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How Case Teams Can Streamline Collections with X1 in RelativityOne

Sam Bock

Our September 2019 release for RelativityOne debuted some game-changing functionality in the platform. Collect for RelativityOne enables fast, secure, and defensible collections right within the cloud, allowing RelativityOne users to pull data directly from Microsoft Office 365 without ever leaving the platform or Azure.

One of our developer partners—X1joined up with us on building this functionality, bringing their patented technology into Collect to help simplify traditionally complex workflows.

To get a better picture of just what Collect and X1 Distributed Discovery are capable of now that they’ve teamed up, we sat down with X1 Executive Chairman and Chief Legal Officer John Patzakis. Check out the most impactful takeaways from our conversation, and sign up for X1’s upcoming webinar to learn more.

Sam: What makes collection challenging for today’s legal teams?

John: Traditional e-discovery collection methods consist of either unsupervised custodian self-collection or manual services, driving up costs while increasing risk and disruption to business operations. On the other end of the spectrum, endpoint forensic imaging is burdensome, expensive, and not legally required for civil litigation discovery. Additionally, these manual and disjointed efforts are not technically integrated with Relativity, thus requiring multiple hand-offs, which increases risk, expense, and cumbersome project management efforts.  

How does your team think creatively to tackle those challenges in the interest of conducting faster, more defensible collections for your customers?

We tackle collection from the enterprise and also enable significant scalability. X1 Distributed Discovery enables enterprises and their service providers to search, assess, and analyze electronically stored information (ESI) across hundreds or even thousands of custodians, enterprise-wide, where the data resides and before collection, with direct upload into Relativity. Instead of the expensive and disruptive “image then stage then process then load into review workspace” process, X1 Distributed Discovery allows for access to ESI where it sits within hours.

What sorts of variables exist in today’s collection workflows, and how does your team accommodate for those differences?

One of the biggest challenges with modern enterprise ESI collection comes from remote employees who only log into the network intermittently. Most network-enabled collection tools require custodians to be on the domain in order to work. However, X1 is architected to feature SSL security certificates—creating secure tunnels that enable collection from custodians wherever they are, including on WiFi in a Starbucks or on a plane.

Another key challenge is email collection. Traditional workflows often require collecting an entire PST email container or Exchange email account back to a central location for processing, identification, and preservation of potentially responsive email messages. This approach involves the transferring and processing of large files, which takes a lot of time, before even beginning to identify individually responsive email messages. Our solution eliminates the need to transfer entire email containers by allowing the identification and collection of individual messages in place on a custodian’s computer.

How is Collect for RelativityOne built to manage modern collections more effectively?

Collect integrates the X1 Distributed Discovery architecture to leverage patented search technology that indexes Microsoft Office 365 data directly on the laptop, desktop, or file server, allowing e-discovery, investigatory, or forensic professionals to globally query thousands of individual endpoints simultaneously. Individual emails and files can be identified by keyword, dates, and other metadata content without having to first retrieve the entire PST or ZIP across the network.

Collecting enterprise ESI can be one of the most daunting parts of the e-discovery process, and X1’s technical integration with RelativityOne seeks to make it less intimidating. The software helps streamline the e-discovery workflow by eliminating expensive and cumbersome processing steps and dramatically increasing speed to review. Collect for RelativityOne provides legal teams with a solution that compresses project timeframes; reduces risk by integrating collection with the rest of Relativity’s suite of features for review and analysis; and creating a repeatable process that helps reduce overall efforts and costs that might otherwise be spent outside of the platform. Additionally, the tight integration between X1’s technology and Relativity provides a unified chain of custody for optimal defensibility.  

In short, we’re excited to see how this functionality, tightly integrated with Relativity’s collection tool, can help revolutionize the current e-discovery process by collapsing the many hand-offs involved in the EDRM into a few short steps manageable by one or two people.

What tips and best practices would you share with a team conducting complex collections? How can they set themselves up for success from the start?

When collecting data, plan your collection criteria carefully. Focus on granular search criteria including file types, data ranges, and other key metadata in addition to detailed Boolean search terms to help your team strategically reduce collection volumes. 

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Sam Bock is a member of the marketing team at Relativity, and serves as editor of The Relativity Blog.

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