The Panama Papers leak is destined to be one of the most significant news events of the year — maybe the decade.
Fundamentally, it’s a story about an enormous cache of confidential documents released by an unnamed whistleblower about the practices of one obscure Panamanian law firm that have enabled some of the world’s most powerful people to hide many trillions of dollars in wealth from taxation. An international team of journalists led by Süddeutsche Zeitung is combing through it all. Governments are highly likely to fall as a result of these revelations.
It seems very unlikely to me that the research is being done by hand. Some technology — semantic analysis tools akin to those used in eDiscovery by law firms and corporate law departments — has to be involved. There is no other way the journalists could be efficiently crawling through 11.5 million documents on over 214,000 shell companies to find the correlations needed to identify the people behind them.
My question is: Whose tools are being used? Because while this volume of data would hardly be unprecedented in the eDiscovery discipline, this would still be the nucleus of a marketing coup beyond the wildest dreams of a tech company CMO if it could be publicized.
This is an offer: I write a lot of marketing case studies for tech companies. If your eDiscovery tool is being used to comb through the Panama Papers, and you can get me access to the people I’d need to talk to in order to research it, I’ll write a case study for you, gratis. Anyone?
Peter Dorfman Creative Services 
The flip side to that, is what was in place for data security, because that certainly isn’t a marketing coup.
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