Driving Cost Efficiency Within Relativity: Using Legal Tech for Smarter Ops

Workflows, resource allocation, technology, and applications all improve operational efficiency. When you leverage these resources, you increase profitability, create client satisfaction, and establish a thriving practice. Relativity enables you to manage Matters efficiently, improve productivity, and achieve cost savings. CaseFlow helps enhance this legal technology without compromising quality or client service.

Efficiency in Legal Tech Operation Goals

Setting goals for legal operations is essential to have a clear path for data management success. You need a framework for measurable and achievable goals because structure makes your data management actionable. Purposeful management clarifies complex questions that arise in data administration, improves efficiency, and helps you prioritize tasks.

Five critical goal areas are as follows.

1. Documentation and Legal Document Management

Legal documentation is the storage, retrieval, and sharing of Matters. Key components of legal documentation and document management are document creation, Matter retrieval, and data indexing, storage, and sharing. Efficiency goals include timeliness, accurate data volume management, high-quality data, proper accessibility, and data security.

2. Compliance

Data and Matter management should comply with local, state, and federal laws and guidelines regarding security, privacy, and client confidentiality. Adherence to regulations like HIPAA improves your legal compliance and helps you avoid lawsuits. Compliance frameworks are data security, accessibility, and client confidentiality. Regular audits and updates adapt compliance to changing regulations and emerging security threats.

3. Financial and Budget Management

Budgets help you maintain and grow your practice. Financial management involves budgeting and spending oversight, as practices must track internal and external legal expenses. Cost allocation is essential, with accountability for resources. Collecting and analyzing data is critical for resource allocation. In your practice, you must define key performance indicators, such as cost savings and budget variance, for efficiency.

4. Strategic Planning

Planning involves data analysis and interpretation, operational review, aligning operational improvements, and performance measurement. In strategic planning, you use analytical skills to sift through large volumes of data for pertinent information. Assessing your current operational practices is essential for identifying inefficiencies. After analysis and operational review, you need to ensure that these improvements fit with your broader strategic goals. Measuring your key performance indicators will help you see if your planning is successful.

5. Legal Tech Solutions Implementation

Key metrics for legal tech solutions are time saved, cost reduction, and improved work quality. User adoption is critical for implementing tech solutions, and practice team members should quickly get up to speed and regularly use the new technology to improve efficiency. Regular review helps decide strategies for sustained usefulness.

Relativity Efficiency for Legal Operations

Efficiency in Staging

Staging in Relativity is used to manage data before it is passed to subsequent processes. Here, you clean up data and create formats for analyzing and reporting from raw data. This process improves efficiency by saving storage space and money via carefully curated Matters.

Review Efficiency

In the Review stage, you create efficiency by tracking Matter progress and managing reviews all in one place. You can use reusable templates for common workflows, which saves you time and effort. In Review, permissions are simplified, keeping stakeholders in the loop. Queues are quickly updated to add documents, and stakeholders can easily and efficiently review Matters. Data is secure because only authorized stakeholders can access it. With secure, permission-based review, compliance with legal standards is effective.

aiR for Review

aiR for Review is Relativity’s generative AI solution. Its purpose is to streamline the document review process. It sifts through Matters to identify relevant and key documents and uses large language models to review them. Its efficiency comes from relevance review and document identification. aiR is fast, analyzing up to 3 million documents per day, averaging 10,000 to 13,000 documents per hour.

Repository Efficiency

The Repository workspace enables you to focus on your data. You use it to store documents and code for future use. Compiling documents for moving to a Matter workspace is a critical stage in the data lifecycle. The tools that you can use for efficiency in this stage include:

• Structured Analytics, Including Name Normalization. Name normalization is the use of standard and well-defined names for data and Matters. You will have a clear definition of Matter categories so you can easily move them to the correct next stages.
• Document Metadata Searches. Document metadata are tags for documents that categorize Matters. For example, a Matter tagged as “invoice” will be easy to search for if you are looking for invoices in your data management system.
• Cluster Visualization and Conceptual Analytics Tools. Cluster visualization shows your data as an interactive map. This enables you to see an overview of Matters and related data clusters.
• dtSearch. This is an advanced search system featuring proximity searches, stemming searches that start from root words, and fuzzy searches across field types. It supports Boolean operators, custom noise word lists, and keyword searches. Full-text search helps you find data quickly by subject.
• Imaging and Optical Character Recognition. The latter translates text images, such as scanned documents, into text. Relativity can help you quickly move paper documents into your data management system, saving you time and effort.

Cold Storage Efficiency

Cold Storage adds data management efficiency by storing information that you no longer need. Matters can be brought online as necessary. This helps you save storage space and money that you would otherwise spend on subscriptions for additional space. Matters that are no longer current, administrative reports, and clients who are no longer active with your practice are examples of Cold Storage data.

How CaseFlow Helps Legal Operations Efficiency

Managing stages in Relativity is efficient, but CaseFlow offers other solutions to enhance the process. It manages Matters management with constant monitoring, configuration, and scheduling. Here’s how, in each stage:

• Staging. In Staging, inefficiency is too easy when managing large data volumes. Information duplication, data loss due to mistaken deduplication efforts, and compromised security lead to ineffective Matter management. Fortunately, CaseFlow automatically monitors Matters for duplicates and data fragments and assigns data volumes to effectively save storage space by staging unique, valid Matters.
• Review. With CaseFlow, you manage Matters in the Review stage with a clear dashboard interface. Updating queues is easy when you can view your data in one place with an uncluttered interface. Security and Matters management is effective when all stakeholders can obtain information with permission-based access.
• Repository. In CaseFlow, your Matter data is effectively managed with structured analytics, including name normalization, metadata, full-text dtSearch, and cluster visualization. By using well-defined names for Matters, tagged metadata, and conceptual analytical tools, you can easily find your information.
• Cold Storage. CaseFlow helps you store Matters and other information that you no longer require. The management system brings data online when you need Matters and other information. Effective data storage needed for compliance and administration means more storage for current data and lower storage subscription costs.

Final Note

Relativity is effective at managing Matters and other data in the Staging, Review, Repository, and Cold Storage stages. Its functions help manage the initial input of information, stakeholder Matter review, structured analytics, and administrative functions. aiR usage of large language models means you can effectively find and review Matters and other information. With CaseFlow, you can achieve greater efficiency through the automatic search and management of data duplicates and fragments. Also, its clear dashboard interface means information is uncluttered, and its metadata and name normalization help with searching Matters and other data. For cold storage management, CaseFlow brings Matters and data online when needed.

All these functions add up to saved time, effective human resource allocation, lower costs, proper security, and legal compliance.

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.