Espion to trawl 30m Quinn documents for Anglo case

Espion, an Irish headquartered digital search expert company, will be used to trawl through 30 million documents inside Quinn Insurance Limited in order to fulfil a discovery order being sought by the family of Sean Quinn.

The document search is required by the Quinn family in order to allow them advance a massive civil action against the State to try and prove that they were illegally loaned over €2 billion by the former Anglo Irish Bank. This money was used either to buy or support the bank's own shares, unknown to the stock market.

The Quinn family believes this transaction should be declared invalid as it was done for an alleged illegal purpose.

This is denied by the former Anglo Irish Bank. The Quinns have not had access to documents in their father’s former company since they all exited the business some years ago.

Dr Damir Kahvedzic, a senior digital forensic and ediscovery consultant with Espion, has been lined up to carry out a document search of Sean Quinn's former insurance company.

Liquidator
Dr Kahvedzic will carry out the search at the request of Mc Cann FitzGerald, the legal advisers to the special liquidator of the former Anglo Irish Bank.

Espion is headquartered in Dublin, but it also has office in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Brussels. It uses “predictive coding” and “technology-assisted review” to search large volumes of documents for relevant information through a combination of search algorithms and human expertise.

Espion plans to use a powerful software package called Symantec Clearwell to carry out its document review of Quinn Insurance Ltd for McCann FitzGerald.

This software is commonly used in litigation in the United States as well as Europe, but has been less frequently used in Ireland.

Separately, it emerged last week that the Quinn family is now using CP Crowley & Co, a Galway legal firm, to represent them in their case against the former Anglo Irish Bank. The law firm declined to comment either about themselves, the case, or how they were being paid, when contacted.