Okay okay...DISCO is not really 200 years old, but since I last wrote about our 100th product release exactly 2 years ago, I thought it would be nice to celebrate our 200th product release, too.
(I’m glad we didn’t decide to use release names starting with consecutive alphabets or names of things to name our releases after — e.g. Android Oreo, MacOS Mojave — as we would have run out very quickly.)
At DISCO we practice continuous innovation — we have kept our amazing pace of releasing new features and enhancements to all our users every week, without requiring painful upgrades. DISCO’s rapid rollouts means lots of new features and enhancements — and no downtime.
Here is what makes DISCO different.
We build: Launching new features and new products
DISCO has dedicated product delivery teams focused on every part of our Ediscovery and Case Builder applications. Furthermore, our platform and infrastructure teams wake up every day focusing on how to leverage the latest technologies for performance, stability, and capabilities. I could list out the dozens of features we have released in the past 2 years, but let’s take a look at just a few.
DISCO’s Cross-Matter AI is unlike anything available in this industry. Imagine the efficiency in being able to identify all the privileged or junk documents on day one of review. Utilizing the latest machine learning innovations, our data science team developed the ability for firms and corporations to leverage learnings from previous matters on new matters. So when a new matter is loaded with documents, relevant documents are surfaced immediately.
DISCO’s Data Management Suite provides unprecedented speeds in upload and processing with proprietary technology built in-house. This allows users to upload more than 4 TB per day directly from their computers just using their web browser. Whether it is native or load file data, it is processed automatically and readied for review. That means that lawyers can begin reviewing documents in minutes rather than days or weeks.
And then there’s DISCO’s latest product – DISCO Case Builder. In a world where lawyers still use paper or paper-adjacent tools like Adobe Acrobat to review deposition transcripts, Case Builder provides a collaborative cloud-based depo review platform that lawyers will actually want to use. And with automatic video-transcript-synchronization, lawyers can find those key moments in the video early rather than at the eve of trial.
We listen: Delivering on feature requests
Input from our clients and users is central in how we prioritize what we build at DISCO. Weekly, monthly, and quarterly analysis and deep-dives of feature requests helps inform us on what to build next. With in-product surveys for every feature or enhancement, no matter how small or large, provides DISCO valuable signal from end-users. Our agile development and release processes allow us to build and deliver requested features very quickly to our users and clients.
For example, we learned that DISCO users absolutely loved it when we added the ability to copy previous coding decisions to the current document. But they really wanted to also be able to copy over the document notes and privilege notes. So we built that in a few weeks. We heard users wanted the DISCO Ediscovery application to remember the last redaction reason when they were placing multiple redactions on a single document. So we built that. We heard that there were new government agency production regulations that required additional production fields. So we built that.
We listen to user feedback and client requests and actually build the seemingly little things that make their lives easier and have a big impact.
We innovate: Making things better, faster, stronger
Imagine if Apple had released the original iPhone and said, “Yep, we’re done.” Instead they have continued to make the user experience better year after year. Software is never “done.” Every week, week after week, DISCO’s product team focuses on how we can make the user experience better – either through better UI (user interface) or adopting the latest platform technologies. This focus on performance is not isolated to just one portion of the application.
DISCO is famous for lightning-fast search (1/10-second) and document rendering (⅓-second). While we dedicated significant platform and infrastructure efforts in those areas, that’s not all. We focus on performance everywhere – uploading data, processing data, search, viewing documents, and producing them. For example, just with a single update, we made our search speeds 35% faster than the month before. We recently made changes to how quickly search highlights appear on documents – now 5x faster than before. We increased how quickly large numbers of documents are tagged, increasing that speed by 24x.
And it’s not just speed/performance. We continuously evaluate and adopt new technologies that make lawyers more efficient and surface the right documents to you. DISCO AI is a great example of how surfacing the most relevant documents to the top can help legal teams cut their document review times by half. But we continue to make it better. To get technical, we switched from Word2Vec embeddings to FastText embeddings. What that means for our users is that now they can get the benefits of DISCO AI-powered predictions on non-English language documents, in addition to the industry-first DISCO Cross-matter AI mentioned earlier.
We improve: Actually fix things
Let’s be honest, bugs are an unavoidable artifact of any software. At DISCO we strive to be as responsive as possible in fixing any issues our users identify. As soon as we hear about a possible bug, it is immediately triaged based on severity and impact. We dedicate developers to fix issues with high severity and impact and roll out the fix to users as quickly as possible. We religiously track our 7-day, 15-day, and 30-day bug resolution times – meaning, we fix issues in a week, 2 weeks, or a month. With DISCO’s weekly releases, our users don’t have to wait months for the next software release or upgrade for a fix.
We expand: Adapting to new geographies and new rules
We now live in a world where data often traverses multiple geographies and is subject to increasingly stringent data privacy requirements. DISCO’s dedicated security team ensures we, our clients, and their data are compliant with GDPR, Privacy Shield, CCPA, HIPAA, etc. To accommodate clients located or doing business outside of the U.S. or transferring data across borders, we began hosting DISCO applications and client data in Ireland and Canada in compliance with privacy regulations. We set up in-country teams to provide the full gamut of services to clients locally and globally.
I cannot tell you what we will talk about in our blog post about our 300th product release. But I can tell you to watch this space to continue to see DISCO grow, innovate, and push the boundaries by maniacally focusing on inventing technologies to help lawyers focus on practicing the law and improve outcomes.