The Challenge
A few years ago we were working with a client who was using our ClarVergence® review and production platform on a review project with fairly tight deadlines. In this particular case they opted to concept cluster the data in order to create review sets with conceptually similar documents. Over the last few years clustering data for review set organization and assignment has become very popular, and has helped accelerate document review rates by providing targeted groupings of documents based on the concepts they contain. One consideration, however, is that multiple documents belonging to the same family (e.g. emails and attachments) may contain very different concepts which, when clustered, can put them into very different document groupings.
Depending upon the production requirements, this may be fine, or may create an issue.In this particular case the production requirements dictated that email attachments deemed responsive needed to be produced with their parent emails whether or not the parent email was coded responsive. This isn’t a unique requirement, but was one that the review team had not been made aware of when they began review. Had they known it, workflow and coding requirements would have put in place for easy accommodation.
While pulling non-responsive parent emails in with their responsive siblings attachments was not an impossible request, it did require some extra steps based on the way the client coded documents. They needed to build queries to return responsive documents and any non-responsive parents in order to have what they needed for their productions. No big deal, but not ideal.
The ClarVergence review and production platform is a powerful and flexible platform that allows clients with production security rights to perform productions directly through the review interface. At that time, however, there wasn’t a quick and easy way for this client to pull their production together given their review workflow and guidelines imposed for document coding.
As our client team held discussions with the client on how best to approach the assembly of their production, one of the Client’s project team members said, “ Wouldn’t it be great if there was a button on the interface that automatically pulled in the parent documents for all responsive attachments?” We all agreed and in this case… that’s exactly what we did.
The Solution
Each TCDI Project Team has a developer assigned who works closely with the Project Manager as a resource to support project-specific issues or custom requests. Not all custom requests can be implemented during the course of a project, but these developers are there to make that happen if they can.
In this case the Project Manager met with the Developer assigned to the project and reviewed the issue and the request. It was clear that adding this capability would significantly ease the process by which the client performed their document productions.
By the time the client logged into the system the next morning, there it was. A new button labeled “Return Parent” that would include the parent email with the responsive attachments. Needless to say, our client was thrilled when they saw the “new button.” They never expected that we would listen and respond to their need so quickly.
From our standpoint we were pleased to have delivered on a client need so quickly. However, we did not take the task lightly. Depending upon the complexity of a new feature, it can take months to get implemented.
Specifications have to written and quality control protocols have to be developed and followed to ensure there is no negative impact on the rest of the product. In this case, however, we were in luck.
The code needing to be written to deliver this feature was simple and did not interact or impact any other code within the application. Therefore, quality control and testing was uncomplicated, allowing such a fast turnaround.
Summary
This story of responsiveness, and others like it, happens for two reasons. First, we offer the tremendous benefit of owning the software applications our clients use. It’s our development teams that write and maintain the code for these products so the timing of changes and enhancements is in our control. Second, we have a culture that thrives on actively seeking and delivering solutions that best meet our clients’ needs. We’ve spent the last 20 years meeting the challenges of this fast moving litigation technology market. That’s how we partner.