I have known Craig Carpenter, CEO of data collection company X1, for almost as long as I have been in eDiscovery. At Relativity Fest in Chicago, I at last had the opportunity to interview him. The context was a newly-announced partnership between X1 and Relativity. Why, I asked, should users be excited about this?
Craig Carpenter said that the most obvious benefit lies in the ease with which users can now get data into RelativityOne. The workflow is now seamless. RelativityOne already collects data from e.g. OneDrive and O365, making use of its cloud presence to make these collections from anywhere. X1 adds the ability to collect from sources which RelativityOne does not handle natively, including social media and the ever-widening range of tools by which users communicate with each other.
I asked Craig Carpenter if the lawyer users appreciated the value of this – do they self-start by asking for it? Very much so, Craig Carpenter said. Lawyers always appreciate the ability to get their eyes on data quickly, and the combination of X1 and RelativityOne means that they can do so without the time and cost of travelling to get to the data when it can be put remotely straight into a Relativity workspace.
There was a time when the dominant task was reactive discovery, with companies seeing no obvious RoI in identifying data for proactive compliance. Craig Carpenter says that the balance is still skewed toward reactive discovery, but that privacy compliance and cyber events are becoming as important as discovery and investigations.
Since this interview, X1 and Relativity have announced extensions to their partnership, including the integration of social media and web evidence, and the development of demo sampling and analysis pre-collection – there is a press release about this here.
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