Wednesday, 19 December 2018
Firms around the world are recognizing the role that Software as a Service (SaaS) tools play in their competitive differentiation, enhancing their value-added services while controlling spend, optimizing security, and giving their teams and clients access to the latest and greatest features on the market. Executive Director in KordaMentha Forensic, Craig Macaulay recently talked with Kelly Velisek from Relativity about how KordaMentha are embracing RelativityOne. Below are excerpts from their discussion.


Booming Economy Paves Way for Digital Transformations

“Historically, Australia – and the greater Asia Pacific region – has been a bit behind the times when it comes to utilizing technologies like technology-assisted review, analytics, and the cloud,” Craig said. “But that’s changing quite rapidly as more and more corporations are already using the cloud to store their data, and many are looking for more efficient ways to solve their e-discovery and compliance-related problems.”

KordaMentha, however, has been quick to adapt new and more efficient ways to drive value to their clients and revenue for their firm—relying on tools like Relativity Analytics and active learning. By shifting their discovery and compliance operations to the cloud, KordaMentha is taking another leap in spearheading technology adoption throughout the Asia-Pacific region. 
 

Redirecting Infrastructure Management

“We realized that we were always going to be limited with managing infrastructure, and we couldn’t always push our Relativity investment to the maximum,” Craig said. “Outsourcing infrastructure to the experts is a no-brainer, and it’s the last thing we want to be spending our time on.”

Additionally, KordaMentha wanted to shift their compliance and security measures to be more proactive in the face of potential risks and threats.

“We wanted to be ahead of the curve from a compliance and security standpoint. When managing your own infrastructure, you tend to be reactive,” Craig explained. “With RelativityOne, we have an entire security team with Calder7 who proactively test for vulnerabilities and constantly assess and monitor those aspects. We could never achieve this level of security with our own infrastructure.”
 

The New Gold Standard

“Traditionally, eDiscovery has been an expensive and onerous process, and we view unstructured data as an untapped resource in e-discovery,” Craig explained. “Structured data tells you that someone did something; unstructured data tells you why. Organizations that realize unstructured data’s power can generate valuable insights to help to make better-informed decisions.”

This philosophy is rooted in the question: if you understand the why, what would the result be? Craig explains that it takes a paradigm shift in thinking and provided some colour behind the current economic climate in Australia to validate this concept.

“We didn’t really suffer in Australia from the global financial crisis (GFC), unlike the rest of the world where banks had to downsize, re-evaluate processes, and introduce new regulations to monitor their work,” he said. “Out of the four big banks in Australia, they all rank in the top 20 globally at the moment. But, what we’ve learned from the recent Royal Commission into the finance sector is that there is an underlying culture built around greed rather than services to clients.”

KordaMentha sees the value of utilizing these insights to build analyses to monitor corporate culture by assessing text and email, instant messages, and other forms of unstructured data that is often overlooked in the e-discovery and compliance processes.

“Maintaining culture is going to be one of the biggest drivers to corporate profitability and success, and using unstructured data is going to be key to benchmarking or measuring success,” Craig added. “Understanding why people do something is much more powerful than the event itself.”


Looking Ahead

As more organizations like KordaMentha come to rely on cloud technology and leverage unique applications to help them work smarter and faster, they’re discovering valuable insights for their businesses that continue to expand their value propositions.

“Relativity shares our vision behind the future of eDiscovery in Australia, and throughout the world, and we now have the freedom to drive the tool into directions that not long ago we would never have thought possible,” Craig said.

 
For the full article Riding a Perfect Storm for Innovation in Australia by Kelly Velisek, visit relativity.com.