The Story Is Between the Lines. Find It with Everlaw.
We live in the midst of an unprecedented information explosion. The digital transformation of our work and personal lives has resulted in the production of recorded knowledge at a rate that was once unthinkable.
From birth to death, and everything in between, we are creating electronically stored information that can last for decades.
Photos, emails, chat, video. From the mundane to the sublime, there’s a record of nearly all of it — and it’s all potentially discoverable.
For legal professionals, this has ushered in a golden age of evidence.
Conversations whispered in corridors are now preserved in Slack messages. Deals made in conference rooms are now recorded on Zoom. The hundreds of pieces of information that can add up to a dispositive argument can now all be found and connected among millions of data points.
But, to date, most legal tools have fallen short of the challenge of putting it all together.
When it comes to connecting the dots in litigation and investigations, our ediscovery tools are still obsessed with the individual document – documents that give only a fractured, partial image of what matters.
For legal professionals today, document-by-document analysis simply is not enough.
What lawyers need are tools that can add new insights from our rapidly expanding world of ESI. That can capture novel data types directly from their sources. That can illustrate the innate connections between parties, patterns, and concepts, in ways that are intuitive and accessible.
That can help you place each piece of potential evidence together into a compelling theory of what happened and why.
Lawyers need to be able to find the story that’s hidden between the lines.
Today, Everlaw announced its newest set of features, carefully designed to help legal professionals tackle the pressing challenges posed by today’s litigation data. These new tools, Zoom Cloud Connectors, Communication Visualizer, and Video Depositions, allow users to access their most important data, quickly discover connections in communication patterns, and organize video deposition evidence more effectively than ever before.
Capture Key Evidence Where It Lives With Zoom Cloud Connectors
The modern office is virtual. Whether you spend your work day in a home office, corner suite, or noisy cubicle, there’s a good chance that at least some of your work week is spent video conference. Over three trillion minutes were spent in Zoom meetings alone last year.
Many of those meetings are recorded, creating potential sources of evidence that can capture not just the ins-and-outs of business dealings, but the visual nuances that traditional forms of communication can lack.
Of course, like all sources of potential evidence, separating the mundane from the impactful is the primary challenge. For video evidence like Zoom, that challenge is exacerbated manyfold. For a doc reviewer who is tasked with watching Zoom recordings, it’s quite easy for the game-changing evidence to get buried under status call after status call. To realize the potential of such evidence, lawyers need tools that can quickly ingest Zoom data, transcribe conversations, and index that information so it is easily discoverable via search, visualization, or any other means. Legal professionals need to capture not only the video itself, but the associated documents that can be equally revealing, such as in-meeting chats.
Everlaw Zoom Cloud Connector now provides a streamlined way to ingest data directly from Zoom and move it quickly into your review stream. Where in the past legal teams would have to download Zoom recordings to their local machines, then upload them back to their cloud platforms (not just a slow process, but a risky one, creating multiple copies of sensitive data), Everlaw’s Zoom Cloud Connector provides a seamless transfer from source to review platform.
Further, with traditional Zoom exports, data arrives in a disparate state: a file for audio, a file for video, a separate chat transcript, etc. With Everlaw’s direct connection, legal teams can now keep these essential components together, retaining the meaning and context surrounding the data.
With automatic transcription of A/V data, Everlaw makes these key pieces of evidence instantly ready for review, so legal teams can find the sections that matter and not waste their time on the rest.
Understand Key Players and Communication Patterns at a Glance
Where Everlaw’s Zoom Cloud Connectors help capture new sources of ESI more efficiently and effectively, Everlaw’s Communication Visualizer helps make sense of the immense volume of email communication in litigation today, letting users quickly discover key parties and patterns.
Based on the concept of social network analysis, Communication Visualizer displays the key relationships that can be hidden in big data sets, so that you can move through them instantaneously and interactively.
Within Communication Visualizer, small circles – or nodes – represent key players. Larger nodes indicate higher volumes of correspondence, and the size of the line between any two nodes shows how often people email each other. Rich interactivity allows users to isolate specific communications between individuals, dig further into key documents, refine date ranges, specific email accounts and even view the specific documents.
Pair Visualization With Machine Learning and Predictive Coding for Unprecedented Insight
The power of Everlaw’s Communication Visualizer to help legal professionals unearth insights hidden in big data becomes even more apparent when paired with Everlaw’s suite of advanced analytics tools.
Consider a hypothetical matter with 10 million documents that have been collected, processed, and are ready for review. This could be a litigation or an urgent internal investigation. The legal team has some idea of what’s in the document corpus but not a significant level of visibility. They are aware of a few key actors, but not the whole universe of individuals and interactions.
At this point, a reviewer may take advantage of Everlaw Clustering to understand the key themes and concepts in their haystack. Using unsupervised machine learning, Everlaw Clustering will display all 10 million documents grouped by their conceptual similarity on a single screen. This is an incredible bird’s-eye view of the data set, giving the reviewer unprecedented insight into what lies in their documents without reading a single one.
If an interesting cluster of documents emerges, the reviewer can click on that cluster, and either go deeper to review key documents or open Communication Visualizer and see the key individuals and players in that cluster of data.
Everlaw’s Data Visualizer and Communication Visualizer can be used on any slice or cluster of the document corpus, giving legal teams an astounding level of control and confidence.
These tools can be combined further in multiple, beneficial ways. For example, if predictive coding surfaces a key document, reviewers can then use Clustering to quickly identify the most conceptually similar files. Or users can utilize existing predictive coding models by overlaying prediction scores onto the Clustering visualization to identify clusters that contain many predicted hot documents, pointing them to additional potentially relevant documents in those clusters.
Powerful on their own, these tools can truly transform the document review and analysis process when combined.
Leverage the Nuance and Emotional Power of Depositions With Ease
Of course, collection, review, and analysis all lead up to presentation. Everlaw’s Video Depositions tool empowers legal professionals to make the most of evidence created in depositions, allowing users to unearth the subtleties in deposition testimony that can make or break a matter.
Everlaw users can now upload deposition recordings to Everlaw and move seamlessly between transcripts and video, to identify critical moments, label and classify testimony, and add video snippets to their case narratives.
With streamlined clip creation, legal professionals can create powerful exhibits from recorded testimony and export them for a smooth, organized presentation.
With built-in collaboration, teams can now share depositions with key stakeholders, working collaboratively to identify the most salient moments, and interact in real time to control the pacing and tenor of an examination.
Video clips are automatically integrated throughout Storybuilder, whenever a user cites to the video transcript, whether in the case timeline, a case strategy draft, or an exhibit list. The clip is always right at your fingertips, so you can see the power of the footage itself when you need it most.
Find the Story Between the Lines with Everlaw
In the midst of an information explosion, finding the truth can feel chaotic. Small details can go unnoticed, large patterns can be hidden in massive amounts of data, key insights left filtered out or unnoticed. Yet these fractured pieces of information can be the difference between success and failure, clarity and incoherence.
Everlaw lets legal professionals find the story between the lines like never before. Sign up for a demo today to experience the difference for yourself.
