Machine Learning Brain Credit: MY stock/Shutterstock.com

 

Looking to jump-start your legal technology career but don't know how? Jared Coseglia of TRU Staffing Partners writes a monthly column on certifications to know and training to acquire in the industry for Legaltech News. This month's piece takes a look at the Brainwaves Learning Center, the new online Brainspace analyst training.

 

The reputation of Brainspace in the legal technology vertical may be big, especially after its speedy acquisition by now parent company Cyxtera, but the organization runs quite lean. With around 50 employees, Brainspace is focused holistically on developing superior machine learning technology to assist with investigations and the smart analysis of data. It is not a services company. It is a software company; however, a critical service it does provide is training and certification on its software.

For years, Brainspace relied entirely on classroom training to deliver and certify users of the tool. Michael Griffin, director and driver of the marketing initiatives at Brainspace, identifies this as a core challenge in scaling: “What we realized was that we weren't able to provide enough live training to our global market, and it was affecting our ability to grow our business internationally.” Classroom training on Brainspace can require employees to take up to a week off from their typical daily duties, especially when adding in travel time. “This became a big challenge,” says Griffin, “so we developed training online that is self-guided and on-demand to get users through the basics on how to navigate through our technology.”

Enter the Brainwaves Learning Center: Brainwaves, the new online Brainspace analyst training and certification platform, is live! The current online offering from Brainspace is for the first-level analyst training and certification. Advanced users can anticipate the Brainspace administrator training and certification to go live sometime this August. (Classroom training is still available for both analyst and administrator education.)

The forthcoming admin online certification and training will cover more institutional tasks like managing integrations to Venio or Relativity and supporting hardware for infrastructure requirements and will be more geared toward individuals that support the environment, rather than using the software. “The Brainspace analyst online certification is for daily users of the tool and is about how you get value out of the system,” says Griffin.

Training is broken into modules. “We modularize software when we do our training,” says Griffin. “Every three to four modules we do knowledge checks, which include a series of questions with multiple-choice answers. Right answer gives you access to the next module. Every seven to eight modules, there is a hands-on exercise.” Analyst training will give users confidence in leveraging the “cluster wheel,” a data visualization tool, and how to get the most value out of it, among other things. Users log in to an online system to do the exercises.

There are approximately 20 modules, which equal around six hours ending with a final multiple-choice test of 60 questions covering all the content. Users who pass get certification online and an online badge to display on social media platforms. The first and second exam are free for those who have gone through the training, after that you have to pay to take the course again. Griffin admits he has received feedback that the analyst certification exam “seems a little easy” to some users and that Brainspace “could make it a little harder.”

Making the barrier to user entry harder, however, may not be in Brainspace's best interest. Growth for Brainspace does not mean just acquiring more clients but also getting existing clients to wield the technology more frequently and effectively. “One thing we are tracking now is customers who are underutilizing our software,” says Griffin. “We do this by looking at how many documents they have in the system, how long they stay in the system and how many people at an organization are trained and certified. Clients who have tons of data in the tool but aren't using it … that's a tool training issue.”

Brainwaves has been live for nine months, and the organization has already seen an immediate increase in tool usage from existing customers as a result. “We have had tremendous adoption of Brainwaves, especially from global users. They can take it in a day at a fraction of the cost of a live classroom without incurring significant time away from work.”

For Brainspace, an online learning center was essential for accelerating adoption. “Training is key to using the software,” says Griffin. “We constantly innovate, change existing features, alter screens and tabs and make the product sophisticated. It can be difficult to use if you have not gone through training,” adds Griffin. “Brainspace is becoming a more sophisticated machine learning tool. We're trying to create a layman version of machine learning that we can put in the hands of each and every person in your organization. We want everyone to take advantage of this technology. But this is extremely technical. You can try to dumb it down, but it is complex.”

This new Brainspace certification course is available on-demand online and only takes one day to complete at a cost of $600 per user. Enterprise clients get full access to all courses and the associated materials. Anyone can take the training and certifications—unless you work at Relativity, NexLP, OpenText and a few others. “Brainspace is a restricted certification,” says Griffin, “We are protecting the IP and don't want competitors coming in there and borrowing not just what we are doing but how we are doing it.”

 

Jared Coseglia is the founder and CEO of TRU Staffing Partners, an Inc 5000 Fastest Growing American Company 2016 & 2017 and National Law Journal's #1 Legal Staffing Agency, and has over 15 years of experience representing thousands of professionals in privacy, e-discovery and cybersecurity throughout the world.