As we’ve all heard time and again, 2020 was a transformative year—and in our space, it has had a huge impact and really changed the way people work.
With widespread teams, evolving data types, growing data volumes, and deadlines getting shorter—well, the entire e-discovery process has the potential to spiral out of control.
But not for those who are well prepared to meet these modern challenges.
Here at X1, we’ve been working hard on giving modern organizations the technology they need to get data identified, collected, and ingested with maximum effectiveness for years. Now, with X1 integrated into RelativityOne via RelativityOne Collect, users of the industry-leading SaaS e-discovery platform can accomplish this in more targeted and faster ways than ever before.
Let’s take a look at what this integration means, and why it offers non-negotiable capabilities to today’s legal teams.
A Remote Workforce
Work from home has rapidly accelerated and will likely not dramatically reverse in the foreseeable future. Many of us will continue to work remotely for months to come—or perhaps permanently.
These trends were already ramping up, but 2020 hammered the accelerator on telecommuting and remote working. According to Global Workplace Analytics, before the COVID-19 pandemic, just 3.6 percent of US workers worked from home multiple days a week. That number is now estimated at 25-30 percent.
This may be a boon for work-life balance, but it poses big complications for data collection in response to litigation and investigations. Historically, this process has required disk imaging or other methods that often prompted collections to be performed in person. In a shared office, that might be easy to accomplish (in fact, it might be too easy, resulting in vast over-collections of data in many cases). But with everyone working from home and confronted by concerns about social distancing, travel restrictions, and possible quarantines, it quickly became untenable last year.
Thanks to those circumstances and the increased use of the cloud for data storage, demand for web-enabled collections is up—by a lot.
RelativityOne Collect gives legal teams the ability to index and search on data in place, analyze the contents of a data source, and categorize data quickly to identify what warrants collection and what can be eliminated—all before it’s pulled from the source and brought into a workspace, and from anywhere. Previously, RelativityOne Collect was able to directly connect with Office 365 and Slack sources to perform these remote collections; with the integration of X1’s innovative endpoint technology, Collect can now gather data from additional sources like email and files on laptops, servers, or network locations.
Then, the targeted data is seamlessly imported into Relativity—no extra processing, downloads, uploads, or risky data hand-offs required.
This means a streamlined process that can be performed from anywhere, on multiple custodians at a time, and across many of the most common data sources. Forward-thinking teams are saying goodbye to cumbersome and expensive ESI collection and processing tools in favor of this bright new world.
Proportional Data Decisions
Another trend that began to take hold over the last decade is the move toward targeted collections. Gone are the days when full disk imaging was standard practice. Today’s sources are far too densely packed with data to assume everything needs to be captured for every matter. Over-collecting means not just increased costs for data storage on your matters, but huge amounts of time wasted on reviewing unnecessary documents—and all of this adds up to proportionality violations.
The courts agree: Complete disk imaging is by and large unwarranted in civil litigation. (In particular, see Diepenhorst v. City of Battle Creek.)
Instead, what is needed is a middle ground approach in the form of a targeted, automated, and remote collection that provides documentation for defensibility and an emphasis on speed to review.
With traditional processes, there is an inability to quickly and remotely search across and access distributed unstructured data in-place. e-Discovery teams may end up spending weeks or more collecting data, with traditional workflows taking as long as 30 days to complete before data is available for review.
In addition to putting deadlines and case strategy efforts in jeopardy, these delays can increase the risk of errors and security vulnerabilities as data is moved between systems and team members rush to get things done. With X1 endpoint collections integrated into Collect, data can be accessed, searched upon, culled, and ingested directly into your review workspace with no go-betweens required—so your targeted data sets are defensible and in good hands from start to finish. Oh, and that 30 days is cut down to mere hours.
This enables much needed efficiencies in the e-discovery process in the face of growing data volumes, widespread teams and data sources, and diversified data types, because you can target which data you bring into your workspace before it’s published (and have detailed reports on those decisions to back up your final collection). You’ll see benefits not just in greater speed to review, but also greater speed in review, because you’ve eliminated a lot of inefficiencies from the get-go. Plus, you’re protecting potentially privileged or secret information that doesn’t need to be pulled into a project in the first place.
Process Democratization
Finally, there’s a third evolving trend in the collection space. For a long time, there has been a perception that doing collections is difficult, and requires a lot of specialized training or certifications. With the proliferation of the cloud and new data sources, however, this has started to shift. Most e-discovery cases do not require collection by a certified forensics examiner, especially since not every drive needs to be imaged. Instead, as the industry has moved more toward targeted collections, the accessibility of the process has greatly improved.
Additionally, today’s legal teams are under great pressure to do more with less—less money, less time, and less help. As a result, they need to be empowered to perform some collections themselves even if they don’t have that highest degree of training and expertise. Fortunately, cases using targeted e-discovery collections and collections from cloud sources don’t generally require such extensive training.
When organizations are given the tools to do some of this work internally, they can save forensic resources for when they’re truly needed (on really hairy or dicey matters).
RelativityOne Collect’s easy-to-use interface lets any individual perform those type of targeted e-discovery and cloud collections with minimal training. And as a growing number of organizations are experiencing a greater need to remotely collect from computer endpoints as well, Relativity and X1 have partnered to build an integration to help in-house teams do that, too.
So, while numerous courts have held that custodian self-collection is simply not defensible, capable and well-equipped legal teams can and do collect data from custodians in a defensible and secure manner. Then, those same team members can take what they’ve learned from this at-a-glance view of the origins of their data sets, and bring that knowledge to the rest of the e-discovery or investigation project.
The result is streamlined, end-to-end e-discovery in a single, secure, and easy-to-use platform.
And we will be demonstrating this integration live on our February 24 joint webinar with Relativity: “RelativityOne Collect and X1: Streamlining the Global Collection Process.” Please join us by registering here.
