modern Hong Kong Hong Kong's skyline
|

Eyeing a growing e-discovery market in the Far East, Relativity has announced that its cloud-based e-discovery platform RelativityOne will now be available in Hong Kong. Managed service company FTI Consulting will be the first to offer the software-as-a-service (Saas) solution to the Hong Kong's legal and e-discovery practitioners.

The move to offer RelaitivityOne in Hong Kong comes only months after the solution was launched in the UK in August 2017, following its public debut in the U.S. early last year. Abigail Cooke, APAC account manager at Relativity, said it made sense to focus on Hong Kong as the third expansion, given that “Hong Kong is our third largest sales and support team behind Chicago and London.”

Cooke added that since law firms in Hong Kong are required to offer e-discovery services to multinational and corporate clients, “with smaller teams and smaller budgets” than those in the U.S., Relativity believed they could benefit from a more cost-effective cloud-based e-discovery solution.

The focus on Hong Kong is also driven by the evolution of the city's local e-discovery market. “The Hong Kong e-discovery market was born out of forensic fraud investigations, making the advisory firms major players in the market,” Cooke explained. “While it is still heavily dominated by consulting and advisory firms, we've seen the Hong Kong government also taking part in e-discovery services and products, local law firms using it for arbitration and litigation, as well as traditional e-discovery providers setting up offices in Hong Kong to support their international clients… Hong Kong has developed an e-discovery market in its own right,”

Given the growing local market for e-discovery, Relativity also aims to partner with local Hong Kong e-discovery providers and law firms, who will be able to offer RelativityOne on their own.

For now RelativityOne will only be offered in Hong Kong and not China, which has different data privacy and handling laws under the country's recently passed cybersecurity regulation.

Cooke noted that the law “shouldn't affect RelativityOne in Hong Kong. Hong Kong data storage and transfer regulations are different than [China] under the one country, two systems rule. All of our existing customers operate separate data centers in Hong Kong and [China].”

Still, addressing the reality that some Hong Kong law firms will have clients, partners in subsidiaries in China, RelativityOne providers like FTI Consulting are looking at ways to allow for e-discovery in China without running afoul of the country's data regulations.

Wendy King, managing director at FTI, noted her company will “deploy e-discovery professionals with collection tools and Relativity on [Chinese clients] server-class laptops/mobile servers,” to essentially conduct “collection, processing and review on-site at the company's location within China.”

Though there are no immediate plans to expand RelativityOne into China, the cloud-solution will break ground in other global markets in the near future. Cooked noted that Relativity plans to launch “RelativityOne data centers in Canada and Germany in 2018.”