icourts is an Australian company offering forensic investigations, data processing, eDiscovery, and related services. It has long been a Relativity partner.

At Relativity Fest, I interviewed Matt Lan of icourts and asked him first about the uptake of analytics in Australia.

Matt Lan said that there had been real uptake of analytics in the last 12 to 18 months. The clients expect their providers to engage with analytics to help them with volumes of data for discovery and related purposes. They appreciate, he said, that you can’t just “throw bodies at the problem”.

Demand for the use of analytics is driven largely by litigation and regulatory matters, he said, but extends to almost anything where costs and tight timeframes require it. Relativity’s analytics bring substantial benefits to clients.

Relativity had been doing well in Australia for some time now. What is changing is how relativities partners are using it.

The existence of Australian court judgments and rules developments about technology-assisted review (I wrote about those here) is helping lawyers to understand how they can help their clients using the more sophisticated analytical tools.

It is the up-and-coming senior associates who most want to engage with analytics and not just in big firms – medium sized firms are driving a lot of the use of these tools in order to compete with others, including bigger firms.

icourts had recently been involved in a case with a 1.4 million documents. The client had only a short time to understand what data held, what relevance calls to make and to understand their case strategy. There is more to the use of analytics, in other words, than merely slicing through the volumes.

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