In a recent survey of Relativity’s corporate customers, 75 percent of respondents reported that their investigations take over a month, with 25 percent reporting that their investigations take at least 3 months. We also know that a corporation can expect to field 50-100 cases a year, while service providers, law firms, and government entities, whose principal organizational purposes are to conduct investigations and manage cases, will have many, many more.
Consider for a moment the amount of data included in those cases. Every day, people send trillions of emails, texts, Slacks, WhatsApp messages, Facebook Messenger chats, Instagram DMs, Twitter DMs, and Microsoft Teams messages across their organizations. Add to that the information generated from databases such as SharePoint, OneDrive, and/or Google Drive, and the data created becomes mind boggling. In fact, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created in a single day!
Let’s do the math…
Small teams + (1-3+ month long investigations x 50+ cases x millions of bytes) =
not even close to enough hours in a day
Overwhelmed by this avalanche of data? The solution lies in technology. Specifically, investigative-focused technology that brings order to the very real, very chaotic data that human beings create.
That’s why we’re excited to announce the release of brand-new enhancements to communication analysis in RelativityOne, with visualizations that deliver an immersive, yet slick, investigative experience, purpose-built for investigative workflows. With a team led by a former investigator and many months of user research, we made sure to deliver features that give back time and really make a difference, whether you are using the tools for a full-scale investigation, or diving into case data as an e-discovery professional.
These enhancements can help solve a variety of new challenges. Keep reading to learn about the problems you can tackle with RelativityOne’s newest communication analysis technology.
Get a Grasp on Complex Relationships
People are at the crux of a case or investigation. To get to the truth of what happened, you need to understand who was involved, how they interacted, and what roles they played. RelativityOne’s new communication analysis functionality helps you do just that. New visualization libraries and features depict connections across conversations, bringing key actors and relationships to the forefront.
To understand these complex connections, artificial intelligence links each person, called an entity in RelativityOne, based off their communication patterns and groups them according to who they are most frequently in contact with. You can then dive further into the relationships through a right-click context menu that allows you easily select or merge entities, flag the connections that are most important, or hide those you would like to ignore.
Explore the data according to your preferences, with options such as excluding entities with no connections, adjusting the width of connection lines according to volume, or even viewing in dark mode. These game-changing visualizations adjust in real time so you can quickly and intuitively uncover the most important relationships.
Filter the Noise, Find the Facts
Finding valuable insights within an avalanche of information requires sifting through the noise. The enhanced filtering and search functionality now available in communication analysis allows you to navigate vast amounts of data, identifying the most relevant pieces while excluding what doesn’t matter.
Preset filters help you easily isolate the most important people and conversations. View the top 5, 25, or 50 communicators in your project with one click, and watch as visualizations automatically update. Use recipient filtering to include or exclude individuals who were sent emails directly, or those who were simply copied. Or get even more specific, with entity searching that highlights and identifies custodians.
No matter how much information you are dealing with, communication analysis can help you cull it down—so you can just see what is important, in an effective yet efficient manner.
Uncover Hidden Context
Understanding the volume of communication between key actors is necessary to discover the story behind your matter. But sometimes you need more context to see the full, people-driven picture. That’s why we are making communication analysis compatible with other RelativityOne analytical tools. Soon, you will be able to overlay findings from sentiment analysis and search term reports across communication analysis visuals. By seeing who is talking about the most important topics, or where there is a lot of positive or negative sentiment expressed, you can quickly home in on the most informative conversations, and those most likely to contain your “smoking gun.”
With new messaging platforms and data formats always growing, corralling information can feel overwhelming. Let RelativityOne’s new communication analysis enhancements bring structure to chaotic conversational data and help you find valuable insights in record time. Start using these new enhancements when they launch this month and look out for more features (and dare we say fun?) coming throughout 2023.
Graphics for this post were created by Sarah Vachlon.
Brittany Roush is a senior product manager at Relativity, working on features like search and visualizations. She has been at Relativity since 2021. Prior to Relativity, she spent over a decade conducting investigations, managing e-discovery projects, collecting data, and leading a data breach notification practice. She has a passion for building better tools for investigators and PMs to make their lives and cases easier (at least partly because her friends in the industry would hunt her down if she didn’t).
