Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Lynn Frances Jae. Published: 2012-09-05 05:00:29Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. When I went to the demo for Nytrix, I thought that I would be reviewing a new review tool. So, I was surprised when the demo was as much about the delivery system as it was about the tool itself. Complete Discovery Source is a seven-year-old eDiscovery service provider that has made their name in client services. Their new offering, Nytrix, is part of a suite of products CDS has been quietly creating and using in-house. Now, they have decided to make those tools available to corporate legal departments and law firms as a cloud-based IaaS/Saas (infrastructure as a service/software as a service) offering.
To date, eDiscovery review services have mostly been cloud-based SaaS tools. The service provider hosts the data and software on its network and users access the review tool via a web browser. This tool puts even more of the process into the cloud. The review platform is bundled with an ECA tool, processing engine, production engine and dashboard for controlling your data. So, a Litigation Support Manager can upload data directly to the cloud-based storage system. You can begin with raw data and move all the way through the process, or pop into the system with data at any point in the workflow. It gives the firm total control of its data. CDS will be supporting all of these services with their extensive client services division. If your people get stuck at some point, there is someone on hand to help solve the issues. This is a hybrid between having an in-house solution and outsourcing your eDiscovery services. It is worth tracking this new paradigm to see where it goes, since infrastructure, security and training have been some of the obstacles to bringing services in-house. This solution appears to clear those hindrances.
Now about the tool itself: Nytrix seems to have all of the basics covered. Users, permissions, tagging, searching, assignments, redaction and reporting are all flexible and customizable. As a long-time Relativity shop, they know the little things that can cause big issues and have addressed them. For instance, they have single instance documents for foldering. (A document can reside in multiple folders without expanding the size of the data set.) The search tool can be a little complicated, but like other parts of the tool, it provides options. They have incorporated keyword search for basic Boolean search, and more advance Lucene search for proximity, fuzzy and other more advanced search features. Once you learn the syntax, it will be less confusing. A nice feature is a query validator which tells you if your search is going to work. This solves the issue users experience with some search tools that return no results because of bad syntax, leading the user to believe that there are no documents that meet the desired search criteria.
The case administration section includes the reporting dashboard which is robust and gives you lots of views into the data set, the process and the progress of all phases, including detailed document review reporting.
The review interface is clean, simple and customizable. You can show or hide various frames to adjust the screen real estate to your workflow and undock the document viewer to take advantage of multiple screens. The redaction tool lets you redact in the native view, then the system generates an image on production. This saves the step of TIFFing or creating a PDF prior to redaction. The native viewer also includes a machine translation tool, which I didn’t see in action.
All in all, the Nytrix platform looks like it will be a good alternative for legal departments and law firms that want to have more control over their eDiscovery processes without the infrastructure, software and personnel expenses involved with in-sourcing eDiscovery.
eDiscoveryJournal Contributor – Lynn Frances