ZyLAB is an eDiscovery company with a long and respectable history – the company’s technology for organizing and parsing through documents has been used in trials by the United Nations to prosecute individuals in the Khmer Rouge trials, and in Yugoslavia against Slobodan Milošević, along with many other major international matters. In addition, the ZyLAB technology was used in the United States in the O.J. Simpson and Unabomber trials.
One would think that a company with that strong of a history and high-profile experience would just rest on their laurels, but that has never been the case for ZyLAB. In fact, in early 2017, the company released their second generation SaaS platform named ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery which offers a variety of functions for managing document reviews. The platform has enabled ZyLAB to work closer with small to mid-size firms which has not been a typical market focus for the company.
ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery is a scalable SaaS platform that provides a robust set of features for review including auto-classification and auto-redaction. ZyLAB ONE is also designed to collect email and files directly from Microsoft Office 365. Additionally, ZyLAB ONE offers an integrated audio search function, which has been an extremely important tool in some of the major trials where there have been a number of audio and video recordings included in the database.
The ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery platform has enabled ZyLAB to work closer with small to mid-size firms.
Data Processing and Dashboard Interface
Having recently transitioned from a legacy technology (SilverLight), ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery now boasts an entirely re-designed interface with a look & feel similar to Gmail and other Google apps (based on HTML5). That means the entire platform is familiar, browser agnostic, easy to navigate … and fast.
Once data is uploaded into the system, it goes through the automatic processing phase where files are OCR’d, de-duplicated, deNISTed, email threads are extracted, document families are identified, and much more. Notably, ZyLAB ONE can also OCR text in multiple directions – forwards, backwards, and upside down.
When the processing stage is complete, ZyLAB ONE provides a colorful and systematic series of pie charts that visually represents the facets of your data. These charts are completely customizable so that you can choose to see your data broken down by custodian, file types, reviewed categories, and much more. Each little section is interactive so that you can drill down deep into each facet or category. A better description is that ZyLAB ONE provides a “visually interactive” dashboard that provides many powerful tools for digging into the details of your data quickly.
Another interesting feature of ZyLAB ONE is “entity extraction” where the technology looks deep into the contents of your files and documents to find and reveal locations, people, and places so that they can be presented to you in a helpful manner.
Searching and Topic Modeling
As one would expect, ZyLAB ONE provides powerful search tools and capabilities. The simple search box at the top of the screen can be used for direct searches although it is extremely easy to perform more powerful, advanced searches. ZyLAB ONE can also run multiple searches at a time, which is an excellent way to test out a list of keyword search terms that you may be discussing with the opposing party.
All searches are tracked in ZyLAB ONE so that you can access your search history at any time. And since ZyLAB ONE does an excellent job at finding specific patterns in your data, you can search specifically for phone numbers, social security numbers, IP addresses, etc.
When you click on a document from your search results, any word that was returned from your search will be highlighted in yellow. If you program “persistent” search terms into the platform, those words will be highlighted in green. And if you see any word highlighted in blue, that is a word or phrase that has been marked for “auto-redaction” which is usually specific consistent and recurring types of information like social security numbers and other personally identifiable information (PII). ZyLAB ONE allows you to pre-program certain words and character patterns to be auto-redacted so that it lowers the risk that this information might be inadvertently produced.
ZyLAB ONE includes a unique and impressive feature called “Topic Modeling” that innovatively reveals the relevant topics and ideas found in the data using artificial intelligence. The idea of extracting topics or “clusters” from electronic data is nothing new, but ZyLAB has created a useful and interactive circle visual that gives you even greater access to the subject matter that you may be interested in. When you see a topic in the circle that interests you, simply click to drill down deeper into the topic until you get to a level that you want to view. It just takes a moment to get used to this approach, and once grasp the idea, it’s difficult to use a linear list of topics.
Viewing Documents
When you’re ready to drill down into a list of documents to review, you can click on a document to open the viewer. While there’s a lot of information on the screen, it is very well organized. The document image appears in the middle panel, with the left panel containing the email thread conversation and document families.
The right side panel houses a variety of tags that can be applied to the documents. All of the tags are customizable in the ZyLAB ONE platform where you have simple tags, or force reviewers to select multiple values. Tags can also be created on the fly, and can be added in a freeform method similar to how you can “tag” your messages in Gmail rather than placing them in folders. ZyLAB ONE works on a similar idea to Gmail tags where you can filter your documents by any tag when you are running searches or you’re ready to create a production set.
ZyLAB ONE offers a full set of redaction and annotation tools so that users can apply the necessary manual redactions for documents that require that approach before production.
Document Production
ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery is working hard to further streamline their production tools by reducing the number of steps that users have to go through while creating a production set. Users have the opportunity to include slip sheets in their document productions, and there is a fantastic interface for applying Bates numbers and other endorsements. There are a variety of options for how and where the stamps will be applied to the documents as you go through production.
Who Is ZyLAB?
Over the past 30+ years, ZyLAB has closely worked with corporations, law firms, and governmental agencies to easily deal with regulatory requests, investigations, and litigation needs. The company has also supported some of the most high-profile U.S. and international trials. The company’s latest offering, ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery is designed to work for firms and corporations of all sizes.
Why You Should Consider ZyLAB…
- ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery is offered as a scalable and elastic SaaS platform accessible for law firms of all sizes. The technology is offered on a per-GB subscription pricing.
- Offers powerful and robust auto-classification and auto-redaction tools for processing data along with machine translation of foreign language documents.
- Entity extraction for quickly pinpointing locations, people, places, so that they can be revealed for reviewers.
- Innovative Technology Assisted Review including Topic Modeling tool that reveals topics uncovered in the document collection allowing users to quickly drill down into specific concepts included in the data set.
Try Out ZyLAB For Yourself!
Click here to visit the ZyLAB website and request a demo of the ZyLAB ONE eDiscovery platform.
