How Relativity Transforms Legal Data Into Actionable Insights

Your Relativity instance is probably costing more than it should. The platform remains the industry standard for good reason, but someone at your practice needs to constantly manage where your legal data lives, and that's harder than it sounds.

Staging overages pile up when cleanup doesn't happen fast enough. Review workspaces sit idle for months, still billing at expensive rates. Conversion windows to Repository mode come and go unnoticed. The pattern repeats across dozens or hundreds of Matters, each with different retention agreements, each requiring someone to notice when it's time to move them.

Here's the uncomfortable question: Is anyone actually managing your data lifecycle, or is your team just reacting when something breaks?

Read on to learn how Relativity transforms legal data into actionable insights.

Why Smart Firms Are Still Doing This Manually

Lit-support teams know what needs to happen: Run activity reports, check client agreements, coordinate with project managers, and move cases from active Review to Repository mode or Cold Storage or archive them entirely. It’s a relentless process!

High volumes of Matters flow through a Relativity instance constantly. Data volumes, data types, and cases grow rapidly. Each client has different retention rules. Some want immediate archiving post-settlement. Others need data accessible for years. Managing these timelines across concurrent Matters, each at a different lifecycle stage, becomes its own full-time job.

When "best practices" meet reality, it looks like this: spreadsheets tracking Matter status, recurring calendar reminders to check inactivity, coordination emails with stakeholders before any move, and manual report generation to justify decisions. The knowledge exists but the execution capacity doesn't scale.

Meanwhile, you’re realizing that you're paying costly Review workspace rates for Matters that haven't seen activity in months. Many early adopters of RelativityOne have run out of Staging space entirely and now pay large overage fees. As a best practice, Staging needs continuous cleanup and maintenance below contractual limits, but no one wants to do that systematically.

The Repository Advantage That Most Firms Underuse

Early Case Assessment represents where efficiency actually starts. In e-discovery, culling narrows down large datasets to the most relevant information for review. ECA is that crucial initial evaluation; it determines relevance and potential case impact before committing resources.

Repository workspaces are specifically designed for this work. Start processing and strategically filtering data in a Repository workspace, and you’ll see that you’ll push only a select set of documents to separate Review workspaces. This approach shines when applied to the same dataset across multiple Matters that require separate reviews, enabling dedicated teams to focus on specific areas.

The cost equation also changes immediately. Culling before Review means lower overall data subscription utilization. You're not paying premium rates for documents that won't survive the filter. Strategic filtering happens before Review, not after you've already paid for it.

Here's what most firms miss: Existing Review workspaces can be converted to Repository workspaces to save on costs when large volumes of data are no longer being actively reviewed. To be charged at the Repository rate for the current month, you need to install the Repository application in a new workspace within twenty-four hours of creating it. That window is crucial, and it's easy to miss when no one's systematically tracking workspace activity.

Repository preserves coding decisions and case work product at a lower rate. Review handles active work at the rate that makes sense for that level of activity.

What an Automated Legal Data Lifecycle Actually Looks Like

CaseFlow continuously monitors the entire Relativity instance. That's the difference between checking and knowing. Instead of running periodic reports to see what's changed, the system monitors every workspace in real time, tracking activity patterns.

The configurations match your actual client agreements, not generic rules that someone guessed at. CaseFlow can be configured at the instance and client/Matter levels. This flexibility enables the system to adapt to different retention agreements, such as:

• Immediate archiving clients
• Long-hold clients
• Regulatory compliance clients with specific timelines

Finally Seeing What's Actually Happening

Most firms can't quickly and confidently answer, "Which Matters are inactive?" They certainly can’t do it without running reports, checking recent activity logs, and coordinating with project managers who might know about upcoming work.

CaseFlow monitors the entire Relativity instance to provide visibility and automatically move Matters to appropriate stages in the data lifecycle. Dynamic activity definitions adapt to your practice. Perhaps “activity” means document coding, production requests, user logins, or ARM archive access. The system tracks what matters to you, then reports based on that reality.

This happens without the manual report-running ritual. The visibility that you need to make decisions is available continuously, not just when someone has time to generate it. Turning guesswork into data that you can act on changes what's possible at scale.

Easy Archiving That Doesn't Require Heroics

The current reality of archiving a Relativity Matter is this: Administrators first run reports to determine if a Matter can be archived. Before archiving, the action should be communicated to the client and other team members to ensure that it won't impact the case or client agreements. They then check if it's ready, coordinate with stakeholders, and hope nothing breaks during the process.

CaseFlow automatically identifies inactive Relativity Matters based on individual configurations that match the data-retention rules for each client and Matter. The identification occurs systematically across all workspaces, not just the ones that someone remembers to check.

Before archiving, CaseFlow notifies all stakeholders to prevent a case from being inadvertently taken offline. The notification is sent to everyone who needs to know, including project managers, client contacts, and review teams. It's the communication step that manual processes often rush or skip entirely.

Stakeholders can stop the auto-archive action with a click in the notification that will "reset the timer," because sometimes, cases wake back up. The reset button acknowledges that reality without requiring administrator intervention every time that plans change!

Scheduling Without the Spreadsheet

CaseFlow's Actions On-Demand enables administrators to schedule all different data lifecycle actions for single or multiple Matters from a single interface. Moving multiple Matters through lifecycle stages from one place eliminates the coordination tax that makes manual management so time consuming.

Repository mode, Cold Storage, and archiving are all scheduled when it makes sense for each Matter: different dates and different Matters but the same interface. The scheduling accommodates the reality that Matters don't move through lifecycle stages in lockstep. They each have their own timeline based on client needs, case status, and retention requirements.

In many cases, lifecycle actions must be done on several Matters on different dates. The single interface removes the cognitive load of tracking those dates across systems and calendars. Getting back administrative time for actual strategic work becomes possible when the scheduling infrastructure matches the complexity of what you're managing.

What All This Actually Saves

Lower storage costs from timely workspace conversions compound monthly. Every Review workspace is converted to Repository at the right time, every inactive case is moved to Cold Storage when it makes sense, and those rate differences add up across your portfolio. Workspaces transitioned to Cold Storage are billed at their original data tier rate until the start of the following calendar month, at which point, billing automatically switches to the Cold Storage rate. Timing those transitions strategically maximizes the savings.

Reduced subscription utilization through smarter data flow means you're only paying for active data at active rates. Repository workspaces store culled datasets, Review workspaces contain only what needs active attention, and Cold Storage holds truly inactive cases. All data lives where it should be based on its lifecycle stage.

Spending less time on administrative coordination frees capacity for work that matters. Lit-support teams running activity reports, reviewing client agreements, and coordinating moves can redirect that effort toward strategic initiatives instead of maintenance tasks.

More capacity to take on Matters without scaling headcount changes what's operationally possible. The bottleneck in manual data lifecycle management often limits the number of concurrent Matters that a firm can effectively handle. Removing it expands capacity without proportional headcount increases.

The Competitive Angle That Nobody Mentions

Firms that manage legal data lifecycles well can price more competitively. When your operational costs are lower because storage is optimized and administrative overhead is reduced, that flexibility shows up in pricing conversations. You're not padding estimates to cover inefficiencies.

Faster turnarounds happen when you're not bottlenecked by manual processes. Cases move through stages efficiently, data gets where it needs to be when it needs to be there, and delays caused by coordination overhead disappear.

Client transparency becomes possible when you actually know your Matter status. Real-time visibility into what's active, what's in Repository, and what's archived will answer client questions immediately instead of requiring research to respond!

The competitive advantage isn't obvious until you see firms operating at different levels of data lifecycle maturity. One firm is constantly reacting to storage issues, running reports to determine what can be moved, and coordinating emergency cleanup when overages occur. Another firm has systematic processes that handle this automatically, freeing their team to focus on case strategy and client service.

The difference compounds over time—not only in cost savings but also in capacity, responsiveness, and the ability to scale operations without drowning in administrative overhead.

Relativity transforms legal data into actionable insights. The platform provides the storage types, flexibility, and power to handle complex e-discovery workflows. What separates firms that extract maximum value from those that don't is the ability to manage data lifecycles systematically instead of reactively, and that requires automation that scales with the practice.

Stop letting inefficient processes drain your firm's profitability. Every hour spent on manual case management and disorganized workflows is an hour that could be spent generating revenue. Your clients deserve better, and so does your bottom line. CaseFlow delivers streamlined case management, automated workflows, and real-time insights that free your team to focus on what matters most: practicing law profitably. Ready to drive real efficiency and savings? Discover how CaseFlow can transform your firm's operations.