How the Industry Documents Library and Everlaw Teamed Up to Drive Industry Accountability
UCSF, The Forever Lobbying Project, and Le Monde Shine a Light on Public Health with Everlaw for Good
In an era where information is abundant but transparency can be scarce, the work of investigative journalists and public archives is more crucial than ever. Their dedication to unearthing critical data and making it accessible to the public plays a vital role in holding powerful entities accountable and informing public discourse.
This commitment to transparency is exemplified by Rachel Taketa, the Processing and Reference Archivist at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Industry Documents Library (IDL), who has dedicated her career to making internal industry documents available for public health research and advocacy.
Taketa's work at the IDL involves managing an immense collection of documents from industries impacting public health, including tobacco, opioids, and chemicals. Her efforts are not just about preserving records, but about actively providing access to information that can lead to breakthroughs in the pursuit of justice for the public good.
The UCSF Industry Documents Library: A Beacon of Public Health Transparency
Since 2002, the IDL has served as a critical online archive, making publicly disclosed documents from industries that impact public health readily accessible.
It originally began as a repository for tobacco industry documents, born from landmark lawsuits in the late 1990s, and has since expanded to include materials from the opioid, chemical, food, and fossil fuel sectors. Taketa has been with the IDL since 2005.
“We preserve and provide access to documents that shine a light on the practices of these industries and uphold UCSF’s allegiance to social justice and public health,” Taketa said when describing the IDL’s mission. The sheer scale of this undertaking is immense, with the archive now housing over 25 million documents.
A significant challenge for the IDL, especially with newer collections like those from opioid litigation, is this high volume of documents and the need for meticulous redaction of personal information. Taketa noted the drastic increase, from receiving 15 million tobacco documents over the course of 20 years, to now getting millions of opioid documents all at once.
"In the past, we received documents that had already been redacted or did not need a comprehensive level of care. With the opioid materials, however, we’ve had to create a workflow for manual redactions," Taketa stated. "Our first opioid collections came to us completely unredacted, and with only three people on staff, we realized we were going to need some sort of partner or outside organization to help us out.”
This is where Everlaw became a game-changer. Taketa remembered Everlaw from a presentation given to her team almost a decade prior, and realized its potential for handling massive document sets and streamlining the redaction process.
"What Everlaw has allowed us to do is to actually have a project at all," Taketa said. "We couldn't put any of these documents online if they weren't reviewed and redacted for personal information. And if we can't make a concerted effort to protect people's information, then we can't put them online. If we can't put them online, our entire project is sunk.”
Taketa uses Everlaw throughout many of her projects for the IDL. She leverages Everlaw's visualizations to get a handle on content and custodians, search term reports for identifying potential personally identifiable information, and the ability to identify duplicates and attachment families.
“You can’t really break Everlaw, which is always helpful,” Taketa said.
The Forever Lobbying Project: A Multinational Investigation
In Europe, a group known as the Forever Lobbying Project was also running into a similar situation as the IDL, with a need to process and make thousands of documents available quickly.
The Forever Lobbying Project is a groundbreaking cross-border investigation, involving 46 journalists and 29 media partners across 16 countries, delving into the lobbying efforts surrounding per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), often called "forever chemicals.”
The team collected over 14,000 unpublished documents on PFAS, making it the world's largest collection to date on the topic. A significant portion of these documents (4,796) were obtained through 184 Freedom of Information requests to public bodies across Europe. Additionally, 3,393 attachments were downloaded from the European Chemicals Agency, and 6,026 documents came from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and litigation between Minnesota and 3M.
Some of the journalists involved had experience using the IDL for previous projects, and reached out to Taketa for help in uploading all those documents. It quickly became clear that due to the various time zones and regulations the Forever Lobbying Project was operating with, Taketa wouldn’t be able to assist with all their needs.
“I initially met with the project leads to walk them through what our system looks like, what we do, and how we get documents in, and it seemed like the lift was a bit difficult for them technologically,” Taketa said. “They asked if we would be one of the repositories that hosts the documents, which I was happy to do, but they also wanted to redact them first, which led to issues with the GDRP regulations the EU has in place. I pointed them to Everlaw and said, ‘Why don't you try and go through the Everlaw for Good program?’ And that's what happened.”
Journalists Stephane Horel from Le Monde, Leopold Salzenstein from Arena for Journalism in Europe, and freelancer Luc Martinon participated in the project, and worked directly in the Everlaw platform to help prepare these documents for release.
Crucially, many of these collected documents contained personal data, such as email addresses, telephone numbers, or physical addresses, which, for privacy reasons and legal prohibitions in both the EU and US, could not be made public. Deleting this information manually would have been an insurmountable task.
“In the E.U. and the U.S., you can't publish documents with personal data like phone numbers, addresses, and that sort of thing,” Horel said. “And to do that manually, with this huge number of documents, would have been impossible.”
Horel and her team quickly got up to speed in the Everlaw platform, and were able to start redacting the necessary information.
“Everlaw was a super quick miracle solution that allowed us to do this automatic redaction in the cleanest way possible,” Horel said.
Everlaw's Role in Fueling Transparency and Impact
It was Rachel Taketa and the UCSF Industry Documents Library that connected the Forever Lobbying Project with Everlaw.
Le Monde journalists initially approached UCSF for advice on creating their own repository, but due to time constraints and technological lift, decided to have the IDL host their documents. However, the need for redaction before hosting led Taketa to recommend Everlaw.
"Rachel Taketa showed us how the UCSF team uses Everlaw to automatically redact personal information from documents," Horel recalled. "The platform seemed easy to use and we were impressed by its ability to spot and redact email addresses and phone numbers. We realized it was exactly what we needed."
Through the Everlaw for Good program, the Forever Lobbying Project gained free access to the platform, enabling them to efficiently redact sensitive information. While they had already been using another tool for analysis, Everlaw was instrumental in making the publication of their vast document collection possible.
Their investigative work revealed staggering findings, including an estimated cost of cleaning PFAS contamination in Europe of €2 trillion over 20 years if emissions remain unrestricted. By analyzing hundreds of documents, the project also shed light on the ongoing efforts of industry lobbyists to water down PFAS regulations at the EU and national level.
A Partnership for Progress
The collaboration between the IDL, investigative journalists from the Forever Lobbying Project, and platforms like Everlaw demonstrates how technology can bridge the gap between vast amounts of information and public accessibility, ultimately fostering greater transparency and accountability in critical areas of public health and policy.
Everlaw's intuitive design and robust features, particularly its batch redaction capabilities and ability to handle massive data sets, proved essential for both of these organizations in overcoming significant logistical hurdles.
“By making these documents publicly available, we hope to improve the democratic process around chemical regulations, and foster a better awareness and understanding of the corporate influence on chemical regulations,” Salzenstein said.
Thanks to this project and Everlaw's involvement, Le Monde and its partners have already published over 100 stories, podcasts, and TV shows related to the Forever Lobbying Project.
