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5 Ways Your e-Discovery Workflows Will Look Different (and Better) in 2016

John Harris
Over the years, we’ve worked hard to ensure Relativity evolves as quickly as the demands of e-discovery professionals—and the pace of this industry’s need for innovation isn’t slowing down. As attorneys and their clients become more tech savvy and case teams get more and more creative in tackling their toughest projects, the bar continues to move higher. 
We’re driven by the challenge of keeping up with those demands, and we’re excited to deliver Relativity 9.3 next month. This morning marked the substantive start of Relativity Fest 2015 as our president and CEO Andrew Sieja delivered a keynote that gave attendees a sneak peek at the upcoming release.

For those who couldn’t join us in Chicago, here’s how Relativity 9.3 will help you meet your e-discovery demands:

1. Analyze and interact with your data in new ways.

analyze-interact-smBusiness intelligence isn’t a fad. It’s a necessary part of tackling large data volumes in a smarter, more organized way. Intuitively interacting with live data—seeing the full scope of it from any perspective without being overwhelmed—is critical to understanding your case at a glance and getting to work more quickly.

Relativity 9.3 brings a dynamic new interface framework for working with your documents, designed to facilitate better data analysis through visualization—so you can comprehend and take action on your case data however you choose. You can turn any field of metadata or coding information into a data analysis widget, pivot on multiple dimensions to go deeper—for instance, to visualize how keywords are concentrated by custodian—and interact with graphs and charts to filter and drill into interesting sets of documents.

2. Search in a whole new way.

Searching & Building in RelativitySearching is at the core of document review and requires serious flexibility for the right level of inclusiveness and precision. Sometimes, finding that balance leads to some very complex search strings.

An intuitive search builder in Relativity 9.3 allows you to execute complex searches without the need to memorize nesting conventions and other details. Instead, just drag and drop conditions into logic groups. The new interface offers the ability to combine full text searches with conditions on any field in your database. With Relativity 9.3, it’s easy to understand your search at a glance.

3. Create custom dashboards.

Custom Dashboard in RelativityDocument lists are a familiar and essential aspect of document review, but review needs to be guided by a strategy that helps you quickly uncover insights in your data. e-Discovery software should be flexible enough to not only bring those insights to light, but to let you do it in whatever way works best for you and your team.

One of the best things about the new data analysis widgets in Relativity 9.3 is that you can use them to build your own custom dashboards and save them for continued use. Dashboards let you quickly change context to get just the information you need for that context—be it prioritization, progress monitoring, or quality control. Build dashboards with widgets that support your context and quickly switch between them based on the task at hand or question you need to answer, and get your work done more efficiently.

4. Get started on review even sooner.

Get Started On Review SoonerCase teams need to get to their documents as fast and painlessly as possible. On stage this morning, Andrew demonstrated how, with improvements to processing and collection in Relativity 9.3, you can go from initiating a collection to searching and reviewing fully processed documents seamlessly and faster than ever before.

Relativity 9.3 features many improvements that streamline your workflow and get you to review faster, including the ability to process extracted text directly to Relativity Data Grid, Relativity’s NoSQL data store. Processing to Data Grid improves speed, reduces storage requirements, and provides instant searching. The new version also optimizes de-duplication and text extraction, introduces support for direct processing of E01 files, allows simultaneous processing of multiple CJK languages, and streamlines error handling. These improvements together mean faster and easier end-to-end processing. With Relativity Processing, groups like Complete Discovery Source (CDS) are successfully pushing double-digit-terabyte volumes of data into review.

5. Don’t wait to dig in.

data-grid-search-smFaster processing is just one way to get faster insight into your case data. Being able to search it instantaneously? That’s even more powerful.

In Relativity 9.3, processing into Data Grid means you can start searching documents immediately as they’re being loaded—without having to build or maintain search indexes. Your team can start digging into what’s prevalent in your data set and strategizing for review immediately. No wait time required.

During Andrew’s Relativity Fest keynote, several members of the Relativity community shared their experiences with the platform. Christine DeMilio, e-discovery team leader at Allstate, and Christine Milliron, litigation support manager at Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, talked about how their e-discovery processes improved this year. Matt Knouff, e-discovery counsel at CDS, discussed CDS’s implementation of the full, end-to-end Relativity stack from legal hold through production. Their team has been able to harness the platform’s flexibility to provide creative, agile, custom solutions for their clients.

Before the keynote, Matt told us, “From the software platform to the people working behind the scenes to our ability to create and integrate custom tools, Relativity lets us work with our clients in a way that’s agile and intelligent.” It’s exciting to hear.

These are the stories that drive us to build a stronger platform with every Relativity release, from our monthly updates to major releases such as Relativity 9.3. With every new enhancement, our goal is to deliver software that evolves with our customers and their businesses and anticipates tomorrow’s demands.


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