by advice@kCura

Several members of our advice@kCura team are experts in custom development, helping our partners and clients build applications and integrations to extend Relativity’s functionality. To highlight some of the unique ways our users are taking advantage of the platform, we interviewed a few of our partners and clients who have worked with custom development to help create some more complex applications.

We recently spoke with chief sales and marketing officer Jon Leitner and vice president of marketing Donna Peterson from Fios, whose newest Relativity Application—Fios Redaction Assistant—was released on September 28. Fios Redaction Assistant is only available to Fios clients.

If you have any questions about working with our team or have any custom development needs, please feel free to reach out to us at advice@kcura.com.

kCura: Tell us a little about Fios Redaction Assistant.

Jon Leitner: Fios Redaction Assistant is a tool built on top of Relativity that brings more functionality to the redaction process, making it easier, faster, and more reliable for the user community. The current feature set is based on pattern redaction: when you have different kinds of repetitive information, such as Social Security numbers or specific names, Fios Redaction Assistant can auto-redact those patterns wherever they end up in your collection.

How did you come up with the concept?

Donna Peterson: It started at LegalTech New York last year. We left that show believing we wanted to build an application to create a differentiator for us and to extend our instance of Relativity. We then brainstormed ideas with a cross-functional team about what was possible. We were mindful of this application being squarely in Relativity, but also wanted to create something truly unique. We evaluated our ideas based on three conditions: value to our customer base and our potential customer base, strategic fit with Relativity’s functionality, and overall fit with other strategic partners, notably Special Counsel. A redaction application emerged in the lead.

Why did you land on redactions?

Jon: It was simple. There were a lot of cool new ideas being introduced, but we asked ourselves what a fundamental problem was that attorneys have today on every document review. It’s redaction. From the days when review was done on paper and now into the electronic world, redactions are time-consuming, error-prone, and risk-prone—and they always will be. However, they’re necessary to protect privileged and private information. So when we thought about a Relativity application that could have value in the marketplace, redaction rose to the top in our minds. We also felt we had the resources that we needed—including a significant number of RCAs on staff—to solve this challenge in a meaningful way.

How did you work with our custom development team on this solution?

Donna: Once we had the idea, our development and product marketing teams fleshed out what we might accomplish in the redaction space—what the application might look like, the objective for it, and a description of it. Then, we reached out to your team to get your reaction and start driving for technical alignment with Relativity. Fabrice Medio, our vice president of software engineering, went out to work with your development team for a day to gain some hands-on knowledge for building in Relativity. This created a good affinity between Fabrice and your team. We then worked autonomously for a bit, and finally came back to your team when it was time to share a functional version of the app. We wanted Fios Redaction Assistant to look very natural—to fit in with all the paradigms users can expect from Relativity. We even made sure Fios Redaction Assistant was simply another tab within the software.

Jon: We’re aggressive users of the Relativity APIs, and the integration component was a high priority for us. User experience was as important to us as the technology itself.

Did any of these meetings change your approach to Fios Redaction Assistant?

Donna: When we first demoed Fios Redaction Assistant for your team, we didn’t have text overlay redactions as part of the application, but we really wanted to include that functionality. We weren’t sure what the most expeditious path for accomplishing that was, especially within our release timeline. However, an epiphany occurred while working with your team that enabled us to add that piece—and it’s now a feature in the product, one that we didn’t think was possible in our timeframe.

What’s in store moving forward?

Jon: We have a lot of ideas that we’re interested in exploring down the road, but right now we’re focused on Fios Redaction Assistant—enhancing it, doing more with it, and making sure it best serves our clients. But I wouldn’t rule out more custom applications coming out of Fios.