When you tell people you work in the legal industry, you can sometimes sense the way they picture an episode of Suits or Law & Order. Of course, for many of us—especially those in e-discovery—a typical workday couldn’t look much different than that.
“In the corporate world, most people can agree: often we’re helping a bunch of people who are really, really rich sue and throw money at each other,” said Harry Trick, a senior manager at FRP Advisory, during a session at Relativity Fest Chicago in 2024.
That awareness can sometimes be a source of existential distress. Isn’t there something more we, as legal and technology professionals, can do? Something bigger? Something with a greater purpose?
I am proud to say that many of us are doing more, and I was enamored with such stories at Relativity Fest Chicago this fall.
Harry shared the above quote during one of our Community & Culture sessions during Relativity Fest, where he spoke alongside several other panelists. The full list of speakers included:
- Jaclyn Sattler, Senior Manager, Strategic Initiatives, Relativity (moderator)
- Therese Carey, Senior Director, Global Service Delivery, Epiq
- Andrew Stroth, Managing Director, Action Injury Law Group, LLC
- Harry Trick, senior manager, FRP Advisory
During the session, the panel spoke about how their pro bono work has enabled them to work together in support of the greater good—to advance causes with far-reaching implications well beyond the corporate matters you might work on every day.
In partnership with Relativity’s Justice for Change program, and with a passion to do more, Harry, Jaclyn, Therese, Andrew and their teams are hard at work advancing access to justice, bringing home wrongfully convicted exonerees, and making legal tech professionals everywhere quite proud.
Alongside their own inspiring stories, the panelists also shared tips for how to join the cause and help improve access to justice in your company and community.
Working Together for Incredible Causes
“It’s great when someone who’s been victimized is able to work with a large firm for justice. But that’s not always the case,” Therese Carey, from Epiq, said during the Fest session. “Technology is a game changer, and it’s through technology that we’re able to bring justice to the right people who could otherwise be languishing in jail.”
For many matters involving social justice, the need to parse through massive amounts of evidence is a fundamental first step in building a case. But it can be a monumental task for a legal team or victim faced with limited budgets and technology options.
“The Innocence Project is working with people who’ve been convicted wrongfully and are using DNA evidence, primarily, to prove their innocence. But to get those records means reviewing years and years of paper: transcripts, pleadings, appeals that had failed—all of it,” she explained. “For each exoneree, there would be law students and lawyers around the country reading and summarizing these files in a manual way. But I know that new technologies—and after seeing Relativity aiR for Case Strategy yesterday [at Fest], I feel this even more—are a game changer. You won’t need hours and hours and hours to plow through client files. This opens the opportunity to represent more victims.”
Time is precious. Expertise is crucial. And the data required to further the pursuit of justice can be daunting. This is why partnerships between the right people, armed with the most powerful technology, and using optimized processes are so essential to pro bono work.
Justice for Change was established to help enable those partnerships. The program provides organizations doing work on behalf of social and racial justice with free access to RelativityOne, and pairs them up with a participating partner or law firm to provide administrative and project management support. The idea is to leverage the unique benefits of our technology and our ecosystem to positively impact racial and social justice in our communities.
For Andrew Stroth, who moved from representing professional athletes to civil rights work, this partnership has been invaluable.
“Through Justice for Change, we had Relativity, Lighthouse, Intelligent Voice—my opponents tried to overwhelm us, but it was the opposite. We’re playing 3D chess and we’re on the offense every moment,” he said. His firm’s ability to access the same powerful technology and expertise as their much larger opponents has enabled them to make a difference in the lives of people like James Gibson, who spent 29 years in maximum security prisons for a wrongful conviction.
“We’ve done the work; we have the platform,” Andrew said proudly.
Features like OCR, AI, and machine translation have all accelerated the groups’ pro bono projects and extended their abilities to take on more cases and help more people.
“From my perspective, using the technology, we will reach the people we want to reach faster; they won’t be in the system as long. Wouldn’t that be great? We can have more people spending time on more substantive matters of the case and work to exonerate someone wrongly convicted. That’s important. Having both the people and the tech together—because you still need the lawyers and their brains—will help us,” Therese said. “As I sat through the workshop on aiR for Case Strategy, I thought, ‘This is even going to make the pro bono work easier.’ When you can aggregate so much disparate information together, along with legal theories from lawyers and the weaknesses they want to see, it’s really going to impact pro bono work in a really very positive way.”
“Technology is the difference maker, but the people element of this program is such a huge thing. The firm we’re helping out in EMEA is comprised of investigators, few of them with legal backgrounds—most have corporate investigations backgrounds and have moved into pro bono and not-for-profit work,” Harry added. The Justice for Change program he’s currently working on is focused on investigating war crimes in Syria. “The skillsets that have come together in the Justice for Change program really boost and elevate what the recipients of the program can do, as well as the people supporting them.”
Harry also excitedly shared that a wider suite of RelativityOne’s capabilities will now be available to Justice for Change projects. Already, these additional features have enabled significant progress on his team’s current matter.
“On this case we’re working on, there is no database. There’s no record of international war crimes people committed. So what we’re doing is building a database—not the holy grail, but an open source of information. When a person watches a video, learns what happened, and finds it’s not relevant to the thing they’re investigating right now, but in six months they find that it is—it’s really tough to remember anything that far down. We’re building a repository of information where our investigators can collect all this data from whistleblowers and other sources, which people can call on when they need it,” Harry explained.
“But the other challenge is that we’re working in a small area with so many languages. The languages are so vastly different. We had contracts handed to us in French, but the team we’re supporting doesn’t speak French. Fortunately, Relativity has a suite of products, and Translate is one of them. So I called Jonathan hill and asked if we could get Translate on our Justice for Change project—and, to be clear, I was gonna pay for it if we couldn’t,” he continued. “But he made it happen, and now the full suite of additional products will be included in Justice for Change this fall. Relativity aiR, Translate—everything. That’s amazing.”
Forwarding Future Progress
In addition to the on-the-ground work our panel is doing to seek justice for their clients, as with Harry’s database project, they’re building the foundation for future progress as well. The goal is to make the need for justice known, and to make it more possible for more legal professionals to get involved.
“I did a presentation at Northwestern’s law school this year, and over 21 exonerees were in the room. We were sharing our work, and a lot of the students walked away thinking they could leverage their law education to make a difference in the world,” Andrew told Fest attendees. “We can leverage the law, technology, and world-class teams to make a difference. I’ve been so empowered because we can hit a couple buttons on our computer and discover the truth. And it’s enabled us to bring in world-class lawyers to help.”
For Therese, the accessibility and velocity of e-discovery technology can level the pro bono playing field—meaning more law firms of different scales can join the causes that mean the most to them.
“Larger law firms have a budget for this; they want to be known for doing millions of dollars in pro bono a year. But smaller and mid-sized firms struggle, because it’s a significant cost that’s associated with this type of case,” she said. “Programs like Justice for Change help with those costs: the hosting, users, and other trickle-down elements. So we’re able to bring the tech to organizations and smaller firms that would’ve maybe said they couldn’t handle a case because they just weren’t big enough and didn’t have the ability to do it.”
For Andrew, his work in civil rights cases means everything for each of the clients he represents—and a lot for the broader community as well. Passionately pursuing justice for his clients helps others feel seen, and the work his firm is doing to make more data available to others is increasing awareness around the injustices already in play.
“We don’t have a seat at the table. Black and brown communities don’t necessarily. James Gibson couldn’t afford this. The system isn’t necessarily broken; it’s working for a lot of people. We’re using technology and litigation to disrupt that system,” he explained. “It’s about access to justice. We have this underground railroad—barber shops, churches—where people are talking about this. That’s how we get our business. We’ll use this same model we’re using for James Gibson and bring it to other people. Life is not a fair game, so we’re trying to change the game.”
He's hopeful that learning from and, whenever possible, correcting the mistakes of the past can help set the stage for a more just future.
“If you understand the past, you can predict the future. How can we look at the past 25 years to predict the future? My firm partnered with others and the Law Firm Antiracism Alliance to build a new data project. We showed the city the numbers, and the city said the numbers are wrong. But it’s built with 14,000 responses to FOIA requests; it’s their data. I’m going to build it in Atlanta and God is going to serve that table,” Andrew continued.
“We’ve built this to have a seat at the table. People are reaching out to me. They want to understand it. Those in charge are on notice and can’t say injustice doesn’t exist. What we want to do is leverage history to change the course of the future. Every time a mama hugs me because her son’s been killed by police unjustifiably, or when Gibson talks about his 29 years in prison and how he couldn’t see his mama because she died—how do we change the future by understanding the past? The tech is super powerful in pursuit of that.”
This desire for lasting change is what keeps Andrew going. Fest attendees were noticeably moved by his words.
“I’ve been to more funerals in last 10 years than in the last 50. I’ve seen so many Black boys like my son in caskets. I realized when switching from representing pro athletes to this line of work that God had a different plan for my life. Whatever age you are, think about your purpose and your passions to make things happen,” he implored the audience. “The Truth, Hope, and Justice Initiative mobilizes mothers to tell their stories. I can do the legal work and technology work, but the human stories … Listen, it’s great to make money and get promotions. But think about how you can have a real impact on your community and make things happen to change people’s lives.”
How to Get Started with Pro Bono Projects
In that spirit of inspiring action and hasten change, all of our panelists had wonderful advice on how legal professionals of any background can join the movement and begin their pro bono journeys.
“There’s plenty of this to go around. For those of you with service providers, go and chat with your leader about getting involved. The tech is moving forward, we’re all moving forward—that’s fantastic. But the one thing we need to do better as a community is be involved in all of this. You feel great at the end of the day, which is wonderful, but it’s easier to make that difference if more people are there and fighting,” Harry said.
He continued: “What we each know is different; everyone has different skills and backgrounds. The community coming together to use what we know and have spent years building in our careers—it is only going to get better. The tech doesn’t help if we as a group don’t get together more and use our collective knowledge to advance the program.”
His perspective on how each of us can give of ourselves—our skills, our careers, and our growth trajectories—to make the industry better was heartening.
“We all go through our jobs and careers trying to be the best we can: to get promotions, to work with new clients who have matters we’re interested in. We all try to improve every day. Take a step back and think about more than improving you. Improve everything. Even other people’s access to justice, or the way international war crimes can be addressed,” Harry advised.
“Think about technology as getting better regardless of what you do—and it will. I’m not clever enough to work out how to make the next product; I can’t code, so that’ll happen with or without me,” he went on. “My challenge is to use that product to make other people’s lives better. And if I learn something along the way, or get a new certification, then cool. I get better too. But don’t think about it as, ‘how can I improve?’ Think about how we can improve as a community.”
I loved the way Harry summed up how and why we should all be involved in this work: “The Venn diagram between the e-discovery community and the people involved in this program shouldn’t be a Venn diagram at all; it should be a single circle. Everyone gets a better shot at justice if we get to that point.”
Therese agreed, noting that the first step is simply joining the conversation.
“Take a good look at the Justice for Change program and evangelize it. The word spreads. If you find yourself in a position where you are seeing activity that could be a good candidate for Justice for Change, evangelize it,” she said. “Having been in corporate law firms my entire career, this was a wonderful academic challenge as well. This helped me understand civics, working on criminal matters. I encourage it. Evangelize.”
At the end of the session, a member of the Fest session audience asked panelists to expand upon that Step 1 advice. How, they asked, did our panelists first get started with pro bono work?
“My journey actually started with a session at Relativity Fest, when I first heard about this program. Obviously internal things need to be cleared off; I realize not everyone in this room has the position to do that. But make those steps,” Harry said. “There are people within Relativity—your AE, customer support manager, whomever—who can help. Have a chat. There are so many paths into the program; I really hope no one sees it as a hurdle.”
“Raise your hand. Really. Just raise your hand. The first time I worked on a pro bono matter, we represented parents who had been wrongfully accused of the murder of their daughter. We worked on the appeal, and it was an unpopular case because the media had made them demons. Someone would come to my office and ask what I was doing, and I answered, and usually got their opinion. But it was still a wonderful experience,” Therese recalled. “When we took that case on appeal and argued it, the appellate judges reversed the ruling completely. The clients are now free and have moved and led a relatively happy life since. The crime has never been solved, sadly, but it felt good to help in this one way. And it all started with me hearing we were taking the appeal and walking into an attorneys’ office and saying, ‘How can I help?’ So raise your hand.”
For more information about the Justice for Change program, please visit this page or contact our team. We’re happy to help you raise your hand.
