Over the last few weeks, Relativity user groups across the globe met in their respective cities during the Relativity Spring Launch Roadshow. Each time we attend a user group meeting, the great insight users bring to the conversation impresses us—from ideas on improving collaboration across e-discovery project teams to technical tips and tricks.
We expected to return to Chicago with one common theme from all four of the user group meetings we held on the Roadshow. To our surprise, the topics were pretty different in each city. Here’s what we found.
1. London’s Priority: Build Stakeholder Support for Analytics
Our meeting in London was our first user group meeting in that city, with a chosen topic of implementing analytics workflows. Most attendees were case managers and technology folks and, as we started talking about ways to get started with analytics, the group realized they shared a bigger problem. For most, the question isn’t how to use analytics—it’s how to get buy-in on the technology from case teams and attorneys. Decision makers want this group to make a case for analytics. But how do they prove it will work without actually doing it?
The London group had a few ideas to share. One attendee suggested offering a sneak peak at analytics on the actual case. Case managers could run analytics not on test data, but on actual case documents in a test environment. Convincing results on a sample of a few thousand documents could be enough to show your case team what the project could look like if analytics is applied.
Other folks suggested educating the case team—by giving them a close lesson on what each analytics feature can do, you can cut out the “black box” perception that may be holding them back. Start by sharing this e-book, which provides a high-level look at each feature and its benefits.
2. New York City’s Priority: Get Creative with Productions
New York City was our next stop and has a well-established, active user group. The topic was a new one: how to produce to regulatory agencies. A mix of tech professionals, project managers, and a few attorneys attended, and it seemed like everyone had a different pain point when creating these production sets. The group talked through producing for procedures other than litigation—projects that often set much different production requirements.
Attendees had learned that customized workflows are often required when producing to regulatory agencies. They need to accommodate unique production settings and considerations, and those require unique workflows. Some teams do well building their own customizations, but one attendee also pointed out that the Customer Portal is a good place to find existing solutions available to Relativity users. While every project is different and the scripts may not solve every need, they do cover a good number of workflows encountered by the group. If you're using Relativity and would like to learn more, check out these recipes for workflow ideas, or visit the Code Exchange in the Customer Portal to explore available scripts.
3. Washington DC’s Priority: Bring the Right Attorneys into Review
We visited Washington DC the following day, where our user group discussion focused on computer-assisted review workflows. The conversation took a turn right away when we asked for a show of hands to see how many attendees had hands-on experience with assisted review on a case—the number was startlingly small.
We wanted to dig deeply into why more of these folks haven’t dived into technology-assisted review. As we discussed their barriers, the conversation turned toward getting the right attorneys to review documents. The whole group knew that getting an assisted review project off to a good start means putting an attorney with great insight into the case on the review, as their expert decisions help train the system quickly and accurately. The catch? Those attorneys are extremely busy and don’t always have the time to review rounds of documents.
As a group, we came up with an alternative workflow for when attorneys simply aren’t available: using judgmental sampling techniques to jump-start the project. By targeting documents with clearly responsive content to train the system, these teams can get off to an informed start. It was a great concept, and we received some validation when someone from the group decided to try it for themselves. A few days after the event, they contacted us to say they’d put this workflow into action and managed to categorize more than 220,000 out of 300,000 documents all on their own.
4. San Francisco’s Priority: Seeing the Bigger Picture
Our San Francisco user group’s steering committee wanted to chat about the different ways to leverage data visualization during review, specifically with a Relativity feature called pivot. Case teams are using data visualization for everything from early assessment of their data prior to review, spot checking to ensure collection and processing were completed as planned, monitoring reviewer activity for quality control of the review, and evaluating productions.
One attendee even uses pivot to compare a search terms report to itself, identifying where single terms occur in the data set and where they co-occur. Uncovering how those terms overlap gives significant insight into how keywords and data interact. It’s encouraging to see these teams finding creative ways to leverage data visualization from case to case, as it offers an intuitive, real-time look at huge data sets in seconds instead of hours.
Do these priorities sound familiar? Do you have more to add? Discuss them with other e-discovery professionals right here or at Relativity Fest in October—it’s a great opportunity to learn from peers and share your perspective.
