The companies hope to show companies how valuable TAR can be to their workflows.
Ian Lopez, Legaltech News
Technology-assisted review (TAR) is, in many ways, ‘the talk of the town,’ though for many companies it hasn’t been more than just talk. In an effort to demonstrate the value of analytics within the e-discovery workflow, legal software solution provider Ipro Tech has announced that it will be renewing and expanding upon its existing partnership with analytics provider Content Analyst.
With the expanded agreement, Ipro can utilize Content Analyst technology in its products. Ipro will also continue in its licensing of Content Analyst’s CAAT analytics engine, which organizes documents around content, regardless of whether the same words are used in descriptions of concepts or topics. Ipro uses this engine to serve analytical needs like near duplication, clustering, email threading, conceptual search and categorization for TAR.
“With data collection sizes and content types growing so dramatically, Ipro believes analytics is a key element to delivering a simple, affordable and automated e-discovery workflow,” Kim Taylor, president and CEO of Ipro, told Legaltech News. “By expanding our relationship with Content Analyst, we’ll provide even greater value to our customers. For Content Analyst, more users will have the opportunity to use their analytics engine, CAAT, via Ipro products in different ways and on more types of cases.”
Taylor discussed how this partnership allows clients to experience the benefits of TAR. He said that, historically, both analytics and TAR were priced “on a per gigabyte basis,” and given the once “onerous cost” of analytics in the discovery process, customers “historically missed out” on benefits that analytics can have in their practices.
“We feel strongly that customers shouldn’t be held hostage to gigabyte pricing of analytics,” Taylor said. “Because the costs of analytics are included with Ipro, attorneys no longer have to make decisions of whether they can afford the luxury of TAR or even analytics. By offering this choice, you’ll see analytics used more often and more successfully to help bring down costs and win cases.”
The relationship between Ipro and Content Analyst goes back to the days when the companies collaborated on the integration of CAAT into Eclipse, Ipro’s web-based review platform. Company officials said in a statement that, over the years the two have worked together, the tech integration as well as the partnership behind it helped Ipro “create a distinctive workflow and model that helps its customers lower their eDiscovery costs and reduce the time spent on litigation reviews.”
“Ipro and Content Analyst have had a long relationship working together to bring innovative eDiscovery solutions to the market. Kurt Michel, president and CEO of Content Analyst said in a statement. “Their approach to technology assisted review has made a big impact, and we’re delighted our industry-leading CAAT engine will continue to be an important part of their future development plans.”
Michel told LTN that Content Analyst expanded its relationship with Ipro because of the companies’ “mutual understanding that analytics provides value to the entire e-discovery process, and not just review.”
“Litigation professionals … have come to expect a more intelligent experience with their e-discovery software applications,” Michel said. “Our CAAT advanced analytics engine enables consumer-like intelligence to power highly efficient-discovery capabilities such as conceptual search, near deduplication, dynamic clustering, email threading and predictive coding. Ultimately, corporate counsel and litigation support teams benefit by saving millions in linear review while simultaneously presenting the most relevant information for any legal matter.”
Given the agreement between the companies, Eclipse’s future releases and Ipro’s Automated Digital Discovery (ADD) “will take full advantage of CAAT’s advanced analytics capabilities.”
“We’ve seen firsthand what the addition of CAAT analytics can do to improve efficiencies and workflow,” Taylor said. “It is our goal to continue to look for ways to improve the e-discovery process. CAAT has become an industry standard and we have a proven track record with implementing their technology, so it only makes sense to apply it to the rest of the eDiscovery workflow.”
It’s widely known that while TAR can benefit legal professionals across the industry, there is a lasting reluctance to implement. As Gareth Evans, co-chair of Gibson Dunn’s Electronic Discovery and Information Governance Practice Group, wrote in LTN: “To a large extent, this lack of adoption is due to attorneys’ ignorance of TAR. But even those who may want to use TAR can be quickly deterred by a number of factors.”
Despite the widespread “ignorance” of TAR among legal professionals, some pros are attempting to provide some guidance.
In the Electronic Discovery Institute’s “The EDI Judge’s Guide to Discovery” – a guide on contemporary e-discovery concepts that will be provided to district and magistrate judges across the country – contains chapters that attempt to make TAR more digestible for those not very versed in e-discovery. Shannon Capone Kirk, e-discovery counsel at Ropes & Gray and co-author of chapters on technology assisted review (TAR) and forensics, told LTN last month that the goal of her contribution to the book was to “demystify [TAR], and understand that it’s actually a more dissectible process.”
“Not that we’re Rembrandt, but it’s like asking a master painter to explain how to paint a landscape,” Kirk said. “That’s the part I found really difficult: We live this stuff every single day. This is all we do, so we know all the nuances of technology assisted review and statistics, and how the algorithms are all changing.”
Taylor said that utilizing TAR “is an educational process.”
Ipro will be at Legaltech New York to demonstrate its analytics workflow. The event takes place at the New York Hilton in Midtown from Feb. 2-4.