In today's legal industry, success isn't just measured by cases won but by how effectively a firm operates. Streamlining processes and embracing technology are essential for maintaining a competitive edge. While Relativity is a powerful tool for e-discovery and document review, managing the data lifecycle within it presents significant challenges to operational efficiency. Manual management is often difficult, time consuming, and costly.
Understanding the different storage states in Relativity is crucial for managing costs effectively. Each state serves a specific purpose in the data lifecycle.
Staging
Staging is where data is prepared for processing and importing into RelativityOne. It also serves as a temporary holding area for ARM archives or raw data before being processed. While Staging helps manage your subscription by only adding data when ready, there's a catch: Billing is calculated based on your highest consumption peak during the month. Many early adopters have run out of space and are now paying large overage fees. Staging requires continuous cleanup and maintenance to remain within contractual limits.
Repository
The Repository Workspace is designed for storing documents and coding decisions for future use, which is particularly useful for early case assessment workflows. By processing and strategically filtering data here, you can push only select data to separate Review workspaces. This is beneficial when dealing with the same data across multiple Matters that need separate reviews. It can reduce overall data subscription costs by culling data before pushing it to review.
Review
The Review Workspace is where the active work happens: reviewing, coding, and producing documents for ongoing Matters. This is the most expensive tier, which makes sense when cases are active. However, when a workspace isn't being actively reviewed, it needs to be moved to the appropriate storage state to avoid unnecessary costs.
Cold Storage
Cold Storage is a cost-effective solution for inactive cases that need to be stored for the long term. Workspaces here can be brought back online quickly when needed and can even be archived directly without first moving back to an active state.
The problem is that manually moving Matters through these stages is time consuming, especially when you're managing a high volume of clients and cases across a Relativity instance. Litigation support teams must run activity reports, review client agreements, and coordinate moving cases from active to Repository mode, Cold Storage, or archive status. It's essentially a full-time job.
1. Eliminate Time-Consuming Manual Actions
Moving Matters to Repository mode, Cold Storage, or archiving them is tedious. When you're managing multiple Matters with different timelines and client agreements, manual effort quickly multiplies. Each action requires checking activity reports, verifying retention schedules, and executing the moves individually.
Automation changes this. Solutions like CaseFlow continuously monitor your entire Relativity instance and automatically execute all administrative actions based on your configurations. You can set rules at the instance level for general policies and customize them at the client or Matter level to adapt to different retention agreements.
Even better, administrators can use Actions On-Demand to schedule lifecycle actions for single or multiple Matters from a single interface. Do you need to move five Matters to cold storage next week? Schedule them all at once instead of handling each one on different dates.
2. Gain Visibility and Accuracy in Data Tiering
Here's a common scenario: Some of your Matters are inactive and could be moved to save costs, but you’re not sure which ones. With Relativity data volumes and case numbers growing rapidly, running activity reports across numerous Matters, each with different client agreements and activity thresholds, becomes genuinely difficult.
Automation provides visibility into your entire Relativity instance in a single view. By using dynamic configurations to define what counts as "activity" for each Matter, you can accurately identify inactive ones without manually running reports for each. This visibility helps law firms make informed decisions about data tiering and ensures that Matters are in the most cost-effective storage state at all times.
The accuracy piece is also crucial. When you're relying on manual checks, it's easy to miss a Matter that should have been moved weeks ago, or worse, move one that still has occasional activity. Automated monitoring catches these situations consistently.
3. Safeguard the Archiving Process
Archiving requires numerous steps that are easy to get wrong. First, you must run reports to determine whether a Matter can be archived. Then you need to communicate with clients and team members to ensure that archiving won't impact the case or violate client agreements. If you miss a step, you could take a case offline at exactly the wrong moment.
Automation handles this process more safely. Systems like CaseFlow automatically identify inactive Relativity Matters based on preset data-retention rules configured for each client or Matter. Before archiving anything, the system notifies all stakeholders, giving them a chance to review the decision.
The safety net here is crucial: Stakeholders can stop the auto-archive action with a single click in the notification, which resets the timer. This prevents cases from being inadvertently taken offline while still advancing the archiving process for truly inactive Matters. It's the best of both worlds, as automation handles the heavy lifting while humans maintain control over critical decisions.
4. Achieve Significant Cost Savings Through Operational Efficiency
Failing to manage the data lifecycle properly leads to two expensive problems: large overage fees in Staging and paying active review rates for inactive data. These costs add up quickly across dozens or even hundreds of Matters.
By automatically moving data to the correct storage state, law firms realize significant savings in several ways:
The predictability is just as important as the savings themselves. When clear rules automate lifecycle management, finance teams can forecast storage costs more accurately, avoiding surprises from overage fees or unexpectedly high bills.
Manually managing the Relativity data lifecycle drains time and resources that could be better spent on billable work and client service. The combination of multiple storage states, high case volumes, and varied client agreements creates a management challenge that's difficult to handle manually.
Leveraging automation through solutions like CaseFlow solves these operational efficiency problems by providing complete visibility across your instance, automating time-consuming tasks, safeguarding the archiving process with stakeholder notifications, and delivering significant cost savings through proper data tiering. In the legal industry, where operational efficiency is essential to maintaining a competitive edge, automation is no longer optional. It's how modern law firms work smarter.
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.