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Issue Coding with Relativity Assisted Review

Constantine Pappas

Issue coding—which helps flag documents beyond just their responsiveness—is an integral part of the review process. In recent years, technology has moved case teams’ workflows for issue coding a long way from color-coded sticky notes. Today, reviewers can use an issue field in their review platform to record these tags. In marking records this way, teams identify the most relevant documents in a case so they can be easily found throughout the e-discovery process.

In Relativity, categorization takes this process one step further. Learning from human-coded issues on samples, Relativity Assisted Review can issue code other documents in the data set that are conceptually similar. Issue coding in Assisted Review makes use of the same technology it leverages for a responsiveness review, so, as with traditional computer-assisted review, coding a smaller subset of documents and leveraging the engine against the database to find others can lead to significant time and cost savings.

With both features powered by the same categorization technology, Assisted Review allows a case team to issue code while reviewing for responsiveness. Both types of categorization run simultaneously when a round is finished, streamlining the number of clicks and timeliness of results. Conducting a review for issues fits seamlessly into a responsiveness workflow, and helps case teams earn more insight into their data through computer-assisted review.

To learn more about issue coding with Assisted Review, feel free to contact us.


Constantine Pappas is a licensed attorney with more than 15 years of legal experience. He has served as in-house counsel and managed both paper and electronic discovery for large-scale lawsuits and government investigations. As a member of Relativity’s customer success team, Constantine helps Relativity users with workflows for text analytics and computer-assisted review.

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