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Innovative Thinking Part 1: 6 Tools for Collaboration and Project Management

Drew Deitch

With 26 submissions for the 2017 Innovation Awards, there were too many to mention in one post. All of the submissions will be highlighted this week in a three-part series. The first post in the series shares tools to improve collaboration and project management.

The e-discovery community has been busy building applications and integrations to solve a variety of new and unique challenges for their teams and clients. Twenty-six solutions were submitted for the fourth annual Relativity Innovation Awards.

While these solutions are built on the platform or are integrated with Relativity, they solve challenges beyond e-discovery. We saw four distinct themes emerge in this year’s submissions: tackling new or challenging data types; data transformation, management, and normalization; getting more from your data; and improved collaboration and project management.

The teams behind these innovations will be celebrated for their ingenuity at Relativity Fest. But we also wanted to share their solutions with the entire community. Check out the six innovations that can help your team better collaborate and make project management more efficient:

1. Bricker & Eckler - Land Tracker

When one of Bricker & Eckler’s clients—a natural gas distributor—was in the process of developing an interstate pipeline, they built a tool to organize information related to thousands of real estate documents and manage the data of multiple landowners, tracts, and lawsuits. Built on Relativity, the user-friendly system compiles documents from a variety of sources, even creating litigation documents with the click of a button, accelerating the process for the firm and their client.

2. H5 - Matter Intelligence

To provide maximum transparency and engagement with their customers, H5 created a suite of collaboration and reporting tools that eliminate manual and standalone reporting activities. Matter Intelligence has a unique interface that provides a comprehensive view of project tasks, billable services, expected costs, and data center health. Project managers and attorneys can collaborate via a “feed” showing all case activities, generate and share reports on the fly, share web links and attachments, and chat directly within the tool.

3. Haystack ID - Review Progress

When a client requested a more seamless, personalized tool to better monitor the progress of massive review projects, Haystack ID built a tool that gives review managers the flexibility to easily pull document decision data to present key metrics to their clients, allowing them to quickly and accurately control spend and estimate completion timelines. Haystack ID also customized the weekly report timeline, reporting on Sunday through Saturday, rather than the standard Monday through Sunday setup.

4. Oasis Discovery Partners - LEXI: Ticketing, Invoicing, and Dashboards for Relativity

Oasis Discovery Partners noticed that off-the-shelf ticketing, billing, and project management solutions don’t cut it for e-discovery’s specific needs. To help solution providers and litigation support departments simplify ticketing, billing, and real-time reporting, they created LEXI, a fully featured project management application on Relativity. Users can customize ticketing, quickly create invoices at the client or matter level, set up automated email updates for project teams, and slice all data using custom dashboards that update in real time as users drill into the data.

5. Taft Law - Project Management Application

Taft Law couldn’t find a project management application that fit their workflow, resulting in a disjointed process that relied on their document management system, spreadsheets, and emails to understand a matter’s history. In need of a better solution, they built an application on Relativity that offers an entire picture of a project, reduces storage needs, creates a more efficient archiving process, and allows team members to pick up a project at any point in its lifecycle, all without requiring Taft to license additional software.

6. UnitedLex - The KM

UnitedLex created The KM, a tool allowing project management teams to generate critical business intelligence in Relativity by aggregating case-specific project tracking data. This information helps identify key trends from historical metrics, leverage old matters to estimate new project costs, and view data growth over time. The KM also includes a repository of internal best practices, workflow and training documents, and historical decisions. To minimize context-switching, the data can be viewed from within the specific matter or rolled up in a master project list.

Stay tuned this week to learn about the 20 remaining submissions. You can also check them out on the Community Choice award voting page (and vote for your favorite while you’re there).


Drew Deitch is commercial lead of Relativity Patents, where he helps patent attorneys and searchers work faster with AI. He's been at Relativity for 10 years, in roles supporting our strategic partnerships, executive team, and product strategy.

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