Relativity Study on AI

Relativity commissioned a study last year on how lawyers are using artificial intelligence. Here are some key points that I found interesting:

1. While 38% of law firm study participants used AI software, significantly more — 50 % — of government employees did.

2. AI software was most often used by legal teams for document review.

3. Two-thirds of study participants have implemented training programs to help employees learn how to use AI.

4. Paralegals actually use AI more often than lawyers.

5. AI is more often used as a way to automate low-level tasks, and with the goal of cutting costs - two times more frequently than as a means to enhance risk compliance or legal analysis.

6. There was more concern about the loss of confidential data, than there was about misleading AI hallucinations.

7. IT professionals tend to be concerned about the loss of confidential data that is input into large language models (LLMs).

8. Law firms were twice as likely to use in-house proprietary models or software provided by vendors as they were to rely on publicly available AI software.

BatchGuru - transform metadata in Relativity

BatchGuru from vdiscovery and Nikolai Pozdniakov's Hashtaglegal, is a set of tools to be used in a Relativity workspace which helps you easily transform metadata in existing fields.

If you need to remove email addresses from email metadata to, from, cc, or bcc fields for the purposes of generating output for a document index or privilege log, you can use the 'Remove Email Address' function which creates a new field with the addresses listed with domains deleted, and the email name aliases left in:

You can set it up simply by creating a batch and specifying source and destination fields:

BatchGuru also facilitates the export of native files. Create a new batch using 'Native Exporter' as the data source, and specify a metadata field to be used to designate the filenames:

. . . the output goes to another module in BatchGuru named, 'Native Exporter - Pick Up':

. . . which then links to a zip file containing the exported native files:

This function has limitations because the zip file which is generated is added to the workspace. Multiple exports of large numbers of native files can increase the size of the workspace considerably.

BatchGuru includes many other tools which will allow fields to be split by specified delimiters; generate 'autopreviews' of the first few lines of emails in document lists; and count the number of recipients listed in a single email message. Check out what's possible with it today!

Relativity and AI - aiR for Review

Relativity's latest innovation is aiR for Review, which uses artificial intelligence to not only help find responsive documents, but also to describe why the document is relevant and cite to the parts of the document that make it relevant.

aiR is accessed in the Relativity mass operations menu.

. . . the litigation team enters a case summary using the same type of language you might use in a memorandum to describe the key players and key terms for a matter. A simple 2 to 5 sentence overview of the case should be provided:

The criteria to define exactly what should be regarded as relevant can be given as a description that you would send to another member of your team, rather than a series of keywords or sample documents.

When an individual document is viewed, the user can check a short summary of why it was found to be relevant, associated with the parts of the document that support this finding:

The process still requires a subject matter expert to not only devise the criteria used by aiR, but also to verify the initial results. A team of reviewers has to validate the findings generated by aiR on a statistical sample of the full document set.

When using aiR, Relativity recommends providing information clearly, but also as briefly as possible. The active voice should be used (so, "Mr. Johnson embezzled the bank's funds.", and not, "The bank's funds were embezzled by Mr. Johnson.") and double negatives should not be used. (Don't say, "Johnson can't hardly wait until the deal becomes final."). It is also necessary to avoid the qualifier, "including but not limited to".