Commercial Fraud Litigation

This chapter, contributed to a wider practitioner text on commercial fraud, sets out the firm's approach to forensic reconstruction — the process of rebuilding a disputed transaction from documentary and electronic evidence to establish what actually happened, as distinct from what either party now claims happened.

The chapter argues that fraud claims are disproportionately won or lost at the disclosure stage, well before trial, and sets out a practical methodology for prioritising which categories of evidence to pursue first when the universe of potentially relevant documents is large.

Electronic evidence timelines are usually more reliable than witness recollection. Where the two conflict, tribunals increasingly give greater weight to contemporaneous electronic records — a pattern that should inform how fraud claims are prepared from the outset.

The chapter draws on the firm's experience defending a £340m fraud claim at trial, without identifying the matter directly, to illustrate how early evidentiary prioritisation shaped the ultimate defence strategy.