7 Days of Playing Minesweeper, or How to Shut Down Whistleblower Defense with Analytics - Elise Tropiano, Relativity

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7 Days of Playing Minesweeper, or
How to Shut Down Whistleblower Defense with Analytics
Elise Tropiano, Senior Technical Product Manager

Elise Tropiano
Senior Technical Product Manager, Analytics

Agenda
Who We Are
The
Problems
We Solve
How We
Solve These
Problems
Case Study

Who we are
• Fast-growing legal tech company
• Unstructured big data platform
enhanced with advanced
analytics, machine learning, and
powerful visualizations
• 800+ employees worldwide
• Headquartered in Chicago, with
offices in London, Kraków, Hong
Kong and Melbourne

Witamy w naszym
Krakowskim biurze
• Product Innovation Center
• Opened in September, 2015
• Focus on data transfer solutions
• Growing team up to 100 this year

Relativity helps manage and analyze data
relevant to litigation and investigations

organize data
discover the truth
act on it

data problems we solve

We live in a world where there is an electronic trail of evidence in every potential
litigation. Every sent email or document created could be relevant in a trial.

= 45,000,000 emails
Scale of a Hypothetical Large Case
500 people potentially involved
x 100 each sending emails per day
x 180 working days a year
x 5 years

It all could be potentially relevant in litigation.
And it’s not just emails that are relevant…

750M+ files
in the largest case in Relativity

our solution

SaaS platform

our platform
search & search workflow
machine learning
email analytics
workflow & applications
repository
data analytics & reporting

whistleblower or extortionist?

Drinker Biddle is a full-service law firm providing
litigation, regulatory and business solutions to public
and private corporations, multinational Fortune 100
companies and start-ups.

• When a senior executive for a publicly
traded company was fired for
underperformance, he made a serious
allegation on his way out the door.
• He claimed he was laid off because of
his repeated attempts to inform
officials that the company was
falsifying quarterly financial reports to
the public.

Kick off a long list of tasks for the
company, including waiting for a lawyer
to send them a demand letter, gearing up
for defense, coaxing out the facts as
knowledge evolves, and possibly settling
the case before even getting to the truth.
Two Options to Handle This Case
Traditional Approach
Start an internal investigation and figure
out exactly what happened and decide
how to handle it.
Analytical Approach
Cost: $1,500,000+ Cost: $80,000

Investigation Timeline
Days 1-3
• Collected multi-sourced data
– One million emails + thousands of complex financial reports
• Relativity Analytics: Email threading
– Grouped email conversations and found initial set of relevant
meeting notes and presentations
• Relativity Analytics: Keyword expansion
– Ran terms round in these meeting notes through keyword
expansion to find additional relevant terms
• Relativity Analytics: Clustering
– Groups documents into conceptually similar groups
– Prioritized the review of clusters containing relevant documents
to find additional sources of intelligence
DAY 1 DAY 2 DAY 3

What ACTUALLY Happened?
Former employee had been emailing
with his wife on his personal
account and forwarding those
emails to his work email.
The emails contained keywords and
phrases relevant to the investigation,
so Drinker Biddle were able to make a
case to collect from former employee’s
personal email, and load that into
Relativity for further review.
Drinker Biddle found evidence of the
former employee working with his wife,
an employment attorney, to develop a
case against the company, and they were
able to prove he was drafting emails
about fraudulent accounting before the
quarterly numbers were recorded.

Relativity Analytics helped shut down
a whistleblower defense in 7 days,
saving an estimated $1.5M+

How We Did It
Email Threading
DIVIDE emails into segments and understand each
segment’s metadata.
1
COMBINE emails into conversation threads.
2
IDENTIFY inclusive emails for optimal efficiency.
3

From: Brandon Gauthier
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2015 7:50 AM
To: Michael Di Salvo
Subject: Demo Email
I need some email data for a demo, can you reply
back to this email. Thanks!
From: Michael Di Salvo
To: Brandon Gauthier
Subject: Re: Demo Email
This is me, replying to your e-mail.
You sir, are very welcome.
One more time! This way we can show email
segments better.
This is me, creating an additional segment.
Subject: Demo Email
I need some email data for a demo, can you reply
back to this email. Thanks!
This is me, replying to your e-mail.
You sir, are very welcome.

How We Did It
Keyword
Expansion
CREATE multi-dimensional space from terms in document text.
1
IDENTIFY terms that are conceptually similar to a
user-provided query.
2
RETURN the terms for augmented searching.
3

“Personally-held”

How We Did It
Clustering
INDEX documents into multi-dimensional space.
1
HIERARCHICALLY GROUP documents into conceptually similar
groups using the document text.
2
VISUALIZE clusters for promoting corpus understanding
and searching.
3

“It’s incredibly unjust for companies to pay
a settlement if they’re unsure that a claim
has merit simply because they don’t have
the money or the resources to investigate
it properly.”
Chief Data Scientist and Partner, Drinker Biddle
Bennett Borden

any questions?

thank you

7 Days of Playing Minesweeper, or How to Shut Down Whistleblower Defense with Analytics - Elise Tropiano, Relativity

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