Integral to every investigation, is document and data management. We are cognisant of the importance of document management as well as the importance of the chain of evidence and preservation thereof. We consider the ruling concerning the admissibility of documents in terms of section 3(l)(c) of Law of Evidence Amendment Act 45 of 1988 in the “King trials”, where the judge refused the admissibility of the documents on the basis of inter alia procedural irregularities in the document controls.

Our extensive experience in the forensic accounting field, positions GDG as the partner of choice for data management and capturing services for forensic investigations and litigation support. In our experience we have found that many clients may be paying a premium for certain elements of the investigation and that the price paid for these elements is not commensurate with the value which the clients may gain. GDG’s value proposition is to offer the document management and data capturing portion of investigations at competitive prices without compromising on quality, security and timely service delivery.

GDG offers the following services to legal teams or investigation units within a variety of organisations:

• Assigning suitably qualified staff who are managed and supervised by professionals with experience in the field of investigations;
• Applying strict security and confidentiality measures and controls to assignments;
• Retain control of documents requested and/or received relevant to an investigation;
• Observing best-practices for chain of evidence;
• Applying strict access controls to documents and data;
• Consulting with the investigating officer / project manager to establish background to the matter to the extent that this will contribute to the development of appropriate templates and/or databases;
• Paginating evidence;
• Preparing a detailed index of documents;
• Converting hard-copy paginated documents to PDF to preserve the original evidence;
• Applying optical character recognition (“OCR”) software to PDF documents so that the documents are “searchable”;
• Capturing and/or converting relevant data;
• Preparing detailed cash flow analyses;
• Preparing a court ready report complete with detailed Annexures detailing inter alia, sources of information, document / data management, procedures performed and findings;
• Providing expert testimony related to the document and data management and conversion / analysis where required.

Contact us to discuss the service offerings available for your investigation in detail