Legal analytics

The rapid growth of e-discovery projects has made project management analytics a new staple of e-discovery work, both for helping project managers oversee and track e-discovery projects and to project accurate costs to the companies financing these projects.

E-discovery and regulatory compliance group Catalyst this week launched its own analytics tool for its corporate e-discovery platform. Catalyst Analytics, the new tool, will feature real-time project data across multiple matters and custodians in a centralized database. The tool can also schedule automated reports to stakeholders via email with any set frequency.

Jennifer Davies, product manager for Catalyst Analytics, explained that the platform is an outgrowth of some of the work Catalyst did to prepare biannual reports for one of the organization's biggest clients. “It would take a lot of resources using manual labor and Excel spreadsheets, tools that were more of a time-consuming process,” she noted. As a result, the company developed a set of templates and automation tools for those clients to expedite the process.

Davies noted that the analytics tool, now available for a wider audience, aims to serve up key analytics to multiple different kinds of users, from the litigation support staff up to the chief legal officer. “Some people are managing multiple matters at the litigation level, understanding where all the action is happening,” Davies explained, adding that these people may want to view all the matters they oversee in one place. “Chief legal officers, the info they're interested in is on a much larger scale, not as granular.”

The expansion of analytics tools and ever-increasing pressure from business leaders to curb legal spend has forced many e-discovery shops to move from the more ad hoc management systems—anything from Post-its to printouts to Excel spreadsheets—to more formalized analytics structures.

“Within more mature legal departments, it's definitely a higher demand to have more real-time information. It helps them make better-informed decisions,” Davies noted.

Catalyst is certainly aware that the analytics platform is entering a fairly crowded field, vying for space somewhere between the analytics tools that corporate legal departments have developed in-house and the existing out-of-the-box tools on the market. The company is hoping to differentiate itself by bringing its market insight to bear on both the tool's product design and professional service offerings, as well as tailoring its analytics services to specific clients.

“We really have that capability to customize to whatever the client wants,” Davies added.

In recent years, Catalyst seems to have directed much of its technology development toward its e-discovery tools. The organization was an early pioneer of technology assisted review (TAR), using predictive algorithms and other machine-learning techniques to identify key documents. The company launched its Enterprise Insight platform for corporate counsel just last year, and has embarked on strategic partnerships with TotalDiscovery and American Discovery to flesh out its offerings across the EDRM spectrum.