Corporations

Relativity’s secure web-based architecture allows AGCs to maintain one central repository of litigation data for the firm and gives them the ability to collaborate easily with external counsel and experts. Each group in the system sees only the documents and features to which they need access, and all work product is completely secured.

AGCs and their teams can construct and modify validation methodologies and best practices to simplify and standardize workflow processes that result in repeatable and defensible work product. When a successful workflow has been established, templates can be saved, built into the platform for future cases, and rolled out to all external parties. This provides a uniform process, no matter which law firm or contract review group is working with the documents.

By building Relativity applications, AGCs can manage more than ESI. All activity related to the identification, collection, review, analysis and production of a data collection can be tracked and monitored through these applications. This includes litigation holds, collection activities, chain of custody, pleadings and other court documents, witness information, timelines, historical subjective coding decisions, contract reviewer statistics, and more. Predefined and customizable reporting and auditing give AGCs easy avenues to track access, decision making and reviewer productivity. Combining Relativity’s application-building and reporting capabilities gives AGCs a tool to track historical designations for key custodians in previous reviews. In scenarios during which multiple matters are being reviewed at different law firms with overlapping custodians, this capability can help reduce risk by ensuring that documents are being designated consistently among the firms. It can help save time and money by providing external counsel involved in new matters with knowledge already gained from previous reviews.

This means it easily can be integrated into the firm’s existing IT infrastructure and managed by the same IT professionals responsible for other enterprise systems, thus reducing personnel and training costs. A corporation’s preferred backup and recovery methodologies can be applied to Relativity. The enterprise license model for corporations is horizontally scalable, allowing the firm to bring on as many hardware components and as much storage and processing capacity as needed, without the cost of any additional server- or processor-based license fees.

Relativity supports industry-standard data load formats, as opposed to any specialized data format requirements. Thus, data easily can be migrated from other platforms or processed for import into Relativity by the corporation’s ESI processing applications or preferred litigation support vendor. As the industry’s most flexible review platform, Relativity allows litigation support managers to customize the interface and workflow to the needs of individuals and groups of users. Superfluous features and data disappear from the interface entirely. A user is also guided through the predetermined workflows, therefore saving considerable time with respect to end user training.

Efficient workflows can be saved as templates. Litigation support managers can then build, customize, or implement the templates for different types of matters to quickly address new matters and reduce the inefficiencies of repeatedly building similar databases. These templates and workflows can be used to provide productive and manageable workflows to external counsel and contract review companies.

With more than 100 full-service litigation support service providers offering hosted Relativity services in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, companies have a range of options for outsourcing. This array of outsourcing venues also helps reduce dependency on a select number of law firms or service providers when it is necessary to host projects externally. Relativity partners range from strong regional and national providers to multinational consultancies.

The addition of Relativity Analytics features – such as clustering, which automatically sorts documents into conceptually related subsets – delivers further benefits and cost savings to corporations by accelerating the linear review process. Relativity Analytics can also be used as an automated QC measure to compare human decisions to results from the concept engine, impacting both speed and accuracy.

Relevant details and documents, such as employment history, department, and organizational structure, can be imported, tracked and maintained in Relativity. Templates for specific types of investigations can be saved, reused, and standardized for all incidents. Chain of custody and collection details easily can be monitored, and if the matter goes to litigation, these details can be carried forward automatically to the discovery database.

By implementing Relativity Analytics, HR, security and IT professionals add a powerful e-discovery tool to the analysis of corporate data. Through Relativity Analytics’ categorization feature, staff can store examples of potentially or known harmful documents, such as e-mails and documents that have caused issues in the past (harassment, malfeasance, IP theft, non-compete and disclosure violations). Based on these historical examples, Relativity can analyze a collection of corporate documents and folder anything from the collection that is conceptually similar to past harmful examples. This allows the HR team to maintain a repository of problem documents by issue, thus speeding the identification of red flags during an investigation.

Relativity is certified by RSA to provide two-factor authentication. Combined with 128-bit SSL encryption and a granular security model, this allows for complete collaboration between a corporation and its external counsels, experts, and third parties, implemented in a single document repository with the comfort of having the data secured as required by role.