eDiscovery and
Contract Review
Claire Williams | July 15, 2019
Often times, we see contract review and eDiscovery discussed and evaluated on opposite ends of the legal review spectrum. While there are significant differences between the two, innovative firms have already found a very profitable intersection point. In this post, we’ll go into detail on how tackling your first contract review project is easier than you might think. But before that, let’s recap why contract review and eDiscovery have traditionally been separate.
The foundation of eDiscovery is about classifying information at the document level. This process tends to be relatively quick, with massive amounts of documents taking several minutes to process. You’re looking for:
- ‘Hot topics’ or ‘smoking guns’
- Generally different projects and opportunities
- End result is producing responsive documents and redact privileged portions
Contract review involves more in-depth analysis of complex documents. While the document count is typically lower, the time spent reviewing an individual document can take several hours.
- Every document matters. Deep understanding of things like clauses, sentences, words, dates, etc.
- Looking for similar or the same things across the documents and similar projects
- End result is structured data across all documents
Now that we’ve got that covered, let’s dive into why that line in the sand is disappearing.
Your firm undoubtedly has tools and processes already around “data wrangling”; getting documents from a bunch of different repositories into nicely consolidated and processed into a central data base ready for review. However, many don’t realize that these document review problems agnostic to whether we are talking about documents that are contracts or evidence in a litigation matter.
So what’s this lucrative intersection point we mentioned earlier? Relativity. If your firm is using Relativity for eDiscovery today, you can start using it for contract review projects tomorrow (literally). Relativity’s incredible eDiscovery come-up story over the past few decades is no secret. Fast forward to today, it has grown into so much more than just eDiscovery; it’s the leading document (key word) review platform.
And that’s exactly why we built Heretik as a lightweight, deployable application on top of Realtivity. Our solution is the perfect extension and interface for tackling all kinds of corporate transaction projects, all within the same familiar review software your team knows and loves.
We’re obviously a little bias, so we reached out to long-time Relativity client Complete Discovery Source (CDS) who just successfully rolled out their new contract review services. Their work with law firms, corporations and governments require both eDiscovery and contract review services.
Robert Boas, CDS’ Director of Business Development, understands that the best results come from that collaboration. “There is truly no substitute for experience. Together, CDS takes its experience with eDiscovery and document review and combines it with the advance technology and features of Heretik’s contract analysis software. This bridges the gap between contract analysis and eDiscovery, creating the most efficient and effective contract review workflow in the market.”
eDiscovery and contract review don’t have to be separate entities. While there is a difference in how and what they can be used for, the end result is having aligned and clean data. Heretik’s goal is to empower professionals at their trade by giving them the tools they need to be successful with structured data.
Want to see more? Click below to set up a demo to see how Heretik and Relativity work together to bring you the most complete contract review solution.
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CLAIRE WILLIAMS
Claire is a Marketing Coordinator at Heretik. She recently graduated from Miami University Ohio with a double major in Journalism and Mandarin Chinese. Prior to Heretik, Claire worked at Amdur Productions and for Miami University College of Arts and Science.
