When people use Google (News - Alert) to search for something on the web, they’re typically happy to get a few relevant results, which they check and then move on with their lives. But when it comes litigation, every piece of data counts, so organizations need solutions that deliver comprehensive results – returning every single document that mentions the subject in question. With Relativity, kCura provides this kind of e-discovery, explains Andrew Sieja.

Sieja is CEO of kCura, which delivers e-discovery solutions that businesses and their legal teams use to locate internal documents. The company’s Relativity solution can run on premises or be delivered as a SaaS (News - Alert)-based solution via one of kCura’s partners.

Release 8 of Relativity became available in June. This version is faster, more scalable, and can run more cases and users in same footprint than previous releases. Key feature improvements include e-mail threading; faster search speeds; easier calculation of precision, recall, and F1 in Relativity Assisted Review; and the ability to process EnCase Logical Evidence Files. The product currently addresses processing, review, analysis and production, says Sieja, but over time kCura expects to expand Relativity to address additional parts of the e-discovery lifecycle, which also includes information governance, identification, preservation, collections, and presentation.

Differentiators of the kCura solution include the ability to handle more data in its system,

flexibility in how the product can be used (it doesn’t demand a prescribed work flow), and ease of use, Sieja says.

Relativity is in use by 95 of the largest 100 U.S. law firms, the U.S. Department of Justice, corporations with high litigation portfolios, and various consulting firms that offer litigation support services. In all, the solution has more than 75,000 active users worldwide.

Litigation is a messy business and takes a lot of people and time, notes Sieja. But now we have technology that can amplify one attorney to make the decisions for which 20 would have been required in the past, he says. It’s called predictive coding, which involves making correlations between data in sources like e-mail, he says. Through this technology, he continues, we can bring more justice to this world, because it lowers the cost of litigation, and allows the dispute to get down to the facts.

I met with Sieja this summer at TechWeek in Chicago.

As an aside, this event took place at Merchandise Mart, which I found out later while on a fascinating architectural boat tour was a significant contributor to the Kennedy family fortune. The art deco-style Merchandise Mart was the world’s largest building at that time.

The boat tour guide did a great job describing and providing history on some of Chicago’s other great buildings within view of the river tour.

One of the most interesting modern buildings discussed was Aqua Tower, which as it turns out was designed by a grade school classmate of my husband. Turns out she’s now internationally known; in fact, the Art Institute of Chicago had a large exhibit dedicated to the work of Jeanne Gang.

If you’re in Chicago and have an hour to kill, I would highly recommend taking one of the boat tours offered through the Chicago Architecture Foundation. The Chicago Cultural Center, which used to be the city library, is pretty awesome as well. It’s not on the boat tour, but it’s great. Free lunch concerts and art exhibits are housed at the center, but just going in and looking around at the Tiffany dome and beautiful mother-of-pearl mosaic walls is a great experience.