When the Royal Commission comes knocking, get your data ready!

What to expect when a Royal Commission compels your data

The Victorian Government has established the Royal Commission into the Integrity of Major Public and Civil Infrastructure Construction Projects. The Terms of Reference cover state-commissioned major projects and span corruption and criminal conduct, government oversight and accountability, misuse of taxpayers’ money, and bullying, intimidation and violent conduct on worksites. Working with experienced eDiscovery professionals can help your teams confidently comply with one or more Commission notices by finding and producing documents in the requested format and timeframe.

What to expect when the Commission wants your data

Public hearings are scheduled in two blocks, on either side of the state election on 28 November, and private hearings have been underway since shortly after the Commission was established. Government departments, ministers, construction companies, subcontractors, unions, labour-hire firms, suppliers, dispute resolution providers and other parties working on major projects may be asked to produce documents or give evidence. Some major participants have already been invited to give the Commission a detailed account of what they know, ahead of any formal notice.

Notices to produce documents are compulsory. The Commission issues them to require specified records, with at least seven days to comply. Notices tend to arrive in overlapping waves, and previous commissions have been reluctant to extend deadlines. We should expect notices to keep arriving until the hearings conclude. The penalties for non-compliance are serious, with fines up to $50,000 or two years' imprisonment.

Recent amendments also create a Special Prosecutor who can receive the Commission’s evidence and pass it to Victoria Police, IBAC, and other regulators, so what is produced, and how, may be scrutinised well beyond the Commission.

What to know about document productions

Practice Direction 4, issued in September 2026, sets out how to produce documents to the Commission. Unlike in litigation, privilege is not a reason to withhold a document from the Commission. Privileged material must be identified and claimed as the Direction sets out, but it is still produced.

Multiple notices often arrive together, and the same documents may be responsive to several. eDiscovery platforms handle duplicates consistently across notices and are built for tight production deadlines. Assigning document IDs early, consistent with the Commission’s protocol, gives witnesses and counsel a single reference from production through to hearing.

Legal advisers will guide the substance of the response, including scope, privilege claims and confidentiality. The business’s role is to ensure its people, data, and technology can deliver within the deadline, often on top of business-as-usual work.

How technology helps with getting the data

Adio regularly works with law firms and corporations to connect Everlaw to enterprise systems for direct transfer, initiated by the corporate IT team. The initial set-up can take time to pass internal IT governance processes, but once approved it is straightforward and doesn’t incur ongoing costs.

With the inquiry’s scope not limited to a particular period, phone and messaging data are also likely to be sought. Adio uses remote mobile collection to gather specific people’s messages without the device leaving their hands.

Finding the documents that fall within the scope of each Notice

eDiscovery workflows bring efficiencies to searching, reviewing and producing documents. We have previously discussed the value of some fundamental concepts that we won’t explore further. Some more advanced capabilities that may assist when responding to notices include:

• Vector and AI searching in Everlaw enables efficient question-and-answer across large groups of documents. This may include directly asking whether there is anything in relation to the text of the Notice itself. Everlaw has no practical limit on the volume of documents it can support.

• Technology-assisted review (TAR) and AI can cull large document populations into manageable sets, with metrics such as precision, recall and prevalence to validate the approach.

eDiscovery platforms can also assist with identifying privilege and redacting confidential and personal information:

• Coloured markup sets allow privileged, confidential and personal information to be marked and handled separately. If the Commission later requires a category of redactions to be filled or lifted, it’s as simple as clicking a button.

• Keywords, law firm email domains, regular expressions and AI can find potentially privileged material and bulk redact confidential and personal information across PDFs, spreadsheets, audio and video.

Conclusion

Royal Commissions expect timely compliance, and a flurry of Notices can land on already stretched internal teams. Before a Notice arrives, consider your technology capabilities and whether your teams need additional support, so they can focus on the response, work with the legal team and meet each deadline with confidence.

Practical tips

1. Test your response time. Run a mock Notice end to end through your internal teams and outside counsel. Find the bottlenecks before a real deadline does.

2. Inventory data sources, contractors and suppliers. The Commission’s terms reach subcontractors, suppliers and labour hire, and a current inventory makes it faster to scope notices and find the right records.

3. Identify what’s no longer available. Decommissioned systems, departed staff, and replaced devices take longer to deal with and require dialogue with the Commission, so it’s better to know before a Notice asks for them.

4. Assign ownership. Identify one owner and keep a register of every Notice, its scope, deadline and what was produced against it.