Before we released RelativityOne, our flagship cloud solution, Relativity’s partner community was well established to support organizations around the globe with on-premises instances of the software.
Since 2018, as we’ve continued to improve and offer RelativityOne in new regions, many of these partners have adopted it to help their clients streamline operations and meet complex, cross-border needs wherever availability, security, and performance are key factors in their success.
It has been a delight to watch the Relativity community grow so quickly in this way; in fact, RelativityOne is our fastest-growing product in company history, and the reach it’s had around the world has pushed us to keep improving it for our global users year after year.
To celebrate that global community, we’re kicking off a new series of articles here on The Relativity Blog. In it, we’re excited to showcase perspectives from some of these partners to demonstrate how RelativityOne is used across the globe.
Our first stop is the Asia-Pacific region, where RelativityOne currently operates in six geographies including Australia, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and South Korea.
In this article, we’ll focus on what our Asia-based partners have to say about RelativityOne from their corner of the world.
Gino Bello from FTI Technology in Singapore discusses how active learning is a key component of the work they’re doing for their clients:
Clients in Singapore are grappling with many of the same challenges being felt around the world: increasing volumes of data, emerging data sources issues, and new complexities in how they are handled. One important solution we have brought and continue to bring to clients is the use of active learning in RelativityOne, in managing analysis and review of large volumes of data in local regulatory-driven action, investigations, litigation, and post-breach notification, and to sift through data and identify relevancy, key issues, personally identifiable information, and document categories. Our team’s expertise and diligence on this front has contributed to increasing acceptance among local regulators for the use of active learning to minimize the time and cost of handling large, complex data volumes.
Gino Bello, Senior Managing Director, FTI Technology, Singapore
Chris Marks from Ankura explains how Hong Kong is a hub for cross-border dispute:
Hong Kong is known as Asia's World City, and using RelativityOne enables us to live up to that reputation as a staging area for global, multi-jurisdictional engagements. Our clients are often faced with complex cross-border data issues where "boots on the ground" are required across many different territories, each having their own unique challenges. Adopting approaches that take into account the replication of data stored across many locations enables us to proactively reduce the burden of overall review through multi-location deduplication, without moving the data itself. The effects on overall matter costs and cross-border data transfer risks can be substantial.
Chris Marks, APAC Leader Data & Technology, Ankura
Steve Wilkinson from Control Risks talks about the complexity of chat data, and ways they’ve helped clients work with it:
One of the common challenges faced by our clients is the unregulated use of personal devices for business purposes—in particular, mobile devices. This raises numerous issues during the collection phase of our engagements and requires a considerate approach when dealing with concerned custodians. Owing to the widespread use of WeChat and other messaging apps, most individuals have understandable reservations over providing these devices for analysis. We developed an approach which allows us to target specific messages or chats within the application which meets the needs of both our clients and the custodians.
The Control Risks D+DI team in APAC has a wealth of experience in dealing with the intricacies of digital forensics and e-discovery operations in across the region utilising our RelativityOne environments. We regularly advise clients on the requirements of the various legal systems and regulatory environments, which are far often more stringent than those encountered elsewhere in the world.
Steve Wilkinson, Principal - Legal Technology, Control Risks
Kush Wadhwa shares that cost control is a central concern for Alvarez and Marsal’s local clients in India, and how the posture and toolkit inside RelativityOne helps them mediate costs:
Laws and regulations, particularly those associated with e-discovery, are becoming stringent with significant focus on enforcement. Even small litigation today often results in a seemingly “disproportionate” quantum of data that need to be processed, reviewed, and presented. Historically, India is no stranger to digital data creation—especially coming from its large population, its acknowledged leadership in the technology sector, as well as penetration and use of digital assets throughout business world and the economy. A constant ask from our clients has been to strategically process vast data quantum while keeping costs rationalised and in a manner that is expeditious from a timing perspective. This has challenged us to be innovative, think on our feet, and create bespoke solutions. With our ethos of “not bringing a gun to shoot a fly,” working with OEM partners to innovate, developing cost-optimised and value-driven solutions, we have not only provided but exceeded expectations around value delivered. RelativityOne has been a game changer for us on this front and has helped fuel innovation towards specific client problems in a value-driven manner. Speed, machine learning, conceptual searching, and email threading have been especially instrumental for us toward significantly shortening timelines, enabling effective reviews, and providing confidence in the quality of work product and processes used.
Kush Wadhwa - Senior Director (Forensic Technology and Cyber Lead), Alvarez and Marsal, India
Alex Bogart-King noted the high-stakes challenges of managing multi-jurisdictional litigation in this region in particular:
One of the common challenges faced by our clients is difficulties arising from international data sets. International law firms and global corporations are expected to just “get it” when it comes to producing for discovery, even when the data they need to produce is spread across servers, laptops, and mobile devices in multiple countries.
There are significant challenges that arise and considerations that need to be addressed in these types of situations:
- How can you have a defensible chain of custody for data collected in other countries?
- How do you move the collected data to the server location in a secure manner?
- What are the implications for this matter if the data is hosted in another country?
- How can you ensure the data is hosted in a location suitable for all parties involved?
Epiq has experience collecting data forensically all around the world and can host data in Relativity locations throughout Asia Pacific including Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and China.
Alex Bogart-King, Area Sales Director - South Asia Pacific, Epiq GlobalArea Sales Director • Legal Services , Epiq
Stay tuned for more insights from our global community. In the meantime, learn more about RelativityOne and its global availability here.
