Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2012-07-09 06:44:45Format, images and links may no longer function correctly.
Relevance and privilege review dominates the expanding cost of eDiscovery. Controlling that cost has focused innovation to create Technology Assisted Review (TAR) software and service offerings, but the various TAR approaches can be applied to almost every stage of the eDiscovery lifecycle. The trend to consolidate point products into broader eDiscovery platforms provides a pathway to spread TAR methods beyond review. Our recent briefing with FTI on their Ringtail 8.2 release is a good example how a mature product can leverage clustering, machine learning and other analytics to increase quality and efficiency across matter and global workflows. Like several other solutions including CaseCentral, Ringtail 8.2 implements a unified, Single Instance Storage (SIS) repository that gives their analytic data cubes and mines access to collections that span multiple matters. These global analytics support ECA, culling and QA scenarios upstream and downstream from the actual review.
As FTI has slowly merged the Attenex Workbench and Document Mapper products into the Ringtail review platform, they have had to balance the sheer size of collections against the ability to render meaningful analytic visualizations. The Document Mapper concept cluster view now renders dynamically within Ringtail with custom color coding based on keyword collections.
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Although this visualization could be considered the first TAR offering, FTI has not seen widespread acceptance of propagation style predictive coding outside of time critical reviews. Customers seem more comfortable using this integration of technology and workflow to better organize, cull and analyze collections to maximize review quality and efficiency. This matches what we have seen with our corporate and law firm consulting clients. The extension of analytics beyond the pure relevance review is an encouraging sign of our slowly maturing market. eDiscovery pushes innovation in high risk/cost matters because the stake justify the budget. These innovations then migrate to other markets like information governance, retention management and big data business intelligence. I like to think that eDiscovery is vaguely like the Space Program, justifying the single return on investment can be hard, but without it the rest of our corporate technology would move at a snail’s pace. So how have you leveraged TAR solutions outside of review? Let me know at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com!