At Relativity Fest in Chicago, I interviewed Grant Whiteley of Australian advisory and forensics provider KordaMentha. Shortly after that interview, Relativity and KordaMentha announced that KordaMentha had become Australia’s first RelativityOne certified partner.

My interview was not about that yet-to-be-announced partnership but about the take-up of analytics, and specifically of technology-assisted review, in Australia. Grant Whiteley said that KordaMentha had used technology-assisted review for years. For a long time, it was hard to get clients interested, but now they are expecting it and the costs savings which it brings. They are also asking about yet more advanced technology, including artificial intelligence.

There have been a couple of cases about the use of TAR in different states in Australia, together with the world’s first civil court practice direction expressly approving of its use in appropriate cases (I wrote about these here). Grant Whiteley said that the cases had been influential beyond their own states, just as judgments and opinions from other countries were considered when they were relevant.

KordaMentha was recently involved in a very large case for which the use of advanced analytics was the only solution. The client had given discovery to a regulator but the regulator had rejected it, demanding more within the original timeframe. That timeframe was two weeks, and there were 1.2 million documents.

Grant Whiteley said that KordaMentha decided to use Relativity Continuous Active Learning which, he said, was the most efficient tool of all that KordaMentha had used. They ran two projects at the same time, one for privilege and one for relevance. Relativity allowed the two to be run together and to learn from each other.

Grant Whiteley’s prediction was that everyone will be using some form of analytics in the near future. I suspect he is right – in some ways, Australia is ahead of other jurisdictions in its determination to cut down discovery costs, and others will learn from it.

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