Relativity Legal Hold

Relativity has a checklist to follow when implementing a legal hold. Relativity Legal Hold is an application that helps an analyst send out hold notifications, and track the responses to those notifications. Using Legal Hold will leave behind an audit trail to confirm that relevant custodians have been contacted. It's important to identify who is performing the following roles when preparing a hold for a client:

1. The project stakeholders - client employees responsible for determining who the relevant custodians are, and sending out the hold notices.

2. The Legal Hold admins - who will actually be using the Relativity application.

3. The data stewards - which client employees manage its information systems.

4. The alert groups - who receives the responses from custodians.

Relativity uses an interesting term, "escalation cadence", to refer to how unresponsive custodians are to be reminded of their obligation to comply with a hold. I hadn't heard this term before, but its obvious how it is important to get this right. These should be tailored for individual custodians, and individual projects.

The application includes templates for a general hold notice; a release notice, and an email acknowledgment.

Note that the new Osier release of Relativity lets an admin assign custodians to a project automatically using a list of employee numbers.

Field Missing from Add Condition List: Searching on Related fields in Relativity

Note that some fields in Relativity are related fields. When running a search in Relativity these fields will be listed under the parent field. So, in this example we can see there are several related fields under the parent field 'Production' - each name is given after the parent field name and a double colon.

. . . when we go to select one of these related fields as a condition, only the parent field will be listed.

To run a search on one of the related fields, go ahead and select the parent field.

. . . a new window will then open which will allow you to set conditions for the related fields.

Relativity Analytics for Small Data Sets

Relativity recommends the use of analytics (email threading; clustering; concept searching; etc.) even for projects where a large amount of ESI is not collected.

Two scenarios show how analytics can help a team get a handle on a matter in just a few days.

A company wanted to conduct an investigation after the sudden departure of two executives, who were suspected of taking proprietary information. In just 5 days the following steps were performed:

1. Email threading brought down the number of email messages to be reviewed by 30%.

2. Communication analysis quickly showed which employees were communicating directly with each other. The larger nodes indicated a greater number of communications.

3. Clustering grouped together conceptually similar documents in the data set.

4. Active learning - TAR - narrowed down a set of documents considered the most likely to be responsive.

5. Relativity's Case Dynamics includes a Timeline Builder that was used in a report to the client.

In a different project, a team was asked to review a data set for which no metadata was been included, and which had a lot of duplicate files. The data was quickly culled down to what needed to be reviewed in just 5 days.

1. The Find near duplicates tool was used to remove a significant percentage of documents.

2. Clustering detected documents groups which were clearly of no interest.

3. The Find Similar Documents analytics tool was used to find dozens of documents which are similar to a handful known to be relevant.

4. Pivot charts showed groups of electronic files which were outliers in the overall set.

5. The documents set was narrowed down further to only the custodians whose data was at issue in the matter. Relativity recently decided to use the term 'entity' for custodian - for some reason.