It's been a little more than a year since LexisNexis parted ways with Applied Discovery, a high-end document review platform they acquired in 2003. Concordance Evolution capably fills the void.
Concordance has evolved from its early form. Steven Ashbacher, vice president and general manager, Concordance for LexisNexis, says Concordance Evolution is intended for complex litigation matters burdened with enormous volumes of electronically stored information. The Concordance that litigators have been using for more than 25 years (and acquired by LexisNexis in 2006) has been re-labeled "Concordance Traditional."
After testing Evolution, I am convinced the transition is necessary, but fearful that the days of Concordance Traditional may be numbered. Ashbacher assured me there are no plans to sunset that edition, acknowledging the investment customers have put into the system, including years of training, as well as creating workflows and customization. Ashbacher anticipates that current customers will continue to use Traditional for smaller matters but turn to Evolution when they need a high-performance, scalable program to handle the inevitable ESI snowball.
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
While there are some similarities between Concordance Traditional and Evolution, Evolution can stand on its own. The back end is built on Microsoft SQL and delivered through the Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser (version 8 or 9) based on a Microsoft .NET framework. Concordance Evolution also replaces the Imagebase-Opticon-Concordance Image medley with the very powerful Brava Viewer from Informative Graphics Corp. All of this delivers a powerful system that Concordance Traditional could never compete against.
Yet Concordance Evolution could still benefit from a few refinements to make it a natural selection among litigators. Customers are currently required to use IE 8 or 9, which limits browser options and eliminates the use of mobile devices. The concept search and near-native tools feel a bit clunky when compared to other similarly positioned tools on the market such as kCura Relativity and Integreon eView. Ashbacher promises an aggressive rollout schedule this year and next for both new and upgraded features.
In other document review platforms, a list of concepts is generated so that reviewers can gain an additional angle into the data, whereas in Concordance Evolution the Concept Search is baked into the Quick Search bar. And while the document viewer in Concordance Evolution is very powerful (see below), I felt that it was a tad bit sluggish when I zoomed in or switched views.
NEAR-NATIVE
The interface of Concordance Evolution is simple and straightforward. Depending on your access rights, you can navigate the entire system via the omnipresent tabs at the top for Administration, Review, and Reports. There's also a breadcrumb trail that divulges your whereabouts in the system. Clicking the trail worked much better than hitting my browser's Back button.
Concordance Traditional users will recognize the Table View in Evolution to view a list of documents. The default, however, is much more useful and called the Snippet View. It looks like a page of Google Search Results — you see the name of a document followed by a few lines of content. See Figure 1.
Figure 1: Clicking a document in Concordance Evolution brings up the near-native rendering where the Brava viewer offers options for viewing page thumbnails, adding stamps and redactions, etc. Clicking the Document Data tab shows the fielded data for the document which Concordance Traditional users will recognize as the Browse view. Click image to enlarge.
Clicking a document brings up the near-native rendering where the Brava viewer offers options for viewing page thumbnails, adding stamps and redactions, etc. Clicking the Document Data tab shows the fielded data for the document, which Concordance Traditional users will recognize as the Browse view.
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