Fast, Intuitive, Cost-Effective, and High Quality Reviews

In “Why EDiscovery Software Fails To Uncover Material Information During Legal Data Reviews,” a #VenioVision webinar presented on Feb. 23, Abbye Needham, eDiscovery Services Manager, Bit-x-Bit, and Kat Crone, Director of Project Management, LSP Data Solutions, LLC, discussed pain points in review platforms and how these can result in problems for review teams and their companies. They highlighted four issues:

  • Time wasted
  • Higher costs
  • Increased risks
  • Quality issues

In a webinar presented on March 16 announcing Venio Systems’ new product, Venio Review, Abbye Needham, along with Michelle Spencer, Director of Education and Communication, Venio Systems, discussed how these pain points impact the eDiscovery review process and how Venio Review addresses those issues:

What is Wasting Our Time?

One of the biggest problems with the eDiscovery review process is that it wastes a great deal of time, driving up expenses and causing teams to work on redundant tasks when they have more important things to accomplish. Here are a few of the biggest causes of wasted time:

Redoing Prior Work: In most review platforms, there’s no easy way to automate repetitive tasks and ensure they are done correctly each time. With Venio Review, templates and wizards automate common workflows, so that tag and coding sets, customized screen layouts, and field templates are reusable and items are not missed. 

Inadequate Search Tools: Most search tools are not robust enough, failing to deliver consistent results and requiring users to perform searches over and over, using different search criteria until they get the information they need. Not having a list of the past searches for the previous day, week, or month results in repeated searches to find important data and wastes additional time. 

Overly Complex Features: Many review platforms require reviewers to remember complicated syntax, wasting valuable time manipulating that syntax to get the desired results and with no access to search history or saved searches, they have to manually recreate prior searches. What’s more, the user-interface is often too complicated for less technical users, offering too many options and requirements that must be navigated and understood to get the appropriate results. Little things in the user interface, such as understanding whether families are included in searches or exactly how tags will be propagated, can make a big difference over time. Though a wide variety of features may at first appear to be an advantage, more is not always better, and the platform isn’t easy to use if the users find themselves drowning in options.

Third-Party Integration: Managing multiple platforms in the review process adds a layer of complexity and cost that can cause a variety of issues and put your sensitive data at risk. Relying on third-party add-ons increases your company’s risk, because you’re forced to transfer data from one platform to another, potentially reducing data parity, increasing the time spent in the search process and, most importantly, putting that data at risk of loss or exposure. 

Different Tool Sets Needed: Another problem with most review platforms is that different users have different needs. Review attorneys have different requirements for the review process than litigation attorneys and project managers, who are working at a higher level than the review team. Most platforms fail to meet the diverse needs of the stakeholder groups, but Venio Review provides all the tools needed by all of the groups in a single platform.

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When it comes to review, no case is the same. Each has different issues and relies on different data types. Often, the choices offered in review platforms to deal with these options are overwhelming, and time is wasted as users try to find the solution that best suits their needs. And if they’re forced to review data outside of the platform, which is something that happens frequently with platforms that don’t offer an end-to-end solution, that adds additional time — and cost — to the process.

What Drives Costs Up?

A number elements cause the review process to be a costly one for companies:

Per-User Licensing Model: Upfront costs and lengthy contracts with the addition of ongoing expenses mean you wind up paying higher prices, sometimes for services you don’t even need.

Unintuitive Designs: Overly complex, unintuitive designs cause users to waste valuable time in finding the documents and fields with information relevant to the specific review or case type,  and inflexible layouts and dashboards ensure that users aren’t comfortable in the workspace, having to deal with complicated interfaces and an overwhelming variety of choices. 

Inadequate View/Coding Tools: Most review platforms don’t offer tools that can view, organize, or perform the necessary searches on a variety of file types, including social media, multimedia, and transcripts. Because these types of files are becoming increasingly common, having the ability to search them and drill down for the necessary information is vital.

Additional Training/Support: Review platforms with complicated interfaces not only force their users to waste time dealing with complex set-ups, they waste additional time because they require PMs to conduct additional training and/or hand-holding to help those users, taking the PMs away from important, higher-value tasks. This means your review projects are experiencing double the increased costs with the time of both reviewers and PMs being wasted.

Why Is It Risky?

There are several factors that can make review risky. If the search platform isn’t comprehensive or accurate enough, it might be unable to find privileged documents, which could increase the chance of confidential information being disclosed. The same goes for business secrets, PHI/PII, or financial data, which is difficult to redact in most review platforms. Financial data in spreadsheets can be especially cumbersome to deal with, if redactions have to be done in image files or an external platform. What’s needed is a way to do native Excel redactions directly within the review platform without having to image the spreadsheets. 

All these difficulties with the redaction process can result in client embarrassment and eventual loss of business or injury to your reputation. 

How Does Quality Suffer?

If your review platform is less than ideal, quality will inevitably suffer. You’ll experience less accuracy in your reviews, with them missing important information and not delivering the data that you require. Your resources will also be wasted, with employees wasting time and effort navigating complicated interfaces, struggling with dashboards and layouts they’re helpless to change, and going back and forth between multiple tools to accomplish tasks that should be able to be performed by a single, all-in-one solution. What is the end result of this wasted time and an increasingly stressed and frustrated staff? Decreased defensibility and  poor strategy outcomes for the trial team.

What will solve these issues?

Addressing these four pain points — time wasted, higher costs, increased risks, and quality issues — requires a new approach to the review process, one that incorporates time-saving workflows and features, an intuitive UI and layouts, a robust analytics dashboard, tools for diverse file types (including social media, audio/video, transcripts, and native Excel redaction), and flexible licensing and deployment. 

What’s needed is a single solution: Venio Review

Key Features of Venio Review

Venio Review, Venio’s new fast, reliable, easy-to-use and cost effective review platform, addresses all these issues. It enables legal review and investigative teams to find the most relevant information without the need for expensive stand-alone review-only tools or numerous third-party tools. Venio Review can load data from any processing tool, quickly search and tag millions of documents, perform native Excel redactions and entity extractions, and prevent PII/PHI, financial data, and business secrets from being leaked.

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Fast, Intuitive Search

With Venio Review, you benefit from fast, intuitive search capabilities paired with an easy-to-use Advanced Query Builder that generates complex search queries using any combination of search types. Venio Review comes equipped with powerful and customizable filters that offer immediate insights into the dataset and help you easily refine searches, saving time and increasing accuracy. Adding to the speed are Saved Searches, Search History, and Dynamic folders, which increase efficiency and result in more reliable search results. 

Venio Review works via an intuitive, customizable interface that makes the user experience less complicated, more suited to the specific task or case, and eliminates a steep learning curve. Combine that with comprehensive manuals and training programs, and your teams are able to work more efficiently and not have to rely on constant support from the project management team.

 

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Native Excel Redaction

Venio Review’s Native Excel Redaction reduces both the time you spend on the review process and the risk of exposing sensitive information and financial data. By being able to highlight and redact native files within Venio Review, you avoid the complication of reviewing those files manually outside of the platform or from jumbled text documents. 

 

PHI/PHI Identification

Venio Review’s entity extraction gives you the ability to identify and remove Protected Health Information (PHI) and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) , ensuring that such sensitive data doesn’t end up in the wrong hands. Keeping that information secure protects you from damage to your reputation, your relationship with clients and your business in general.

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Customizable IU and Layouts

We realize that users work most efficiently with an interface they feel comfortable with, which is why Venio Review comes equipped with templatized review sets and screen displays for a variety of case types, roles, and tasks, and makes setting up those templates and displays easy for project managers. Venio Review also features a user interface that combines a highly responsive design with accelerated doc-to-doc speed, resulting in more accurate and more timely results for your review teams. That enhanced accuracy and a faster turnaround time means your teams will see improved strategy development and highly quality on the work they do.

Interactive Analytics

Venio Review’s analytics reduce the amount of data that gets moved into review and provides a variety of valuable tools for reviewers, allowing them to gain immediate insights and enable faster ECA and culling via interactive widgets and layouts, all of which dramatically reduces the amount of time spent in review — and reduces your costs as well. 

The interactive widgets and layouts — which are also customizable — allow users to sample data to ensure that the collection is comprehensive and complete, and that existing strategies are working efficiently and accurately.

Users can visualize the flow of email communications and merge duplicate addresses before they drill down into the details, saving a great deal of time. They can also identify key actors or custodians, spot potential alias email addresses, and see time gaps using Venio Review’s Interactive Timeline and Social Network Diagram, a spider-web view of interconnected email nodes.

Comprehensive Viewing/Coding Tools

Because eDiscovery is no longer driven by traditional emails and documents only, Venio Review offers support for a variety of file types, encompassing the way people communicate in the modern world of online discussions and social media interaction. Venio Review’s Social Media Viewer includes emojis, videos, pictures, links, and GIFs, and allows users to filter by person and/or date, saving the trouble of sifting through thousands of posts. Our Multimedia Viewer and Transcript Viewer allow users to timestamp specific sections and attach notes, streamlining the process and making locating the most important information much easier. 

Key Benefits of Venio Review

Higher Quality Results

Venio Review delivers high quality results, with secure data sharing and collaboration built into the platform. Secure, expiring links can be emailed to experts or witnesses to access a subset of the data for review and comment. Customizable dashboards offer immediate insight and action for users, and immediate oversight for project managers, and easy-to-use QC and sampling tools ensure accuracy, resulting in better strategy outcomes for trial or investigative teams.  

Less Costly Reviews

By streamlining the review process and optimizing the interface for maximum efficiency, Venio Review reduces the time you spend on reviews, reducing your expenses. The platform comes equipped with workflows and features designed to save time, a streamlined  environment to get you the best, most accurate results, accelerated doc-to-doc speed to further reduce time spent in review, and a full suite of oversight tools ensuring you can maintain high levels of accuracy and that your resources are being used in the most efficient way possible.

Faster, More Accurate Reviews

When it comes to the eDiscovery review process, there’s nothing more important than accuracy, and Venio Review offers consistent and accurate search results, with CAL capability that utilizes  a machine-learning engine to reduce case data by up to 90% to surface what matters most in your case or investigation. Also, Venio Review’s auto-collection enables tiered reviews, and our logical tagging feature will allow your legal review teams to hit higher levels of  productivity and efficiency. 

Risk-Free Review and Production

With Venio Review, you can rest easy knowing your data is protected. The platform features built-in, enterprise-grade security, which offers a layer of protection above and beyond the security features and processes in AWS. Your information remains safely stored behind firewalls and multi-layered security protocols. What’s more, Venio Review offers Excel Redaction and PII/PHI identification, ensuring that sensitive data is not exposed during the review process

No Third-Party Add-Ons

Venio Review has been designed as a single solution with no cumbersome third-party add-ons to complicate the process. That saves you the trouble of dealing with complicated licenses and managing a variety of tools or add-ons that have to be integrated with your existing platform, which increases risk when data must be transferred from one tool to another. As a single platform that handles all your needs, Venio Review saves you both time and money.

Flexible Licensing and Deployment

Venio Review is a fully managed SaaS solution that supports individual cases housed in different locations, meaning you have the flexibility to decide where your data is located based on individual case requirements. You can choose cloud-based storage, on-premises storage, or a hybrid approach — whichever works best for you. Also, Venio Review isn’t licensed on a per-user model. Instead, it uses a flexible, subscription-based license, which offers project-based payment options that let you license what you need when you need it. In that way, the way you use Venio Review can grow as your business grows.

For more information

  • To watch a recording of the Venio Review Product Announcement webinar, click here.
  • To read the Venio Review FAQs, click here.
  • To download the Venio Review Product Brief, click here.