In 2020, all kinds of internet records were broken. You can probably name most of them: the most Netflix videos ever streamed, the highest number of Amazon purchases, the most data ingested into DISCO...
Oh wait, you didn’t hear about that last one?
Since we released the Data Management Suite (DMS) in June of 2020, 95% of all firms and corporations have ingested data themselves. Those ingests have ranged in size from 500 KB to multiple terabytes.
We’re really excited about this. Our goal with DMS was to build something powerful enough to satisfy the most technical users, yet easy enough that attorneys would actually use it.
Did we succeed? Ask Parisa Khademi, a partner at Lewis Brisbois LLP:
With DISCO, I can start reviewing my documents sooner. It's not just the ingest and processing speeds — which are very fast — but that the product is so intuitive that I can do everything myself. I can receive data from my client and have it ready to review in 20 minutes.
Even partners can use it!
This week, we launched expanded templating capabilities, which will save users more time on even the most complicated ingests.
How did we manage to build powerful ingest tools that our customers can actually use? To tell that story, we need to talk about a couple of our favorite topics at DISCO: Dogs and dog food.
Dogfooding
At DISCO, we love dogs. (Fetch in particular.) We also love “dogfooding” – using our own products in our day-to-day operations to ensure we have the same user experience as our customers and can identify ways to improve firsthand. DMS has become one of DISCO’s primary brands of dog food — a tool our expert data operations team uses day in and day out.
DMS allows users to ingest native or load file data, cull data, archive matters, and perform overlays — all from the comfort of their own offices homes. These tasks can be complex and have historically required coordination with a project manager and technical specialist at an ediscovery service provider.
To change that, the data operations team spent every day for the past three years dogfooding DMS and providing the level of feedback that only power users can. And they didn’t let us release it to our customers until it had all of the capabilities they needed and an intuitive design. The result is a set of tools that have been thoroughly vetted by industry veterans and still meet DISCO’s high standards for ease of use.
How did we do?
Over the past few months, there has been skyrocketing adoption across our entire customer base. Here’s what we’ve seen.
- Nearly 80% of ingests are completed by customers without any assistance from our data operations team.
- More than 95% of all firms and corporations have performed at least one ingest themselves.
- Customer-performed ingests have ranged in size from 500 KB to multiple terabytes.
And we’re always working to make the ingest experience better for our customers. At the end of last year, we released a number of updates to DMS for native ingests, which gave our users more options, better performance, and more templates.
This week, we released a new capability designed to save our users dozens (sometimes hundreds) of tedious, error-prone clicks: load-file templates.
Introducing templates for load file ingests
Imagine you are litigating one of the cases arising from the opioids epidemic. You get hundreds of load files from opposing counsel that contain dozens of metadata fields. Before, you would map each field in the load file to the relevant field in DISCO during each ingest. (DISCO automatically maps most standard fields for you, but there is no way to anticipate all of the fields in a complex matter).
Having to map your fields each time would be a great reason to send your load file off for someone else to handle.
Now, users have the ability to create load file ingest templates, and apply them in two clicks when ingesting a new load file. We expect this to encourage even more customers to perform their own ingests.
Why do we care so much about users being able to ingest their own data? Jokes about Fetch aside, it means they can get to their documents — and the facts of their case — faster. Rather than having to wait on someone else and their 48-hour SLA, they can add their documents to DISCO and be reviewing them minutes later.
Whether our customers are preparing a complaint or writing a contentious motion to compel, understanding facts sooner means better legal strategy. And at DISCO, that's what we're all about (well, that, and huskies).
For more info, check out the knowledge base article on ingest templates for load files.
