In another example that the document review platform Relativity continues to gain traction, Kroll Ontrack announced this week it will license the technology from kCura for use in Europe.
Kroll Ontrack will still offer customers its own document review platform in Europe, alongside Relativity, as it has been doing for U.S. customers since 2014.
The company offers fully managed services, and can collect, process, host and even assist with reviewing data. In Europe, it has data centers in London, France and Germany where data can be hosted. This year, the company also built out a document review center in London that can seat up to 100 attorneys, hired on a temporary basis, to review data.
To gain insight on the Kroll Ontrack’s business strategy, Big Law Business spoke to Robert Jones, the company’s managing legal director for the Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Jones explained that in the U.S., eDiscovery has been driven by disclosure obligations that arise in litigation. But in most of Europe, eDiscovery is not necessarily connected to litigation. Rather, it is a process that companies encounter when reviewing large sets of data for an internal investigation, in response to a regulatory inquiry such as an antitrust probe, or for due diligence before a merger, he said.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of the interview.
Big Law Business: By offering Relativity, it appears as though Kroll is moving away from building its own document review platform, and instead is more interested in offering services such as collection, processing, hosting?
Jones: No. Every eDiscovery investigation is quite unique. It’s got different parameters, different deadlines. In our Relativity offering, one of the things we won an award for was the integration of Nearline Capability into Relativity. Historically, clients have always hated paying for hosting large amounts of data that are simply not relevant to their case. What we have developed is an app that means on the fly you can immediately Nearline data to reduce your hosting costs.
Basically it’s giving the user control to immediately remove data from the scope of their review. Those documents are removed from the scope of the searches you’re running. You’re decluttering the active workspace and helping the clients find the relevant data.
It’s something that we’ve developed – it’s proprietary.
Big Law Business: Right, and customers pay a reduced rate for data that’s “hosted on a Nearline basis.” What’s the actual ‘proprietary’ technology behind Nearline?
Jones: I’m afraid I don’t have the answer to that.
Big Law Business: So why Relativity, and not any of the other document review platforms, some of which employ similar if not the same algorithms?
Jones: It’s a great question. Relativity means different things to different people. It’s driven by the fact that it’s a very simple product to use. Particularly things like assisted redactions takes the sting out of redacting documents. It basically identifies the position of terms which are to be redacted — what it does is it transforms a painstaking redaction of individual documents. It’s just another extention of technology assisted review [or TAR].
Big Law Business: Are you seeing more TAR being used in Europe?
Jones: Absolutely yeah. You may have heard in Europe there was a big decision in Ireland this year. That was our milestone ruling. I think the figure was 750,000 documents were reviewed with technology assisted review, and that was given approval by the court. Lawyers are really getting the benefit of not just predictive coding, but also email analytics and tools that take you right to the heart of communications between people.
Big Law Business: There seems to be an ever-increasing amount of data. At the same time, there are more and more tools to review data quickly. Which is developing faster, and how do you see this market growing?
Jones: I think volumes of data are going to continue to grow. It’s no longer just about email. It’s about things like Bloomberg Data, mobile phone messaging like WhatsApp. We, the industry, will be looking very much at how we get to grips with things like internet chat logs, skype logs, video messaging. Ultimately, we’re a cost conscious society and I think that that is going to drive companies — or, companies will drive their lawyers and eDiscovery providers to offer the most robust and effective solutions to cut through that cost. I would predict more surgical approaches to examining data as opposed to widescale linear review of potentially non-relevant data.
Big Law Business: What is driving Kroll Ontrack’s plans by introducing Relativity in Europe?
Jones: We’ve got big ambitions to expand internationally. We’re pretty well established over here in Europe.
It’s been successful in the U.S. since 2014 and Relativity as a mobile solution takes us to the next level in our plans for global expansion.
We have five data processing centers in the U.S., U.K., Japan, Germany and France and offer a fully managed service. If you tell us that you’ve got a need to carry out an internal investigation in Germany, we can collect the data, take it to a secure facility and carry out the de-duping, extract data, extract metadata and upload that data into your choice of review platform. Basically our data processing centers are places we can carry out those processes and host all of the data. There’s always been a hesitancy to export large quantities of data outside the country, and having centers is just helping us to address data privacy laws in those countries.
For about the last year, we basically built a document review center here in London. We started with seats for 50 attorneys and since found that the demand was such that we doubled. Today, it holds just under 100 contract attorneys that we can hire at very short notice with all sorts of different language capabilities.
We are building a document review center in Germany. I think you should watch out for announcements related to China. That’s definitely a key growth area for us. We are looking at Shanghai. Basically, at the moment, we’re sort of looking at individual client requirements and the behind the firewall solutions — taking it to the clients.
The one thing I would say is that eDiscovery really is a global phenomenon now.