30 May, 2018
FTI Consulting—a global advisory firm with decades of experience handling the riskiest and most complex matters in e-discovery—has an impressive track record for managing huge, multinational projects.
When they applied RelativityOne to their global playbook for Hart-Scott-Rodino second requests, they achieved a speed and scale that exceeded expectations.
FTI Consulting Showcases Second Request Expertise with RelativityOne
Betting on RelativityOne
When a second request happens, each passing day is costing the company millions of dollars. It's one of the most vulnerable positions a company can be in during a merger—the data volumes are enormous and you can't go fast enough.
FTI Consulting is no stranger to this type of pressure, but on a recent matter, the list of custodians topped 150 and they weren't sure how they were going to keep their heads above water.
Within weeks of partnering with Relativity, they decided to put this five-terabyte matter into RelativityOne, hypothesizing that things would move a lot faster if they didn't have to build an on-premises environment first, and that the increased scalability and throughput of the cloud would work to their advantage.
"What RelativityOne really gave us was the elasticity and flexibility to expand and focus on what we do best—providing innovative solutions to our clients," said Daryl Teshima, senior managing director at FTI Consulting.
“What RelativityOne really gave us was the elasticity and flexibility to expand and focus on what we do best—providing innovative solutions to our clients.”
Speed to Review
By choosing the cloud, FTI Consulting was able to get their workspace up and running almost immediately, and they began processing more than 21 million documents into the system. RelativityOne's elastic compute power allowed the team to automatically adjust when they needed more throughput and space, while giving them access to the latest Relativity features, so the documents were processed quickly and with fewer errors than they were used to.
"The capacity and scalability of Processing in RelativityOne helps us keep pace with our clients' needs without sacrificing the quality of delivery they expect from us," said Wendy King, managing director at FTI Consulting.
“The capacity and scalability of Processing in RelativityOne helps us keep pace with our clients' needs without sacrificing the quality of delivery they expect from us.”
'Hold Your Breath' Productions
FTI Consulting moved quickly through the beginning phases of the project, but their biggest concern was still ahead of them. The large-scale rolling productions of second requests can be a crippling challenge, and they weren't sure how a new product they were using for the first time was going to handle it.
Getting off to a strong start, their team produced a one million-page production in less than a week, without any issues. From there, productions reaching several million documents were sent off, and the project wrapped up uneventfully.
"When you're dealing with your clients, the things you don't want to have to focus on are 'is the software stable?' 'is it scalable?' and 'is it well supported?' And I can say with RelativityOne, all those things are more than true," said Wendy.
“When you're dealing with your clients, the things you don't want to have to focus on are 'is the software stable?' 'is it scalable?' and 'is it well supported?' And I can say with RelativityOne, all those things are more than true.”
Beyond Second Requests
FTI Consulting didn't start small—plunging into several other high-volume, resource-intensive projects with tight timelines, like global investigations—with RelativityOne. Within just four and a half months, their team is supporting more than 35 projects consisting of close to 20 terabytes in RelativityOne, and they're realizing the same consistent speed, scalability, and success.
Combining the deep expertise of their more than 4,600 consultants in 28 countries with the growing availability of RelativityOne in Microsoft Azure data centers around the world will make FTI Consulting's handling of the biggest and most challenging legal and regulatory projects less complicated.
