Many of the most prevalent problems eDiscovery professionals face today aren’t related to a lack of competency or skill, but rather to collaboration or a lack thereof. In the legal space, communication is everything, and it is built or broken by the technology that facilitates it. 

To handle litigations in the increasingly complex, data-dominated, and ‘hybrid working’ world we find ourselves in, legal professionals need advanced eDiscovery capabilities. Capabilities that allow them to collaborate more efficiently, more effectively, and turn things around faster – minimising costs and maximising results, no matter how their teams choose to work. 

Read on to learn 3 must-have eDiscovery capabilities for better collaboration, and how you can use them to support your team and improve overall efficiency in your upcoming eDiscovery projects. 

1 - Single identity access 

Legal professionals and eDiscovery specialists often work simultaneously across different teams, partners, systems and workflows that lie outside of their organisation. The problem with this is it means they repeatedly spend time juggling different login credentials and jumping through security and authentication hoops simply to access the files they need. 

This might sound minor at first, but when you consider this being done multiple times each day, by multiple members of staff, it quickly adds up to days of lost time, time that could no doubt be put to much better use. 

Advanced eDiscovery tools can enable you to access all instances and workspaces, through one single identity, at no added cost. 

This saves users significant time by removing the need for multiple logins and authentications, freeing up more time to focus on delivering an exceptional standard of service. In short, it means you can collaborate across your client base more efficiently and more securely than ever before.

2 - Secure, centralised file storage

Another issue legal professionals face is that of version control. And as remote working has become more widespread, this problem has become more frequent, and more difficult for legal teams to address. When working remotely and sharing files across multiple networks, devices and servers, important documents can quickly end up duplicated and stored in several different places... 

This quickly creates confusion, making it difficult to discern which document is the latest and correct version. It can also lead to teams editing and updating different documents, which leaves teams misaligned, and important notes, comments and annotations start to slip through the cracks. Issues of version control like this can jeopardise your security standards, compliance credentials, and client relationships. Not to mention the time taken to resolve such matters is costly. The way to address this issue is through centralised and secure file access. 

Advanced eDiscovery tools allow legal teams and their collaborators to securely access the same files from one centralised location, accessible via the cloud.

This eliminates the need for documents to be duplicated and stored elsewhere, and thus eliminates the challenges that come with version control. 

3 - Live, in-document communication 

While there have been many benefits to the advent of remote working, one of the most challenging things to replicate has been the energy of an in-office, ‘round table’ dynamic. That physical setting allows groups of people to bounce ideas off each other in the heat of the moment, without having to worry about someone’s connection dropping, or someone else being on mute. Live document collaboration is one way that remote eDiscovery teams can replicate such dynamics from afar. 

 As the name implies, the benefit of live documents is that any actions a user takes within the document instantly appear in real-time to all of the other users in the same document – whether that action is redacting, highlighting or annotating or commenting on a particular line of text. This capability can help make remote eDiscovery processes far more efficient, effective and streamlined. 

Bonus capability: Designations 

Other live document features can further aid collaboration and make for more efficient eDiscovery. While designation annotation tools are traditionally used to call out specific areas of a transcript to be used in a trial, they can also be used to help teams highlight specific passages and bring them to the attention of their fellow reviewers. 

For example, let’s say a team is reviewing a particularly detailed document, and Reviewer A wants to bring a particular passage to the attention of his colleague and superior, Reviewer B.  Reviewer A can easily do this by using the designations tool and adding Reviewer B’s name as the ‘designation value’. This allows them to easily cut through the detail and get to the most relevant part of the document while opening up an avenue for further discussion of the particular point that has been highlighted. 

RelativityOne enables you to leverage all of these powerful, must-have collaboration capabilities, from the same easy-to-use platform. 

Since 2019, Array has been a proud partner of Relativity. If you’d like to learn more about this platform, and how it can help you, we’d be more than happy to talk you through it - you can reach out to us via our Contact Us page, or you can view our RelativityOne page for all the latest information!