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Relativity Innovation Awards Turn 5: How the Community is Innovating This Year [Part 1]

Drew Deitch

Throughout this week, we’ll be highlighting submissions for the technology categories and finalists for the individual categories of the 2018 Innovation Awards. This is the first post in a three-part series. Take a look at them all and cast your vote by October 2 to have a say in who takes the stage at Relativity Fest.

The Relativity Innovation Awards season is my favorite time of year because we get to see all of the inspiring and innovative work our community is doing. As we approach our fifth annual Relativity Innovation Awards, we want to highlight those who submitted applications and integrations they’ve built to simplify and accelerate their processes—within and beyond e-discovery.

Here are a few solutions, created by the Relativity community, that leverage the platform to solve challenges outside e-discovery, streamline operational processes, and enhance the review process of mobile, chat, and graphic data types.

Creative Solutions Outside the Bounds of e-Discovery

Bricker & Eckler—last year’s winner in the Best Innovation: Law Firm or Corporation category—is back with yet another innovative use of Relativity to solve a unique challenge outside the realm of e-discovery. When they were helping clients contest a petition to bring a constitutional amendment to a vote in Ohio, they developed a highly automated application to review petition signatures without leaving Relativity.

The application identifies errors in signature collection by scanning the petitions against other data sources, including ID and address records and Google Maps data. Attorneys could then investigate trends and irregularities to challenge suspicious signatures and build their case using accurate statistics. Throughout the matter, attorneys could track the current projections for valid versus invalid signatures on an ‘election-style’ county map of Ohio, also fully built into Relativity.

Deloitte’s submission helps ease a common pain felt by federal agencies. While important, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests (and the reporting that goes along with them) are nuanced and time-consuming. And with nearly one million FOIA requests last year, federal agencies face large backlogs of requests, and intense pressure from the government and the public to stay on pace in responding.

Deloitte built a FOIA application to leverage Relativity’s data processing, analytics, technology-assisted review, and redaction functionality with a workflow designed to meet the unique needs of FOIA processing, including the ability to automate redactions. By building objects to track the Department of Justice’s complex FOIA reporting requirements, agencies are able to create their annual DOJ report with the click of a button. Combining a FOIA application with Relativity’s robust review capabilities allows Deloitte to provide FOIA clients with a 50 to 150 percent increase in efficiency and accuracy. 

New Ways to Handle Common Processes

As e-discovery becomes more complex, so does tracking and monitoring projects and data. The Relativity community is developing new ways to handle various business problems to increase efficiency and give teams more insight into their projects.

To address the cumbersome, manual process of tracking the performance of review attorneys, CDS ditched Excel spreadsheets and developed Managed Review Autotracker. The plug-in for Relativity and RelativityOne provides deeper insight into the review process. A dashboard tracks reviewer accuracy of coding decisions, as well as the history of decisions and overturns by users and supervisors, helping review managers identify, at a glance, high performers and issues needing resolution. They can also dig into detailed reports to ensure the overall quality of review. 

Chesapeake Energy needed the ability to have a top-level view of all legal cases and their data. They created an application, Chesapeake Energy Records and Metrics Tracking (CERMT), to transform Relativity into a complete case management system that provides the legal teams with powerful and intuitive tools to track all elements of a legal case. CERMT tracks matters, custodians, collections, productions, data locations, and case closure information, with tasking and email notifications. 

Kilpatrick Townsend identified a need for a tightly integrated shipping solution to ensure they’re able to track shipped media that contains sensitive information. They developed LitSmart® Shipping Tracker for clients to deliver data to their team, track its location, and manage shipping costs, all within one application. The solution enables clients to create shipping labels and track the shipment’s progress within Relativity, drastically simplifying a multi-step process, saving time and headaches. 

Simplifying Review of Diverse Data Types in Relativity

e-Discovery projects consist of an increasing amount of mobile and chat data as well as images. Each data type comes with its own collection and review considerations, and Relativity partners are finding new, efficient ways to handle them.

Historically, mobile data has been viewed separately from other evidence as structured data, requiring time and money to review spreadsheets and open messages and photos linearly—void of the visual cues found in native applications. To improve the process, Advanced Discovery/Consilio created Advanced Message Review (AMR), which converts data into a format that allows fully functional native review. Mobile investigations are no longer separate, manual processes. With AMR, data is pushed into Relativity and reviewed in parallel with other sources.

Contact Discovery Services also tackled the mobile review challenge. To streamline the mobile review process and help attorneys review, search, organize, and produce mobile device content in Relativity, they created MobileRev™. The solution makes the review experience of mobile content more comfortable for an attorney, just like reading email, and helps them organize data collected from mobile devices, so they can better identify meaningful content quickly.  

Chat and instant messaging (IM) data pose similar collection and review issues as mobile data. FTI Consulting built a chat and IM solution to transform indecipherable chat logs into an easy to understand and review set of conversations, enabling review of chat communications just as you would any other document in Relativity—all while preserving the information in the source document for production. By eliminating automated greetings, exit messages, and other metadata noise, chat logs are reduced by as much as 75 percent, helping reviewers home in on the salient conversations. 

RVM noticed a different review inefficiency: pictures. Reviewers had to click into each graphic file only to find it’s not relevant. RVM developed a more efficient way to view, sort, and make determinations on graphic files without the time investment of traditional review. By displaying thumbnail-sized renderings of the images directly in Relativity document list views, Snapshot makes photo review efficient and consistent.  

Make sure to keep reading throughout the week to learn about the other tech submissions as well as this year’s inaugural finalists in the individual Innovation Award categories.

Follow Along with Relativity Fest All Year Long


Drew Deitch is commercial lead of Relativity Patents, where he helps patent attorneys and searchers work faster with AI. He's been at Relativity for 10 years, in roles supporting our strategic partnerships, executive team, and product strategy.

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