As succinctly noted by The Florida Bar Association in its publication, Florida Law Journal: “Social media is everywhere. Nearly everyone uses it. Litigants who understand social media–and its benefits and limitations–can immeasurably help their clients resolve disputes…it is inevitable that the social media accounts of at least one person involved in a dispute will have potentially relevant and discoverable information.“ “Social Media Evidence: What You Can’t Use Won’t Help You” Florida Law Journal, Volume 88, No. 1.
For this reason, X1 announced at Legalweek in New York the integration of its industry-leading X1 Social Discovery technology into the RelativityOne and Relativity server platforms. This development comes three months after X1’s recent announcement of an integration of X1 Distributed Discovery into Relativity via the Relativity Collect interface. X1 now provides integrated and streamlined ESI collection, now including both enterprise and social media data, for all Relativity users, 75 percent of which are Fortune 500 companies.
For social media and web-based evidence, X1’s Social Discovery now displays collected data natively in Relativity. This enables social media and website content, including complex evidence like photos, videos, comments, “likes,” emojis, and linked content, to be displayed and reviewed in Relativity in its native format. X1 delivered this in response to strong demand from the hundreds of organizations that rely on both Relativity and X1 Social Discovery for their daily eDiscovery needs.
As you can see from the screenshot below, this integration is slick. It provides a rich, native view of social media data in the Relativity interface, all normalized so that the X1 Social data can be reviewed and analyzed alongside all other ESI in Relativity. This enables social media and internet-based data to be reviewed in the cloud by teams of reviewers at once, with all the power and collaboration that the Relativity platform has to offer.
What sets the X1 Social Discovery/Relativity integration apart is twofold. First, X1 Social performs the data collection in an automated yet very detailed and sophisticated manner. X1 collects all the fields individually, including several dozen metadata fields unique to social media platforms and also to websites. This robust and detailed X1 Social collection capability enables the data to be effectively ported, displayed (in a rich view), searched and analyzed in Relativity. X1 Social is not simply taking a glorified screen shot and converting that to a flat PDF. X1 is collecting each post, each photo, and each video, comment etc., as individual items with all their associated metadata. This is the key to maintaining context, parent-child relationships, defensibility and meaningful review and analysis.
The other key component is the integration plug-in for Relativity. This plug-in enables the viewer for all X1 Social evidence ingested on an automated basis to enable a rich, native display. This integration maps all the correct fields per social media data source, as Twitter will have different metadata fields than Facebook, or YouTube, or websites, etc. It also preserves the parent-child relationships between the various social media items such as comments, photos, replies, comments, emojis, etc., and also maps to correct views and viewers that will natively display those items. None of this is possible with a simple screenshot flat file collection, which is what the other inferior tools provide.
“X1 is a key partner and collaborator for our customers with dynamic eDiscovery needs,” said Drew Deitch, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Relativity. “It’s a major benefit to clients for us to be able to offer a streamlined, end-to-end data collection experience with the ability to dynamically find, analyze, collect and review all kinds of data. We are excited to continue collaborating with X1 moving forward.”
X1 is also excited to continue the collaboration to streamline the data import from enterprise and web-based data sources straight into Relativity. This integration with X1 Social Discovery and Relativity is a key part of that effort.
We recently featured the X1 Social and Relativity integration with an online briefing and live demo. You can access a recording of the briefing via this link.