AlphaLit Legal Review and Ease-of-Use

eDiscovery review platforms aren’t exactly uncommon. It’s not surprising: there is a lot of money – a LOT of money – to be made in review. This also means a lot of competition so failing review platform makers can lose their shirts, but the risk is worth it if you are already established in the marketplace, have strong product features, sport a big differentiator that matters to legal users, and partner with complementary companies with major market reach.

AlphaLit is one of the oldest document review makers out there and is a solid provider for large corporations and law firms. Once a vendor is in these environments they may be solidly entrenched for some years. However, eDiscovery is moving and changing fast and there are some big review makers that are aggressively going after their competition. AlphaLit has responded by upgrading and differentiating their E-Direct 3.0 review platform. They have also made some strategic partnerships with complementary vendors Nuix and Content Analyst.

Their review differentiator is deceptively simple: ease-of-use. For technical audiences such as IT, ease of use is a good feature but rarely makes it to the top of the must-have charts. But for legal review users, ease-of-use is a vital feature and can make the difference between winning and losing sales opportunities. In fact, the larger the opportunity the more important ease-of-use becomes. When a purchaser has a large group of legal reviewers to train on a platform, then ease-of-use becomes tremendously attractive.

Simplicity doesn’t exist in a vacuum and E-Direct 3.0 offers the features we expect to see in a full review platform. Some upgraded offerings include batching and workflow modules, privilege log creation, powerful search, and analytics in concert with partner Content Analyst. But even these features are characterized by ease of use with one-click access, batch-based organization for better search, and simple interfaces.

Like we said – ease-of-use may sound deceptively simple, but simplicity is a big selling factor in the crowded review marketplace.