by Joe Aakre, Product Manager, Fios, Inc.

Earlier this month, at LegalTech New York 2010, Fios announced its partnership with kCura and debuted our newest offering: [1] Relativity® powered by Fios.

As you may already know from numerous blogs, tweets and articles (or from your personal experience at the show), attendance and excitement were very high. Over the course of the three days, I provided many product tours for people who stopped by our booth to demonstrate how Fios’ implementation (and 10 years of e-discovery expertise) takes all of the advanced search and workflow features in Relativity to the next level. What became most apparent from conversations and feedback with our customers and prospects is that not all implementations of Relativity are created equal.

The technology behind Relativity is amazing. e-Discovery providers, like Fios, can customize the reviewer experience by displaying as much or as little information as necessary for single or multi-pass reviews. When coupled with Fios’ advanced data processing and project management services, legal teams are provided with a much more robust, scalable platform for managing e-discovery reviews. Here are just a few differences unique to Fios that generated excitement during the demonstrations:

• Greater flexibility and access to hidden data
  Fios processes and pre-TIFFs all items to provide reviewers visibility to hidden content, such as tracked changes, speaker notes and hidden columns or rows in spreadsheets. Review managers can also request that Fios convert items to HTML, which is especially helpful during review of spreadsheets and dramatically increases the speed at which documents load into the system. Both options help to accelerate your review by reducing the overall number of downloads over the course of a matter.
• Email family relationships
  Most default installations of Relativity show family groups as a “flattened out” group of documents. Fios maintains email family relationships by displaying the immediate parent item name next to the child attachment for full contextual review.
• Advanced duplicate identification
  It is easy to search and tag item-level duplicates within Relativity. Fios provides a means to display contextual duplicates across your matter, so you can mass-tag entire email families in a single pass. Fios also de-duplicates items during refresh collections to help reduce data volumes throughout the review.
• Team collaboration
  Collaboration among review teams and review managers is critical. Fios leverages the workflow features in Relativity to facilitate communication between parties, improve quality and maintain consistency. One example is our discussion board. If reviewers have questions about an item, they can post a note to the discussion board. Review managers can then log in and provide immediate answers. Fios also provides a document library with Relativity. Review managers can easily browse and post critical documents about the review – such as production specs, search terms and coding manuals – to a single place rather than guessing which email contains the most recent version.

In addition, those we spoke with at the show gave Fios high marks for our scalable, secure infrastructure and approach to project management. The grid architecture in our data management center dynamically allocates resources to support document reviews and productions without backlog (regardless of case size or data volumes). We also assign dedicated project management teams, led by seasoned, PMI-credentialed project managers, to each matter. Our project managers know the power of Fios and have been specifically trained on Relativity, so they can bring the best of both worlds to your projects.

What impressed me the most about LegalTech this year was the high energy at the show, especially from the attendees. The accolades we received for [2] Relativity powered by Fios was incredible. If you did not get a chance to come by our booth or were not at the show and would like to see a product demonstration, please feel free to contact me at [3] jaakre@fiosinc.com or 503-265-0755,