Spare a thought for Sue Gray. As the nation waits with bated breath in anticipation of her ‘more ‘meaningful report’, Sue Gray has spent recent weeks forensically investigating the vast number of alleged gatherings on government premises during the Covid restrictions. Sue Gray had to sift through more than 500 pages of documentation including over 300 images. Her investigation included interviewing over 70 individuals, whilst she also had to examine WhatsApp messages; text messages; searches of official records; and building entry and exit logs.
Here are three ways LitiGate would have made Sue Gray’s life easier:
The remit of Sue Gray’s investigation included 16 events that took place over a dozen dates between May 2020 and April 2021. When you factor in the constantly changing Covid restrictions during this period, having a clear chronology documenting a timeline of these events would have been one of Sue Gray’s initial priorities. This extremely laborious task would have probably taken several days once she had finished sifting through all her examination material. Such delays are unnecessarily costly both to the government and the public given the intense interest in her investigation findings.
With LitiGate, Sue Gray’s investigation would have been accelerated by a number of hours, if not days. Sue Gray could have easily uploaded all her examination material from interview transcripts to email correspondences involving government officials to our cloud platform which would have then automated a chronology for her within a matter of moments. Not only would LitiGate have saved her vital time, but our increased chronologising accuracy would have limited the potential for human error ensuring that Sue Gray left no stone unturned during her investigation.
In compiling evidence for her investigation, Sue Gray interviewed over 70 individuals. When you factor in the dozens of individuals who may have attended the 16 events, as well as others who also submitted evidence to Sue Gray, remembering all the actors on an extensive case and being able to determine their relevance where appropriate can be a demanding task.
By using LitiGate, Sue Gray would have been able to easily deploy our cloud-based platform to identify the names of individuals who are prominent throughout the entirety of her evidence documentation. Our actor function would have facilitated Sue Gray’s task to identify individuals who may have been repeat offenders of Covid restrictions. For good measure, our alias feature would have ensured that parliamentary nicknames used in correspondences between government figures would have picked up terms such as ‘BoJo’. Again, this would ensure that Sue Gray left no stone unturned during her investigation.
An irritating problem for Sue Gray during her investigation would have been the difficulty in cross-referencing documents. Due to the sheer amount of examination material which faced Sue Gray, trying to locate a precise term or document can take away precious time from a case.
LitiGate’s Smart Search feature has mitigated the issues posed by manual cross-referencing by allowing users to identify key terms and documents with ease. As demonstrated in the screenshot below, if Sue Gray wanted to identify which documents contained the word ‘gathering’, LitiGate would simply facilitate this task by displaying all references to this term across her entire examination material.
Sue Gray’s investigation has been one of the most discussed investigations of the century to date. Yet, lawyers and investigators should not confine themselves to the same manual methods used in previous centuries that can be automated with ease today. These three easily accessible features of LitiGate would have significantly expedited Sue Gray’s investigation without compromising on accuracy.