Highlights from this year’s Relativity Fest

October 5, 2020

Relativity Fest 2020 was virtual and free this year! I took advantage of the opportunity to attend this fantastic conference, and I learned many things that will benefit our clients as Mathers McHenry & Co. continues to expand our growing litigation practice. Some of the key takeaways I learned were about fun marketing ideas, best practices for bringing e-discovery technology in house to law firms, and innovative ways Relativity users have built solutions to solve data challenges.

Cameos
Let’s start with the fun stuff. In the days leading up to the conference, and before each information session began, Relativity posted Cameos (personal celebrity videos) of our idols giving shout-outs to Relativity Fest. The celebrities featured in the cameos included Lisa Leob, Lance Bass, and Latrice Royale. What a great way to personalize a virtual event and get everyone excited and smiling from the beginning.

In House Document Review
More and more, law firms are performing document review in house rather than outsourcing to third party vendors. Having e-discovery technology in house ensures efficiency and high-quality services for clients by:

providing complete transparency on how their data is processed and managed throughout the proceeding (i.e. culling, analytics, and production decisions),
removing the possibility of duplicating client data (i.e. a copy with an e-discovery vendor for ingestion and processing and a copy with their lawyers for review),
gleaning information directly from the e-discovery software regarding size of client data for attaching to invoices or producing to client auditors, and
having the flexibility to offer discounts.

I attended a session about best and cost-efficient practices for bringing document review in house to law firms. This session was very timely for me because Mathers McHenry & Co. is broadening our litigation practice to include e-discovery technology and services. Now I’m better prepared to engage in discussions about what’s being done in the industry, and how using our e-discovery technology can better service our clients.

New Technology Solving Data Challenges
This was my first time attending Relativity Fest so I was completely captivated by the recognition and encouragement that Relativity gives back to its community. The Innovation Awards recognize Apps (add-ons) built by the Relativity community which integrate with RelativityOne to solve data challenges.

One new app in particular caught my attention: Sky Photo Search by Sky Discovery. Sky Photo Search is, as the name suggests, a photo search that harnesses machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyse photos by identifying the contents of photos and assigning keywords, which can then be picked up in keyword or field searches by the reviewing lawyer. Take for example, a photo of a toddler standing in a field of flowers, by a lake: the program assigns keywords like human, person, outdoors, nature, field, water, etc.

This App can be used to run analytics on images within photos (like GIFs in text messages), to give a RelativityOne user a sense of what the text message exchange is about, without having to review each individual message and photo for context. So cool! This benefits our clients, in turn, by saving costs of lawyer time to review every single image if the technology can easily identify and weed out irrelevant documents. We at Mathers McHenry & Co. will keep an eye out for new technology like that which can assist with more efficient (read: less costly for our clients) document review processes.

In all, Relativity Fest 2020 was informative and well organized, and the hands-on exercises were a great refresher on how to use analytics. I’m grateful I was able to attend this year and am looking forward to using what I learned to ensure the most efficient and high quality service to our clients as our litigation practice continues to grow!