Everlaw is a collaborative, cloud-based litigation platform for corporate counsels, litigators and government attorneys from the company of the same name in Oakland. It enables teams to discover, illuminate, and act on information to better drive internal investigations and positively impact the outcome of litigation.
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Relativity
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Relativity (formerly kCura) is a data e-discovery solution supporting litigation, government inquires, internal investigations and data governance policies within a secure cloud platform, from the company of the same name headquartered in Chicago.
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XaitPorter
Score 9.0 out of 10
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XaitPorter is a co-authoring software solution for teams to collaboratively create, manage and produce documents. With it, users can streamline and optimize document production to maximize revenue from bids and proposals and other business-critical documents. XaitPorter is designed to enable co-authors to focus on creating bid-winning content so that teams can become more efficient while production time and costs are reduced.
When I worked at a large law firm and used Relativity, I found that it was rather difficult to use. It absolutely required an IT staff to run and it was great to be able to e-mail litigation support to help accomplish what needed accomplishing. But, Relativity is really a …
I think Everlaw is very well suited for any project where you want to organize your documents, produce documents or review documents produced to you. It's "word processing" features are pretty awful and that makes the Storybuilder functionality less useful. The best workflow for me is as follows: On Screen 1 you have Everlaw browser open. You tag those documents you may use in your story, they show up on the right panel. Then, you open up your word processor on Screen 2 and get writing. If you need to refer to an exhibit in your word processed document, use the #idenitication number from Screen 1 and type it in your document. If you want to review the document, you click the "eye" icon in the right panel on Screen 1 and read it as you are doing your typing on Screen 2. When done with the document, you cut and paste it into the Everlaw Storybuilder "body". You may have to manually search for the #'s to have the documents tagged in your story - You need to have them tagged in the story body so that when you click on "exhibits" you can export all of the exhibits referenced if that is something you want to have done (for example, to upload for e-filing).
In cases involving massive datasets (I.e. regulatory investigations, cross-border litigation), Relativity's powerful search, deduplication, and technology-assisted review features enable fast, accurate identification of relevant documents. For example, we used it in a front-running investigation involving a large asset management firm, where Relativity streamlined data review across multiple custodians. There are multiple use case available.
XaitPorter is ideal when a large document, containing many (preferably independent) sections is being created by more than five writers across different office locations and is subject to review by multiple reviewers and requires formal approval. It is particularly suited for external documents which are to be delivered as a non-editable PDF file.
This tool gives us the opportunity to work together. We always work in the last revision.
We can write comments as we go along and all involved will see it straight away.
We can structure it the way we want/our the way customer wants it and print the whole book in one go. We are sure that pictures/text/tables are where they are supposed to be (they have not moved around the document as it does when using Microsoft Word).
Not everything is as I would like it to be. For example, while it is easy to copy work product (highlights, issue tags, comments) from one project to another, for some reason they don't allow you to copy "storybuilder" objects. It would be nice if they allowed this. What this means is if you have the same set of documents in two projects, you can carry over the issue tags, highlighting, etc., if you want. But, if you created a deposition outline in "Storybuilder" in Project A, you can't copy that deposition (with exhibits) over to Project B.
The Storybuilder "outline" function is not easy to use and does not export well to word. That said, once you get the hang of it, it really works beautifully for organizing exhibits.
Very powerful tool, but does require a high level of expertise and head count to administer the product.
If hosting yourself, requires investment in servers and ideally is housed in a data center
Providers need to pay kCura a monthly user license fee for every user who has access to the tool. Providers can purchase blocks of users, but with a large amount of users on a case, it's cost that some external clients are not thrilled about
It would be helpful to improve functions used to organize and reorganize sections. They work fine, but could be retooled for ease of use. Simple drag-drop over the tree-view from the primary navigator (not only in the dedicated dialog for reordering sections) would be very good. It would be good to support simple flagging or tagging of sections to indicate whatever is meaningful to the user (e.g., to flag a section as imported text that needs formatting, or a section that is high priority for review). The icons do change to indicate predefined workflow states (e.g. approved), but there isn't support for a user-defined tag, perhaps with the ability to filter by tag as many newer applications can do. That would be handy. These aren't criticisms so much as product enhancement suggestions.
The editor is ok but could be tuned up a bit. For example, styles in the toolbar dropdown apply only to the whole paragraph. It's hard to indent text. The button tool doesn't consistently remove the button attribute on an existing button; works sometimes, sometimes not. Little stuff. Overall it's adequate for text creation.
The process of defining templates and styles appears to be a black art. While it's something you don't do often, it should be simplified and better exposed to ordinary admins.
The ability to have more than one section open at a time in the editor would be fantastic. Great productivity tool.
Word import/export could be cleaner.
The ability to export to html with user-defined style sheets would open new markets for Xait. If the product had that, we'd use Xait to maintain our online help site too.
The ability to link to externally stored images rather than lock them inside the Xait library would be huge, as we've expressed to the support team. We manage hundreds of images (diagrams, screen shots etc.) that are used throughout the company, not just for Xait documents. We would like to store them on a file system (e.g. Dropbox) and have them update into Xait automatically when the master copy is modified. This is a very important capability, though in fairness we didn't find it in other products either. Explicit support for Dropbox/Google Drive/Box would be one way, but dynamic linking a la Microsoft Word would be fine, maybe even better.
Relativity is a well established tool that continues to evolve and look for ways to improve. Particular focus on Australian workflows is very promising for us and appreciated. There is a lot of scope for improvement in the processing and PDF workflows but it is great to see Relativity being proactive in those areas
He was really good. He came from Xait and trained us for several days. He got all involved and answered the questions asked. He was a professional trainee
I've used something called blade.acorn in a different mass tort case. I did not like it as much as Everlaw. Maybe it was because I used Everlaw first and was used to it. But Everlaw does have a great and organized platform that I think is better and is well-suited for mass tort cases' discovery process.
Relativity contains all the features together in a single platform. And most of all other than Brainspace none of the other tools have document review capability as good as Relativity has.
The standard product for many years has been Microsoft Word. Some have tried to use SharePoint as a collaborative tool, but it is not suited for the purpose and is generally very user un-friendly. It is not intuitive and we have very few persons with any competency in it. Porter is easy to pick up and the new interface is very intuitive, and the way that Porter works removes many of the typical layout and formatting choices that made Microsoft Word so difficult for the average employee. It also greatly simplifies and reduces the amount of corrective work that tender support staff used to have to do. We are not aware of any product in the market that comes close to Porter. It is an ideal product that was purpose built for collaborative writing.
Unfortunately, I do not have any hard numbers to share. The platform costs what it costs and you either eat that cost or pass it on to the client. The platform certainly makes you a more efficient attorney and saves a lot of time, so even if the monthly fee is kind of high, the client gets a lot of value out of it.
Too soon to tell. Right now we're still at the near end of the value chain - it still seems expensive given the outputs to date. But we have a lower proposal volume than some companies, so you need to factor that in.
Also, the named user licensing is restrictive and problematic in a small company where people perform multiple roles and may dip in and out of the proposal development process over a period of weeks or months. A concurrent user model would be much, much better for us, though I understand you'd need to figure out a way to handle email notifications.
