Editor's Note: The original version of this article was published by Chris Dale on the eDisclosure Information Project website. We thought Chris's interview provided a unique perspective on Allen & Overy's story of transformation, so we're happy to share it here with his permission.
At Relativity Fest in London I interviewed Christina Zachariasen of Allen & Overy. What benefits, I asked, do A&O and its clients and get from using Relativity and RelativityOne?
Christina Zachariasen answered with these points:
- Relativity was a leading review platform. The decision to use it went back more than 18 months as part of a significant transformation of both technology and people.
- The decision was made to shift from being a cost centre to becoming a profit centre. There were significant benefits in having no overhead and new infrastructure which, Christina said, allowed them to be “fleet of foot.”
- The ability to process terabytes of data within hours and then scale the result down was itself a significant benefit. RelativityOne also gave Allen & Overy access to other tools—one example is machine translation software.
- There will be wider use cases in due course going beyond disputes. The technical team sits with litigation, and solving their problems is the priority. Eventually, the same tools and skills will be used whenever lawyers need to look of documents and to slice and dice them. For now, there is plenty of work to be done globally in dispute resolution.
To supplement this interview, I can point you to an A&O article called "Allen & Overy invests further in Advanced Delivery offering with RelativityOne" and a Relativity article headed "Allen & Overy deploys proactive e-discovery with RelativityOne."
