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".

Number of FTC /DOJ HSR Second Requests Per Year

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice's Hart-Scott-Rodino Annual Report for Fiscal Year 2019 is available here. Appendix A to the report lists the number of second requests that each body makes each year. An average of 50 were made between 2010 and 2019, with no significant trend upwards or downwards, and there was an about even split between the two bodies.

The overall number of transactions that result in a second request is relatively low:

The number of transactions (mergers or acquisitions that raise concerns about their impact on competition) reported each year steadily increased over the course of the last decade:

HSR Second Requests Expected to Increase Under Biden

As detailed in a presentation by Driven today, Driven Presents New Trends for Second Request Enforcement in the Biden Administration, the number of Second Requests under the Hart–Scott–Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act is expected to increase in 2021. As discussed in the Tip of the Night for October 19, 2017 , a HSR Second Request may require businesses contemplating a merger to make a quick document production to the Federal Trade Commission so the merger can go forward. Consequently, TAR is often used in these situations to complete document review as quickly as possible. See the Tip of the Night for October 19, 2017.

• Congress is currently contemplating the The Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, S.225, 117th Cong. (Feb. 4, 2021) which will make it easier for the FTC to enforce antitrust laws.

• Last December, Congress increased the budget of the FTC by $20 million, and the budget of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice by $18 million.

• Under the version of the DOJ's Model Timing Agreement, revised in September 2020, the parties may not finalize their transaction until 90 days after they compile with the Second Request, and the Antitrust Division completes its investigation. Previously, the period was 60 days.

• Lina Khan is the new Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. She is well known for criticizing the anticompetitive effects of businesses like Amazon, and is expected to implement a more aggressive anti-monopoly policy under the Biden administration.

• In June 2021, the DOJ filed an action to block the merger of Aon and Willis Tower Watson, two of the country's largest insurance brokers, signaling a start to an aggressive new approach in enforcing antitrust laws.