The Serious Fraud Office’s announcement that it will review another 20 cases for potential miscarriages of justice caused by problems with its Autonomy e-discovery system is welcome news.
However, as someone who represents defendants in SFO prosecutions - including the two which triggered the recent reviews into the Autonomy system - I worry the agency is still not taking the underlying problem seriously enough.
I first became aware of issues with the SFO’s Autonomy system when representing Richard Morris, former CEO of G4S UK and Ireland, who was being prosecuted by the SFO for alleged fraud.
In the summer of 2022, the SFO sent us a curious letter. The agency explained that a key piece of disclosure which supported Mr Morris’s defence had originally been missed ‘because of the punctuation’. No explanation was provided in the letter about what that meant. However, six months later, the SFO would bring its decade long investigation to a close by offering no evidence.
The issue, as we were to discover, was in the way that the SFO had chosen to set up Autonomy back in 2009. This flaw (which the SFO prefers to call a ‘feature’) means that words which are followed by certain punctuation marks will respond only to searches which include that punctuation mark.
So, for example, a document containing the simple sentence ‘I have paid a bribe.’ would not be returned by a search for the word ‘bribe’ alone. For the document to be returned, the SFO would need to search for ‘bribe.’.
I have worked with many e-discovery platforms and have never come across one set up this way before.
Some people within the SFO’s e-discovery team appear to have known about this unusual feature, but either they didn’t tell the case teams designing the search terms, or they didn’t fully appreciate its consequences. In either case, no-one at the SFO thought it sufficiently important to tell the defence when we were asked to propose our own search terms.
The collapse of the G4S case eventually triggered an internal review of at least 66 historic cases which had used the Autonomy software. The SFO has since reported that it has not found any material casting doubt upon the safety of any past conviction, though it is unclear in how many of these cases the agency re-ran the search terms to establish which documents were missed.
My concerns about the SFO’s e-disclosure systems continued to grow during the separate London Mining PLC prosecution in which I represented consultant Ariel Armon. In that case, the SFO reluctantly agreed to re-run its search terms, but refused to say how many documents had originally been missed.
Meanwhile, further issues with Autonomy and the SFO’s new e-discovery system, Axcelerate, continued to mount.
Most recently, in late 2025 the SFO discovered an issue concerning so-called ‘container files’ (files that contain other files, such as zipped folders, Outlook PST files etc.) that had originally failed to process on Autonomy and had then been left untouched for years. These container files together contained around 600,000 files, many of which were new.
The SFO conceded that it couldn’t be ready for trial. A couple of months later, it confirmed that it would not be seeking a new trial date. Three years after proceedings began (and a decade after the investigation started) the SFO offered no evidence against my client and his two co-defendants.
It is this container file problem which the SFO is now investigating more widely.
The SFO says that the issue does not affect its current e-discovery system, but this is surely to miss the underlying problem.
The punctuation ‘feature’ only became a flaw when the SFO didn’t tell anyone about it; the misprocessed container files only became an issue because nobody thought to re-process them.
Claiming these problems are solved now that Autonomy has been replaced is like losing files down the back of a filing cabinet and then saying that everything is fine because you have bought new cabinets. The software was never the problem.
Since 2023, those carrying out forensic science activities (including data capture, processing and analysis of digital storage devices) have been required by law to comply with the Forensic Science Regulator’s Code of Practice. Compliance is demonstrated by having an externally verified accreditation to an international standard.
Unlike dozens of police forces and other law enforcement bodies, the SFO does not hold this accreditation. It should do.
Complex fraud cases are built upon the forensic integrity of documentary evidence. If the SFO can’t ensure that its datasets are complete and accurate, then cases will continue to collapse, or worse, miscarriages of justice will occur.
The SFO needs to get its systems and procedures in order, or it needs to be stopped from prosecuting these cases.
Christopher Houssemayne du Boulay is a partner at Hickman & Rose
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