Alvarez & Marsal analyzes role of structured and unstructured data in disputes
Alvarez & Marsal has published an analysis differentiating structured and unstructured data in disputes, emphasizing the necessity of both for a comprehensive understanding of organizational events.
Management consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal has released an in-depth analysis differentiating the roles and characteristics of structured and unstructured data in corporate disputes. The firm highlights that understanding both data types is crucial for forming a complete picture of events.
Unstructured data, such as emails, documents, and PDFs, constitutes a significant portion of an organization's data, growing annually by up to 23 percent. While this data is often central to disputes due to its accessibility and ease of understanding, Alvarez & Marsal stresses that structured data holds equal importance.
Structured data, organized in fixed fields and defined data types, is typically found in databases and spreadsheets, including financial or payroll information. Its analysis often requires a deeper understanding of business systems and query languages.
Alvarez & Marsal suggests that the true value emerges when these two data sources are utilized together. Structured data provides a detailed and precise view of an organization's transactional activities, complementing the overview offered by unstructured data. This combination helps reveal anomalies, errors, and inconsistencies that might be missed by relying solely on reports or financial summaries.
The firm outlines a process for leveraging structured data in dispute investigations, involving data scoping, extraction, loading, cleaning, transformation, and final analysis and reporting. This approach enables the answering of key questions and the testing of hypotheses in various legal and business contexts.