In this blog, we interview Pete Feinberg, Senior Vice President and leader of Consilio’s Self-Service Business Unit, on the release of Sightline version 7.0.
Leading Consilio’s Self-Service Business Unit, Pete is responsible for Consilio’s self-service business strategy and execution including guiding product direction, marketing, sales, and operations to enable a superior self-service experience for Consilio’s clients.
How are you seeing law firm and corporate small-matter workflows changing?
PF: Both corporate legal departments and law firms are looking to emphasize efficiency, cost containment, and cost predictability. Efficiency in this context means getting things done with less friction and less applied cycles. Cost containment is, of course, a perpetual reality in the context of eDiscovery. And the need for cost predictability means that small matters (like subpoenas, small investigations, employment issues, etc.) aren’t going to result in an over-cooked and unexpected invoice.
This collective pressure on efficiency, cost containment, and cost predictability has altered corporate legal team and law firm behavior such that our clients are actively seeking a solution where they can be self-service for smaller matters. Doing so will allow these legal teams to be able to get through smaller matters on their own. This includes creating project databases, uploading and culling data to the smallest possible review set, applying work product, and print or producing those records – with less reliance on others (at a variable cost) and more cost predictability.
In eDiscovery and investigations, are new data types, like Slack, still far on the horizon or making headways into being a regular part of eDiscovery?
PF: We’ve seen corporate communications shift dramatically over the last decade, from overly emailing heavy (it’s still too email heavy!) to one that relies increasingly on chat and multi-party chat solutions – such as Slack. But it’s not just Slack. It’s also Microsoft Teams, collaboration within enterprise applications like Salesforce Chatter within Salesforce.com, or collaboration tools like Trello or Jira. It’s also business communications that happen over mobile smartphone/tablet devices via SMS, WhatsApp, iMessage, and personal and enterprise messaging apps like Telegram or WeChat.
Now that those data stores are robust, and attorneys are coming to learn that employee behavior of interest is stored within those archives, we regularly see collections of those various chat data stores and a need to review that material through the process of eDiscovery.
How is Sightline 7.0 working to help address the increased volume of private, privileged, or otherwise sensitive material?
PF: Sightline is built to help corporate legal teams and law firms load up their data quickly, cull, and review it quickly and produce quickly. So with the Sightline 7.0 release, several new features drive towards the goal of helping our clients perform eDiscovery better, faster, cheaper than alternatives.
Here are a couple of ways we’re supporting clients in that endeavor:
- Faster to upload data: Now, clients can perform drag-and-drop and processing on multiple datasets concurrently. That gets the data into Sightline faster than before.
- Faster to review the data: Sightline 7.0 improves the document-to-document speed by 25%, which means review on the same set of material can happen possibly hours faster, in aggregate. Faster review means faster production and lower cost, both.
- Faster to redact the data: Sightline 7.0 introduces the industry’s best Batch Redaction utility that allows admins to mass redaction mountains of documents for known sensitive or private information. Instead of having human reviewers draw rectangles over text, admins can now redact all Personally-Identifiable Material (PII), financial account material (PCI), and health material (PHI). Admins can also redact any sensitive info, such as email addresses, account numbers, keywords based on rules, and more. This is a considerable time and cost saver for the legal team.
- Faster to produce the data: Sightline 7.0 streamlines the Productions Module, so the user experience is cleaner and easier for admins, but also speeds up the actual generation and distribution of the Production as well – including an ability to send a password-protected hyperlink to opposing counsel.
The bottom line is that Sightline 7.0, just like previous releases of Sightline, has made another meaningful stride in helping our clients get through the process of eDiscovery quicker on their own for smaller matters.
What are some of the enhancements to the user experience in 7.0?
PF: Besides those improvements mentioned above, Sightline 7.0 has made several improvements to streamline the user experience. If the software isn’t easy and intuitive, it cannot be considered “self-service” because legal teams don’t have time to waste on poorly designed interfaces. So each release of Sightline seeks to polish the rough spots, address the small aggravations that add up.
In Sightline 7.0, our User Interface experts have modified over a dozen different pages to make these small changes that add up to big changes. We’ve done things like optimized page real estate so larger lists don’t hang down below the fold, we’ve moved buttons around so they are easier to see, we’ve standardized some dissimilar pages.
We’ve also improved our SightlineCentral.com knowledgebase with more articles on features, so those features make more sense. We even got a request from a client to provide more documentation on what each field in Sightline represents, and that’s now available.
And, we’ve altered the way that users who were locked out of the system due to multiple, successive failed authentication attempts can reset their password and unlock their account.
Again, on an individual basis, these are relatively small things, but in aggregate – it’s meaningful and something we’re committed to doing with each release.
How would you say Sightline 7.0 is different from other review platforms?
PF: What I hear Sightline’s clients echo again and again is how amazingly powerful Sightline is, but without overwhelming the user experience. It’s powerful with integrated analytics, automated complex workflows, tons of options and features, robust reporting, and more. But that power is put into a package that’s modern, clean, and intuitive. This combination of being very powerful but not overwhelming is what our clients are looking for in a self-service eDiscovery software for their smaller matters.
Older eDiscovery software that was around in 2008 through 2010 may have lots of features, but the user interface and user experience aren’t there for it to be truly self-service.
Newer eDiscovery software may have a pretty face, but it’s not robust enough for the needs of our clients. Oftentimes, it doesn’t scale up if the matter grows, or it’s not backed up by the services organization like Consilio’s Sightline is, or it leaves important features undelivered in Assignments/Batching, or Reporting, or Analytics, or Productions.
So candidly, Sightline is that right balance for our clients.
What are some of the ways law firms and corporates have taken advantage of our investments in onboarding and client experience with Sightline?
PF: There are many options for eDiscovery software on the market, but very few that are as complete and purpose-built as Sightline is, but at the same time fully backed-up and supported by a leading Services Provider, like Consilio. As one of the leading services providers for eDiscovery, Document Review, Forensics/Collection, Analytics, and more, our clients enjoy a unique combination of the technology they want (and need) with the backing, support, commitment to onboarding and servicing that comes with being a Consilio client. That is absolutely a winning combination for our clients.
You can see how welcome and exceptional this combination of both great software and exceptional servicing is in our G2Crowd reviews. On that public web, the property is crowd-sourced reviews by actual users in all software categories, including eDiscovery. Sightline’s reviews are notable in that our Customer Service rating is 9.8 out of 10 – as compared to an eDiscovery industry average of 8.7 out of 10. That speaks volumes on how our clients consistently rate the excellence of their experience – with the onboarding experience, the training experience, the client, and the project support experience.
The reality is that in eDiscovery, the unexpected happens all the time. Opposing counsel gave us different fields than we were expecting. We got some funky data we didn’t expect. Our production deadline is half of what we planned for. These things happen. But with Sightline, our clients can turn to us as an uncommon Services Provider to get them through those difficult situations. That’s really why we do what we do.
For more information on Sightline, click here to schedule a demo or contact us for details.