Equivio Zoom is now available in Relativity, allowing Relativity users to access the Zoom functionality without leaving Relativity.

Equivio Zoom brings together all Equivio’s eDiscovery functions – its predictive coding application Relevance and analytics including clustering, near duplicates, e-mail threads and language detection. Its inclusion in the Relativity Ecosystem allows, for example, the “training” stage of the predictive coding application to be performed using the standard Relativity review interface with which many lawyers are now familiar.

One of the questions which arises for prospective users of predictive coding technology concerns timing –  at what stage in the process does one best introduce the refining power of predictive coding? Convention has it that the most appropriate time is as part of the review stage, either to prioritise the material which has survived the first pass review or at a later stage because conventional tools have not reduced the volume enough, leaving too many false positives for economic review.

The Equivio press release includes this sentence:

Zoom can be used for early data assessment as well as significantly reducing review set volumes and enabling prioritised review.

In a sense this is a statement of the obvious, but it is worth drawing attention to the benefits of applying the power of predictive coding as part of that early stage when you are trying to find out how big this problem is.

The new eDisclosure rules due to come into force in the UK in April 2013 will include new obligations, for a wide range of cases, to have informed discussions with opponents and the court about the best (generally meaning the most proportionate) way of managing disclosure. The benefits  of early data assessment are wider than the mere ability to comply with the rules – any commercial assessment of the costs and risks of litigation must include  that same exercise, and the costs of undertaking it must be set against the longer term benefits of early volume reduction and the value of that early input into the decision-making process.