In a service industry so impacted by rapid upstream data transformation and downstream legal data intelligence developments, nimbly anticipating evolving tech trends and client demands ensures vendors and service providers can meet legal teams where they are—and deliver the support they need to succeed.
At Relativity, we’re committed to helping every member of our community benefit from the fresh innovation and enthusiastic collaboration we witness in this journey every day. Our Premier Success Program is one way we aim to facilitate stronger connections with our partners and between our partners and their clients.
As an early adopter of this program, Trustpoint is committed to the collaborative spirit and nimble mindset that have carried them far in the e-discovery industry over the last decade. We recently sat down with Phil Shellhaas, executive vice president, discovery services at Trustpoint, to talk about the Premier Success Program, his team, and what it means to provide exceptional services in our industry.
Jessica Galant: Can you tell us a little about what the Premier Success Program is, and what about it drew your team to participate?
Phil Shellhaas: The Premier Success Program provides an elevated support experience, particularly for service provider partners, by facilitating a deeper connection between our team and Relativity’s. The Relativity support that the program provides enhances Trustpoint One’s ability to provide the stellar service we are known for. RelativityOne is the heavyweight of our industry and the additional support we receive allows us to align with the core capabilities of the platform to clearly and accurately organize data, discover the value and intelligence within that data, and act on the results quickly for our clients. Moreover, having access to additional resources—such as a product sponsor—enables our team to be uniquely positioned in the marketplace.
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?
The e-discovery community has been shaped in the past two decades by so many professionals who may have started their careers in the era prior to the “e,” when we were learning the basic principles of discovery, largely in a paper era. As technology has developed and Relativity became a premier platform for delivering services, we feel the community aspect of the industry is what has allowed us to advance so rapidly into the current era—where analytics and generative AI, like Relativity aiR, are pushing us faster than we have ever moved before.
Everyone in this industry, whether a veteran who pushed a hand truck with boxes of paper or someone who started in the electronic era, can find and has found peers to learn from and guide along the journey. That’s true both within our own companies and outside of them, with competitors, law firms, and consultants. It is this collective collaboration that makes this work truly rewarding. Peer-to-peer interaction is extremely valuable and shows you're not too into yourself. Being part of this community means you're a thinker and problem solver willing to lean into people you know, as well as people you don’t know, to get better at serving the needs of clients.
How do your clients’ unique support needs keep you on your toes?
The ever-changing landscape of data types and storage environments keeps us constantly looking at new ways and processes to achieve outcomes that clients can glean value from. Short message data from cell phones and chat applications, and the continued growth of modern attachments (e.g., linked files) as more applications that we use every day are deployed in the cloud, are challenges that are top of mind for our customers. They rely on Trustpoint One to have the expertise and problem solving capabilities to handle the challenges presented on any particular matter. Some clients need minimal support due to their unique expertise and acumen. Other clients seek assistance from consultation services on effective processes all the way to helping produce the required end product.
How have e-discovery and related litigation services changed over time, in your experience?
The most notable changes have been trying to align the cost of cloud computing within a business model compared to how they budget for the cost of the technology today. The advancements and innovation provided by the public utility cloud are unmatched and already empowering legal professionals to do more with less. As described above, most corporations and businesses are now operating largely in the cloud—so it was a natural progression that the tools we use for litigation, investigations, and regulatory matters would naturally move to the cloud as well.
The compute resources, technological advancements, and speed that the cloud enables have made the job of a service provider more streamlined and efficient.
How do you envision the Premier Success Program helping you improve your service offering?
First and foremost, the program allows our most senior operators to have a direct line to senior support staff at Relativity. This is a game changer for us as we live and die by the tight deadlines that this industry demands. Additionally, our ability to lean into the product, engineering, and client success teams at Relativity to be at the forefront of feature development, having our voice and our clients’ voices heard directly, will improve our delivery. Our priority access to the Advanced Access programs will also be a unique differentiator by allowing our client base to access new features sooner. Priority ticket management will also assure our clients we are deeply tied to being successful leveraging the platform.
This program is a growth vehicle for our loyal customer base, but also the continued growth of Trustpoint One and Relativity’s relationship. We have an entire team at Relativity dedicated to us and we meet multiple times a month to go over metrics, support needs, and product development topics, and at any time we can reach out directly to our dedicated support team to escalate any need our customers or Trustpoint has.
Tell us a little bit about your team and what makes you—and your approach to e-discovery services—unique.
We have a deep bench of industry professionals with over 100 years of collective experience. Our services range from data mapping and forensic consultation, to expert early case assessment ideologies for processing and producing large amounts of data, to staffing complex reviews for Fortune 100 companies across the globe. Our client-first approach and empathetic position in listening to our clients' unique challenges have proven to be a clear differentiator and increased our client retention rate year over year.
We have an internal catch phrase to “Work backwards from a smiling customer,” and we have maintained our service levels by starting each day with that in mind. The competition in this space has been a constant over the years; some have grown through multiple acquisitions and an assembly line approach to scaling. Trustpoint One has remained nimble and continues to deliver white glove service on a daily basis. We could not do it without the professionals that make up our delivery teams, most of whom have been with Trustpoint for more than a decade.
Graphics for this article were created by Caroline Patterson.
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