Dance with the [vendor] that brought you.
The case had moved to a different venue, but local counsel from the original venue was still hosting the document review on their in-house system, which ran on [Major Review Software].
The new local counsel worked with [Up-and-Coming Review Vendor], and recommended that trial counsel move the documents (many already reviewed and coded) onto their preferred system.
I would not have recommended this move, but I can now say it from experience: You should avoid changing your eDiscovery vendor and software in the middle of a case.
Despite good-faith efforts from the new vendor and the in-house technical team from the old firm, it took me several months to iron out the issues that this seemingly-simple decision introduced, and new ones continue to crop up.
The original host exported a database archive, but the new vendor could not just load that archive and go, since it was based on a different software. Instead, it re-processed the documents, trying to “map” the coding and metadata stored in the old load file onto the different fields it used. This resulted in some metadata being altered in ways that confused everyone. For example, a large number of PDF documents acquired “sent” dates, because they were PDFs of emails; the “sent” dates were years earlier than the date the PDF was “created.” (In one case, the metadata represented that a PDF file of an older email was authored by the email’s sender, who had passed away years before the date the document was “created” by being printed or scanned to PDF.)
When we originally collected documents, we found that our broad search terms had inadvertently brought in several thousand irrelevant documents. I designed and tested several exclusion searches to remove those categories of documents only. However, in the course of the transfer, our saved searches were lost, and it was difficult to re-construct the process by which we arrived at our review set. (Lesson for me: Do not document saved searches only by their names.)
We had used “technology assisted review” AI to determine when to cut off review with the first vendor, but the new vendor used a different algorithm. When we had to do a supplemental collection and review, we lost the benefit of the original AI’s learning. Although the new one caught up quick, it threw off the math that determined whether we were statistically justified in halting our search for responsive materials.
In general, moving to a new vendor risks losing institutional knowledge and creating errors from differences in procedures. Unless the situation with your existing vendor is untenable, don’t change horses mid-stream! But if you must move on, ensure the original vendor remains available to support you, and do your best to stay with the same software. For example, there are a multitude of vendors who can host and manage your documents who use Relativity systems.
