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Multitasking professionals everywhere can rejoice. The Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists (ACEDS) and e-discovery software solutions provider Relativity are partnering to offer a new reciprocal educational credit program.

What this means in a nutshell is that Certified E-Discovery Specialists (CEDS) and Relativity Certified Professionals (REP) can partake in each other's applicable webinars to earn credits towards either certification program.

“This combination is great because it will provide our certified community the ability to stay up-to-date with the software and also remain current within the industry,” said Danielle Urban, manager of certification at Relativity.

ACEDS community members will receive one CEDS credit per hour of Relativity education. Webinars attended in the past two years count, as do presently available webinars, training and events. Participants must submit e-certificates of relevant attendance to ACEDS in order to receive credit.

Likewise, Relativity community members can visit the company's RCE Credit Opportunities page to find ACEDS courses, which cover topics such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, interpersonal skills and negotiating a forensic examination protocol. Attendees need to fill out a form on the Relativity website in order to receive the RCE credits for their participation.

“We have a mix of professional and personal topics that we believe our Relativity certified community will find interesting and educational,” Urban said.

According to ACEDS executive director Mary Mack, the reciprocal educational credit program has been in the works since last year. The partnership is one way to help members with a broad range of skills maintain multiple certifications.

“Our members are what I would call 'e-discovery and…' professionals, so we have people working in e-discovery as well as security, privacy, info gov[ernance] and some of the other adjacent fields, and there are many different certifications,” Mack said.

The CEDS certifications are typically about instilling a functional understanding of e-discovery concepts while the Relativity certifications focus on the technical side of the equation. Mack used a privilege log as an example: An ACEDS webinar might teach you what it looks like or when to use it, but a Relativity could show you how to use a piece of software to create one.

Cross-functionality is becoming critical in the legal profession as the line between tech-speak and legalese begins to blur.

“In truth, e-discovery professionals need to know both. They need to know the functional and the technical,” Mack said.