As an eDiscovery practitioner, former leader of a global law firms eDiscovery program and an eDiscovery software Chief Innovation officer... I have never been more excited about a piece of technology than I am about Streams.
Legal practitioners have never faced a more complex and convoluted data universe, and legacy legal technology alone simply does not cut it. A potential custodian or person of interest might create potentially discoverable Electronically stored information (ESI) communication using SMS, email, social media platforms, collaboration tools, smart stuff, short format messaging and even an ephemeral messaging application all before getting out of bed in a morning. To figure out the key facts of a matter, legal teams need the right tools to be nimble enough to follow these threads of communication.
Newer methods of communication that have swept across the business realms like a digital tsunami have more in common with personal applications than traditional business communication. Many newer forms of communication are shorter in format, incorporate multiple data types and frequently contain a visual component. What does this mean for a legal professional?
The old way of approaching digital evidence in eDiscovery simply may not work effectively when facing a sea of memes, gifs and emojis. Every step of the information governance and eDiscovery lifecycle should incorporate emerging ESI sources today.
As eDiscovery’s unrivaled leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Visualization, Reveal data decided to we MUST fix that!
There Must Be A Better Way
Until now, the legal industry was stuck with tools and workflows designed for documents and email, that was incapable of effectively connecting the dots between emerging and legacy data types and making sense of the data tsunami that is modern Electronic Discovery (eDiscovery). eDiscovery’s unrivaled leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Visualization, Reveal data decided we MUST fix that!
Over the last year, the Reveal team that revolutionized eDiscovery with the game-changing Cluster wheel has been working tirelessly to create Streams. This revolutionary tool deciphers massive amounts of communication data woven across multiple platforms, formats, and times All on a single, fully interactive visual dashboard. Powerful stuff: all the streams of communication in a single spot, where you can understand concepts discussed, key people involved, timing and more.
CEO of Reveal Wendell Jisa noted: “The Cluster Wheel revolutionized how legal professionals could connect and uncover key evidence from email and document data sets. Streams is the next chapter in rich visualization designed specifically for alternative data that helps uncover answers faster and more effectively than any other eDiscovery platform.”
As an eDiscovery practitioner, former leader of a global law firms eDiscovery program and an eDiscovery software Chief Innovation officer... I have never been more excited about a piece of technology than I am about Streams, read on to learn why!
What Is Streams?
After developing eDiscovery’s most believed data visualization tool globally with the Cluster Wheel, Reveal is raising the bar once again with Streams. The engineering team calls it a “macro-visualization engine maps massive amounts of data from traditional and alternative data sources to immediately uncover patterns saving time and resources, while exponentially amplifying insights.”
In plain English this means that with one single visualization you can gain insights from every type of data in your data set form email and text to social media, collaboration tools and even dare I say, TikTok!
Unlike anything else available on the market, Streams’ offers legal teams a seamless visual interface across all today the varied ways we communicate that dramatically accelerates time to insight. At a glance, service providers, law firms or in-house legal teams can see the frequency of key topics across data sources, the prevalence of communication across slack channels or a myriad of data sources, key communicators and more.
Streams is designed to adapt as communication sources evolve, with the ability to incorporate any new communication source quickly and seamlessly. The following is just a sample of the vast array of communication sources Streams supports:
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
- Zoom
- Social Media platforms (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok)
- Text messaging
- Instant messaging
- Documents of all forms (Word, DocuSign, Pages, etc.)
Streams is designed specifically for today’s mass proliferation of digital communication sources like collaboration tools, short format and ephemeral messaging, social media, along with legacy methods like email. When Streams is used in concert with the full suite of Reveal AI-powered tools like the Cluster Wheel, Communication Map and AI Model Library, the results are unmatched in the industry.
Finally, there is a MODERN solution to MODERN communication and discovery challenges.
Shifting eDiscovery Tides
Over the past five years, accelerated most recently by the pandemic, the way we live, work, and communicate fundamentally changed. From the way we shop to the way we work (and everything in between), our new digital lives have created an explosion in data variety and volume. As I can attest from first-hand experience, emerging data types like slack, Teams, WhatsApp and more have quickly gone from outliers as an ESI data source in eDiscovery to mainstream, and legacy tech is struggling.
The digital communication transformation has made traditional eDiscovery technologies obsolete and created a new opportunity to rethink and rebuild eDiscovery. The eDiscovery software and workflows currently available are not designed to support the variety of data formats, the wealth of new metadata fields and the less document centric structure of modern communication platforms. This leads to painfully slow document review, and an eDiscovery process that is not equipped to quickly analyze and extract insights from increasingly voluminous and varied data sets.
Much in the way that when the federal rules of civil procedure (FRCP) fundamentally changed discovery by adding ESI and appending an E, this latest shift is pointed to fundamentally reshape data collection, data analytics and all aspects of modern eDiscovery projects. The legal team’s task of quickly uncovering relevant data is challenging when using legacy eDiscovery solutions only optimized for a document-based approach to eDiscovery. The best approach married best of breed document centric solutions with modern ESI optimized ones.
Streams is a powerful visual tool helps legal professionals access insights fast, without being a data scientist themselves. The intuitive functionality is iPhone easy, while still incredibly powerful for legal teams looking to understand complex data sets.
How Does Streams Work?
Upon ingestion of data from today’s most widely used communications platforms, (Email, SMS, Slack, Teams, etc.) Streams allows users to immediately layer insights into review, narrow or expand eDiscovery and find actionable insights in minutes rather than weeks. Streams follows the type and frequency of a conversation throughout its multi-channel journey to uncover, organize and emphasize patterns faster and more accurately than any other visualization tool available today.
Streams is designed to adapt as communication sources evolve, with the ability to incorporate any new communication source quickly and seamlessly, a tool designed for the modern proliferation of previously unfathomable data volumes and varieties.
As a macro data visualization engine powered by the Reveal’s leading AI technology, Streams maps massive amounts of data from traditional and emerging data sources to immediately uncover patterns and insights on the most interactive visualization platform available today. Streams is a powerful visual tool helps legal professionals access insights fast, without being a data scientist themselves.
What Can I Do With Streams?
There are a wide variety of compelling use cases for a visualization as powerful as Streams. Legal Departments and law firms alike can use Streams independently or in concert with their traditional workflow and document centric eDiscovery software solutions. Used as a part of their Early Case Assessment, or as part of the culling analytics applied at the outset of a document review, the conceptual visualization across multiple communication can connect the dots on key topics, timelines, and people to prioritize in a review.
Streams can also be layered in with AI models and other technology assisted review (TAR) across the full EDRM to further amplify insights and supercharge case teams. The net result is faster access to actionable insights, the legal mind’s true force multiplier in action.
When Can I Get My Hands On This Awesomeness?
The brilliant engineering team and computer scientists that brought eDiscovery the game changing cluster wheel are hard at work perfecting Streams as we speak. We plan to bring the next evolution of data visualization to case near you in early 2023.
Schedule your Sneak Peek at Streams