Brown Rudnick’s four-person litigation technology team uses Reveal to support discovery across the firm, from matters involving a handful of documents to datasets exceeding a terabyte. By filtering data before review, giving case teams earlier insight with AI, and bringing review into a more intuitive environment, the team has found new opportunities to control costs and focus attention on the evidence that matters.

About Brown Rudnick

Brown Rudnick is a 242-attorney international law firm that provides exceptional, client-driven service in global litigation, crisis management, including restructuring, investigations and special situations, brand and reputation management, life sciences, and technology. The firm advises on high-profile cross-border matters while providing the personal attention to clients typically found at boutiques.

Key Results

Meet Brown Rudnick’s “Fantastic Four”

Dawud Burke

Senior Litigation
Technology Manager

Danesh Imran

Senior Litigation
Technology Specialist

Brittany Veilleux

Litigation Technology Specialist

Benjamin Davies-Mathurin

Litigation Support & IT

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It's a small team with an unusually broad remit. On a daily basis, the team works within Reveal as the firm’s primary review platform. Their work spans matter types and sizes, with considerable range. They use Reveal to review matters with as few as 10 documents and others involving more than 1.2 terabytes of data.

Within Reveal’s infrastructure, the Fantastic Four work like a well-oiled machine, dividing responsibilities and tag-teaming requests as they load, ingest, process, and prepare data for review. That collaborative approach helps them manage matters with many moving parts while supporting the case teams that ultimately need to work with the evidence. As Burke put it, Reveal provides, “a seamless way of interacting with our case teams, and a way to work amongst us as a group to load, ingest and process data.”

Reveal has given the team a more intuitive environment for that work, but the impact goes beyond usability. Brown Rudnick can now rethink what happens before documents reach active review, narrowing datasets earlier, controlling the amount of data clients pay to host, and helping case teams understand their evidence sooner.

Moving Beyond a Cumbersome Review Process

Before adopting Reveal, Brown Rudnick relied on a legacy review environment that became infamous among the litigation technology team for its difficulty and cumbersomeness. The friction became particularly apparent when someone outside the firm needed access to the platform to conduct review. Depending on the matter, the firm also gives outside experts and, less frequently, clients access to its review databases. Accountants and other experts may need to access multiple databases as they work alongside case teams.

Getting users the appropriate access permissions could become almost more complex than the review process itself. The team had to create internal usernames and passwords for external users, who then had to download Citrix Workspace, navigate to the appropriate application, and launch the review platform. Davies-Mathurin described the experience simply as “very clunky.” With the high-stakes, fast-paced work the firm manages, the team has little time to waste on access permissions. When they made, the switch their external partners "were all very excited we switched from our old platform to this."

Reveal improved the experience for internal users as well. Imran called the move a “significant upgrade,” pointing to a better user interface and user experience. “Reveal is much easier for our internal users to work with. They pick it up much more intuitively and once we give them cursory training, they’re able to flourish on their own,” Imran said.

Reveal also makes routine collaboration easier for the Fantastic Four. Davies-Mathurin highlighted assignments as one example, calling the experience of assigning batches to specific people and groups “much more pleasant” than it had been in the firm’s previous review environment.

For four people supporting discovery across the firm and the globe, reducing that friction wields major influence. The litigation technology team can collaborate more easily, while the attorneys and experts who enter the platform face fewer barriers to working directly with the documents. The move to Reveal has also opened the door to a more fundamental change in Brown Rudnick’s workflow: reducing the amount of unnecessary data that enters review in the first place.

Reducing the Cost of Review Before Review Begins

Under Brown Rudnick’s previous workflow, the team often had to process an entire dataset before they could determine how much of it was relevant, this meant they would have to charge their clients for data sets that were approximately "95 percent non-responsive."

With Reveal, the team found another option. Now, Brown Rudnick can apply search terms, date filters, and other criteria before promoting data into review, allowing the team to focus on a narrower, more relevant review population.

On one recent matter, Imran described starting with approximately one terabyte of data and narrowing it to about 85 GB of billable hosted data. That represents roughly a 92% decrease in data volume, reducing the amount of data the Brown Rudnick team and its client needed to process and host.

For one custodian on that matter, Burke share the approach produced a measurable financial result “we saved 45 percent.”

Getting Answers Earlier With Reveal AI

Reducing data volume solves one part of the challenge. Once the team narrows the dataset, Brown Rudnick’s case teams still need to understand what remains and decide where to focus their attention.

In the firm’s London office, Reveal AI’s search and analysis feature has become central to the team’s early case assessment workflow. When case teams start a matter, they can ask questions of the data before committing hours to document-by-document review. The answers provide an initial understanding of the evidence and help teams develop more informed search criteria.

Strengthening Defensibility Throughout Review

Ease of use and efficiency matter, but Brown Rudnick also sees another benefit in bringing review into Reveal: greater control over sensitive information.

Burke pointed to defensibility as an important part of the platform’s value. Reviewing documents outside a dedicated review environment can introduce a greater risk of producing sensitive material. By conducting that work in Reveal, Brown Rudnick can give case teams a controlled environment for reviewing documents and mitigating that risk.

“Reveal offers great defensibility.” - Dawud Burke, Senior Litigation Technology Manager, Brown Rudnick

Burke described the impact in particularly strong terms, saying that they’ve eliminated the risk of inadvertently producing sensitive content by conducting review within Reveal.

What Reveal Delivers for Brown Rudnick

At Brown Rudnick, Reveal sits at the center of the firm’s eDiscovery operation and continues to scale alongside the ambitions of a powerful team.  

With Reveal they've:  

• Reduced review data volumes, as high as by 92% on a single matter.

• Reduced unnecessary processing and hosting costs upwards of 45% by filtering data before promoting it into review.  

• Given case teams earlier insight into unfamiliar datasets with Reveal AI, helping them build more informed search criteria before document-by-document review.  

• Made review more intuitive for attorneys and external experts, reducing the friction associated with the firm’s previous review environment.  

• Made collaboration easier for the four-person litigation technology team, including assigning work and managing larger matters together.  

• Strengthened defensibility around sensitive information by keeping review within a controlled environment and eliminating risk associated with inadvertent disclosure.  

By reducing unnecessary data, controlling costs, surfacing insights earlier, and strengthening defensibility, Reveal helps Brown Rudnick’s Fantastic Four focus its time and expertise where they can make the greatest impact: helping case teams get to the information that matters.

Reveal is a leading AI-powered platform for eDiscovery, document review, legal hold, and investigations. Its best-in-class suite of products includes Logikcull, Onna, Reveal Hold, and Reveal Enterprise. Reveal's software combines technology and human guidance to transform structured and unstructured data into actionable insight, helping law firms, corporations, government agencies, and service providers uncover useful information faster. For more, visit revealdata.com.