At the start of 2022, Relativity formed a new team to help meet the needs of an emerging segment: litigation boutique law firms in North America. These firms are focused on a particular area of legal activity, have less than 100 attorneys on staff, and boast unique business strategies that enable them to support their clients in high-touch ways.
Given their size and often lean operations, many boutique law firms opt to work with our RelativityOne Certified Partner network to access RelativityOne. They might be eager to leverage a robust e-discovery platform that can help put them on equal footing with the behemoths of the legal industry, but seek the expertise of a service provider to help them make the most of the technology. In partnership with these providers, they can take advantage of workflow best practices, increased automation, centralization of their matters on one platform, and other benefits, leading to increased productivity and better service for their own customers.
What we’ve learned over the last year of working so closely with these highly collaborative teams is that they have uncovered a lot of wisdom about e-discovery, the legal field, and how to extract more value out of their technology and partnerships—and these insights are highly valuable for all of us working in this space.
So we want to put some of these learnings into context and share them with readers like you. As such, we invited several of our partners to share what strategies and trends they see as uniquely beneficial to the litigation boutique segment, as well as showcase how they are working with RelativityOne to meet the needs of their litigation boutique law firm clients.
Chris Cameron, Director, Account Services, PLUSnxt:
We successfully welcomed a new client who had no prior exposure to Relativity, and their e-discovery experience was limited to utilizing Adobe for document review and Bates stamping. They approached us for assistance when faced with their first substantial project, consisting of close to 100,000 documents. To streamline their review process, we used our expertise and customization of RelativityOne to implement filtering workflows encompassing date restrictions, search terms, redundant content, and email threading. Our aim was to minimize the data set they needed to review.
Furthermore, we provided valuable guidance to the client on negotiating a production protocol that would not only be easily shared with the opposing party, but would also fulfill their discovery requirements. We took them through the best practices related to productions and privilege logs, and equipped them with the necessary knowledge to confidently engage in negotiations with the opposing party.
The client expressed utmost satisfaction with their experience working alongside our team and utilizing RelativityOne. As a result, we are thrilled to say that we will be commencing our third project with them next month.
Zef Deda, VP of Client Solutions, Acorn Legal Solutions:
I have found that Acorn’s Small Case Solution is gaining a lot of traction among mid-sized, boutique law firms. In particular, we’ve had a client who started using this solution for their small cases and have now ended up with multiple attorneys in other departments using our small case solution. We’ve found this solution is specialized well for boutique law firms as it provides them access to RelativityOne on a small scale, and can easily be ramped up if more data is found. It has been so effective that this firm has even had attorneys say, “Don’t take my Relativity away!” because it has been such a helpful tool for them.
Drew Goletz, National Sales Director, eDiscovery and Forensics, Avalon:
Recently, Avalon was engaged by a boutique law firm specializing in intellectual property disputes who was facing significant challenges in managing and reviewing large volumes of electronic data for their cases. They needed a solution that would streamline their e-discovery processes, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. By engaging Avalon and implementing RelativityOne, the firm experienced transformative benefits. They gained access to advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities, enabling them to quickly identify relevant documents, prioritize review, and make informed legal decisions. The scalability and flexibility of RelativityOne allowed the law firm to handle large-scale document productions without the need for additional infrastructure or resources. Furthermore, our team of experienced e-discovery professionals provided support and expertise, ensuring smooth workflows, adherence to industry best practices, and compliance with data privacy regulations. The firm was able to focus on their core legal expertise while leaving the technical aspects of e-discovery to us.
Richard Keene, Project Manager, Elevate:
Anticipating a flood of material from dozens of custodians, Elevate leveraged RelativityOne’s built-in folder structure to organise our customer’s data. We received data from 37 custodians, often involving multiple sources (including mobile data, Facebook data, and more)—all of which required processing and production. RelativityOne’s built-in folder structure made it easy to organise source data because it allowed our team to create a top-level folder for each custodian with sub-folders for their respective data sources. We then leveraged these custom folder structures to prepare 152 production volumes. RelativityOne’s organisational capabilities proved invaluable throughout, from taking the records from source data to setting up the folder structure in RelativityOne and generating complete production volumes.
Andrew Milauskas, Vice President of eDiscovery, Page One Legal:
With RelativityOne, we have forged highly tailored workflows that empower our boutique law firm customers to automate mundane activities like button-pushing and process monitoring, thus reclaiming valuable time. One such firm utilized our automation workflows to achieve extraordinary efficiencies, saving countless clicks and hundreds of hours spent on meticulously monitoring each stage of a case. As a result, the firm could redirect its focus towards high-priority tasks, such as client meetings and court preparations, enhancing productivity, and enabling unparalleled service delivery.
We look forward to further collaborations and learnings from these in-the-field experts in the years to come! If you’re a member of this niche part of our community, tell us about your favorite RelativityOne experiences on LinkedIn using #BoutiqueRelativityOne.
Graphics for this article were created by Kael Rose.
Torben Rankine is a manager on the law firm sales team at Relativity.
