Enterprise data is complex, evolving, growing, and—if you know how to look at it—completely fascinating.
But during e-discovery and other Legal Data Intelligence exercises, finding those insights can mean quite a puzzle. Relativity is here to help you collect, ingest, review, and analyze data with a cloud-native platform that is both flexible and robust. It’s what legal teams use to make LDI projects more efficient and insightful.
Our partner network is there to help with the how.
While we are (and always have been) committed to offering exceptional technical support to our customers, Relativity has also always relied on our exceptional network of partners and law firms to provide hands-on consulting and services to our users. These are the experts who help enable smaller and nimbler legal teams to work on bigger and thornier projects.
Many of these partners have built their businesses based on their remarkable knowledge of RelativityOne and the many ways they and their clients can maximize their investments in our platform. The impact they have on the broader Relativity community is incredible—as is the vast amount of time and effort they’ve dedicated to deeply understanding our software.
To help these more advanced teams move faster in their work within RelativityOne, we recently introduced a new customer success tier that accelerates their access to more proactive technical guidance, segment-focused expertise, and high-touch visibility and input on our product roadmaps.
Our Premier Success Program is designed to provide added benefits to help service providers and strategic enterprises maximize their RelativityOne investments, both for their own benefit and on behalf of their own clients. We’re thrilled that two of our participating partners—Tony Ramsey, CEO of PLUSnxt, and George Phillips, director of eData development and technology at Morgan Lewis—wanted to chat with us about the program, the evolving legal marketplace, and how innovation has been key to their success in it. Keep reading for a chance to learn from them.
If your team could benefit from this option, please reach out to your account executive for more information. We’ll walk you through the added value the Premier Success Program layers on top of the foundational (and phenomenal!) support all Relativity customers receive from our team.
We talk a lot about how the community is a big part of what makes e-discovery and the legal space so special. What does this community mean to you?
Tony Ramsey, PLUSnxt: By collaborating with those who truly understand our challenges—and those of our clients—we're able to create next-level solutions. The camaraderie is strong, and there’s real value in building relationships with others who are in the same boat, working toward the same goals.
The industry hasn’t always been so symbiotic, so it feels great to be part of something where everyone benefits. It’s mutualism at its finest, bringing together service vendors, software providers, and clients in a way that drives success for all.
George Phillips, Morgan Lewis: I have had the absolute privilege and honor to learn, grow, and share in our industry for 24 years. I've been so incredibly lucky to watch this community grow and evolve and I’ve been able to work with amazing mentors who are willing to share their knowledge and skills and collaborate and push each other to build the most amazingly talented and supportive community. Our industry is a community of passionate experts and dedicated professionals, most of whom have been longtime friends, who inspire me and each other to keep innovating and connecting and sharing with others. I absolutely love our very special industry and can’t imagine working in any other.
Clients tend to keep us on our toes. What are some unique challenges or requirements that your clients have posed?
Tony: As the volume and variety of data continue to expand, organizations must be prepared to manage not only the sheer influx of information but also the diverse and complex data types that come with it. Today, e-discovery teams encounter data from an array of unconventional sources, including custom-built support databases, SAP systems, CRMs, and more. By working hand in hand with our clients to process and integrate custom data into RelativityOne, we’ve seen significant improvements in workflows and a stronger partnership between our teams. This provides a more seamless e-discovery experience, where complex data challenges become manageable, and organizations can focus on what matters most: finding the facts that drive their cases forward.
George: We routinely receive all types of structured and unstructured data formats. In one challenging situation we received 27 large SQL database backups that each contained an incredible number of tables. Our client needed us to identify and isolate data for specific custodians. We were asked to do some comparative analysis and targeted reporting and formatting. We needed to use multiple tools and processes to perform this work and then convert everything into a Relativity format so it could then be reviewed and produced.
How have Legal Data Intelligence and related litigation services changed over time, in your experience? In particular, how has the move to the cloud changed or improved this industry?
Tony: In the earlier days, clients and vendors often struggled to implement a truly effective solution to the broader problem. There was a disconnect between the two parties. However, the transition to the cloud—with its capacity to process, scale, and identify issues more quickly—enabled both clients and vendors to align and communicate more effectively. As service providers, our value was not always appreciated. Yet, as technology progressed, the demand for service providers grew in response to rapidly expanding volumes of data. The cloud ultimately necessitated a reset within the industry, prompting a restructuring of business models to meet contemporary needs, ensuring that all parties benefit.
George: Over time, LDI and related services have become increasingly commoditized, and this has allowed for industry standardization of these mature services. This has helped our industry maintain a level of best practices, processes, and procedures on which we all can agree. The move to the cloud creates new opportunities to create new standards according to current needs, settle on new best practices, and create frameworks that will be used by our industry peers to guide them through these new technologies as efficiently as possible while mitigating risk and waste.
Tell us a little bit about your team and what makes you—and your approach to e-discovery services—unique.
Tony: At PLUS, we’ve taken a different approach. From day one we were born in the cloud, designed for the future, and singularly focused on RelativityOne solutions. We have been committed to what is truly best for our clients, embracing innovation without compromise. Our team consists of individuals who are experts in their respective fields, which has enabled us to provide exceptional service to our clients, no matter the challenge. We’ve built our business with a client-centric approach, allowing us to remain highly nimble and relentlessly proactive in meeting their needs.
George: We have a diverse team that covers multiple disciplines across the entire e-discovery process. From collections, to forensics, to processing and production, our team excels in custom handling and unconventional and difficult, complex solutions. In addition to our ability to handle extremely complex requests, we have an internal team that is focused on technology development. We regularly develop custom applications to address client needs or the specific proprietary needs of different projects and case teams. We develop these solutions to work in conjunction with our existing tools. We have, many times, developed solutions before a solution exists for the rest of the industry, and that is a unique differentiator between us and our competitors.
How do you envision the Premier Success Program helping you differentiate and improve your service offering?
Tony: When we gain greater clarity and understanding of our clients' needs—both collectively and within the broader community—we can communicate and apply our services in a way that fosters a deeper level of trust. This allows clients to recognize how seamlessly technology and service work together and highlights the importance of embracing these solutions within their daily business model. We look forward to continuing to strengthen our relationship with Relativity, as ultimately, it is the clients who reap the greatest benefit when we’re all working closely together. And that’s our biggest goal.
George: The Premier Success Program has immediately provided a level of organization and impact to our migration strategy—all of the tasks associated with shifting clients to a cloud-based platform in a way that is efficient and driven to maintain timelines. It expedites our process in ways that could never have happened as seamlessly through our own efforts alone. Another key benefit of the program is the proactive addressing of roadblocks, hurdles, and technical considerations far enough in advance to give us a much-needed buffer during this process. This has already served to maintain happy clients, happy internal teams, and little to no disruption to our business.
Graphics for this article were created by Natalie Andrews.
