Conduent Uses Advanced Analytics and Data Science to Help Its Clients Proactively Avoid Legal Trouble
Karl Sobylak, Senior Director of Data Analytics at Conduent chats with Jeff Kelly at PostGres Summit 2018
When you think of the discovery phase of a legal case, you probably picture some poor attorney surrounded by hundreds of boxes of documents in a warehouse, scouring one after another in an attempt to find documents relevant to his case.
It’s not just a time intensive process, but an expensive one, too, according to Karl Sobylak. “The legal industry estimates that at least 70% of all litigation costs are in the document review process where attorneys are manually looking at content,” said Sobylak, Senior Director of Data Analytics at Conduent. “Considering that Fortune 500 companies spend an average of one-third of after-tax profits on and take an average of three years to resolve litigation, we’re constantly looking for ways to improve upon that.”
The New Jersey-based digital interactions firm is a Fortune 500 company that provides solutions to support emerging technologies that improve automation and efficiency. In the case of legal discovery, the Conduent platform leverages document metadata to make them electronically searchable. But that’s not all. Conduent also applies analytics to the metadata to recommend which documents are most likely to be relevant to a given case. It can even proactively analyze documents and related materials to identify potential legal troubles before they occur, Sobylak said.
“Litigation is sort of a reactive process. You’re already being investigated and you’re already are in court,” Sobylak said in an interview at Greenplum Summit 2018. “But what if you could use these technologies in a proactive manner? What if you could identify those risks and those conditions before they become a legal problem for you? What we’re doing right now is we’re pivoting that same technology stack,” to identify legal risk before cases end up in court.
The technology stack Sobylak referred to includes Pivotal Greenplum, an open source-based massively parallel processing analytical data warehouse. Sobylak said Conduent chose Greenplum for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its ability to scale to massive data volumes and analyze the data in-database.
“Anything we need for analytics is pulled into that database,” Sobylak said. “It doesn’t leave that database unless legally required, obviously. That’s where all the compute happens.”
That’s not all Sobylak had to say about the way analytics is revolutionizing the legal world. Check out the full interview below.
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