive update. Some of this work is ongoing.

Our current system

The SFO currently uses the software OpenText Axcelerate (“Axcelerate”).

As with many software programs, it is usual to find and patch software issues from time to time.

Recently, we finished applying a technical fix to Axcelerate after our staff identified an “encoding issue” affecting the way some words appeared in documents ingested into the system.

This work took some months but is now complete and the issue has been corrected.

We have already informed all relevant defendants about this fix across our cases in court and will continue to share information with future defendants in the normal way via pre-trial proceedings.

We remain confident in the efficacy and integrity of our system.

Our past system

With input from the Attorney General’s Office and His Majesty’s Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate (“HMCPSI”), the SFO has also commenced a review of our past use of software called Autonomy Introspect (“Autonomy”).

The issue we have identified with this software is different. The version of Autonomy used by the SFO in the past had some specific rules that governed the way search terms had to be constructed to identify variations of the word being searched.

The way Autonomy’s search function worked was explained in two cases at court, and we have also discussed it with the independent body that reviews our work, HMCPSI.

The SFO, like all prosecutors, has a legal obligation to disclose material to any convicted defendant which might cast doubt upon the safety of that person’s conviction and to undertake enquiries to ascertain whether such material exists.

We take this obligation very seriously and we recognise that, although we have not seen any evidence of this yet, this issue with search terms could have resulted in relevant and disclosable material being missed.

Therefore, we have decided to look back at our Autonomy cases to see how search terms were constructed and used by our case teams in the past. This work is well underway and we have now completed an initial review of every relevant case, prioritising cases where defendants are serving custodial sentences.

As a result, we have identified many cases which were clearly not affected by the issue. However, in some cases, further enquiries are needed and so we have not yet reached a decision as to whether those cases were affected or not. This work is ongoing and will likely involve some searches being re-run on some cases.

In all cases we have reviewed to date, we have not seen any material which undermines the safety of any conviction.

A dedicated senior working group at the SFO, led by Interim Director of Legal Services Matthew Wagstaff, is coordinating this review with independent input from the Attorney General’s Office and HMCPSI.

The work of the senior working group is also being overseen by an independent oversight group.

We are contacting defendants and their legal teams, where we have address details for them, to update them on this process, setting out in detail the action we have taken.

If you think this should include you – and you or your lawyer have not already been contacted by us – you can reach us at xxx@xxx.xx (mailto:xxx@xxx.xx).

We are committed to continuing to publish relevant information and we expect to provide a further update in the coming months.

We will publish further updates on the progress of this work when appropriate.