Business analysis for legal counsel

A lawyer from England, whom we’ll call Mr. George, contacted me while I was at Relativity to find a software solution to his problem.

In a legal dispute, both parties are required to share what evidence they have relevant to the case. Retrieving evidence is called the discovery process.

When legal representatives share notes, they include context and document references to develop the case story. Lawyers share a version of these case notes with opposing counsel, and another version with their law associates. Software tools such as Relativity supply a workspace where both evidence and notes are merged into one tool. It even delivers an export of these findings called a production.

The trouble is, not every lawyer spends thousands of dollars on a Relativity license or is familiar with the software. A long-form Word document is their preferred method, and they’re not about to halt their practice so that they can learn an expensive tool.

To collaborate with others, Mr. George’s office would manually find and replace every evidence identifier in their case notes with a hyperlink to the evidence in their Relativity instance so that participants could pull up the referenced evidence without learning how to navigate Relativity. This was an onerous task that slowed the discovery process and wasted hours of billable time.

I wanted to give Mr. George an automated tool to fit snugly into Relativity so his office could deliver their case notes both internally or externally at the push of a button.

We began with an initial consult where I learned the problem Mr. George wanted to solve and explored technical options he might consider. I wrote the skeleton of a software requirements specification (SRS) and sent it over the following day. Mr. George reviewed the requirements and returned a revised and detailed version. On a second call we explored the ways technology could solve all the requirements he’d listed and how we might do it affordably. I recommended that he spend a little extra to work with a London-based software consultancy with excellent software maintenance agreements so that he’d be in the same time zone and wouldn’t need to sign another contract if he needed a software fix. I made the introduction and gave the software company a brief overview of my technical approach to solving the problem with a single Relativity-hosted service and a simple object-based UI.

A few weeks later, Mr. George sent me a thank you email for my work and a hearty recommendation of the software consultancy to which I’d referred him. The project came in on time and budget thanks to their excellent software engineering and my effort to translate the legal need into technology terms.