Congruity360
An End-To-End Solution for Managing Data Governance

 
Data has always been a foundational part of the legal space. Truly understanding business data has become the key to achieving broader strategic objectives for law and corporate firms. By managing and using relevant data, these organizations can make their operations more efficient, improve client satisfaction and enhance profitability. Besides, the extensive regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, or HIPAA have also obligated legal firms to manage, clean, and analyze a large amount of information to mitigate risk. With the enormous amount of data constantly growing and taking over law firms every day, it’s essential for them to have robust strategies in place to ensure complete data governance and compliance. To design an optimal data governance strategy, organizations need a robust data management solution through which they can truly understand their data and ultimately harness value from it because the challenge of data management is relentless.

With an aim to streamline data management process, Congruity360 offers a wide range of data governance solutions for corporations, law firms, and government organizations. The company has acquired SaGo.ai Inc, a developer of next-generation legal-centric software solutions to extend its portfolio of data governance solutions with an automated litigation hold platform. Congruity360’s data governance suite includes Hold360, Discovery360 and Classify360, which helps law firms and enterprises in keeping their data secure, up-to-date, and agile while delivering relevant data that empowers businesses to make intelligent decisions.

In an exclusive interview with CIO Applications, Brian Davidson, Managing Partner and Co-founder of Congruity 360, uncovers several interesting insights about his organization’s Legal Tech products their unique value proposition and roadmap for the future.

1> Please walk us through the products that you deliver in the legal tech landscape.

With a focus on cost-savings, simplicity, and efficiency, we introduced three innovative data governance solutions—Hold360, Discovery360, and Classify360. Our suite of solutions works hand in hand.

Hold360, our proprietary litigation hold solution, is a simple, user-friendly platform that enables law firms to streamline legal hold processes with one user-friendly, integrated, automated, and defensible tool. It also helps in reducing timelines and cost associated with litigation hold workflows. Hold360 breaks all the barriers associated with the traditional litigation-hold tracking practices.

Once the legal hold process is completed, the data is then sent to an end-to-end case assessment workflow, which is processed using Discovery360. Discovery360 indexes disparate data sources into a single repository to enable leaner collections of relevant data, accelerating early case assessment and review processes. Discovery360 delivers relevant data to empower legal professionals to perform case assessment early and effectively.

The combination of Hold360 and Discovery360 allows customers to process data from initial litigation hold orders to the targeted collection, helping enterprises yield faster case assessments, minimize legal review fees, and enable timely responses to litigation events. It allows corporate end-users to have complete control over their legal holds, run their data through the platform and then determine what should be permitted for the actual process.

With Discover360 organizations can eliminate gaps in the process and seamlessly perform holding, collecting, ingesting, filtering, reviewing, and producing data in one easy-to-access secure tool. Businesses can research the entire repository in a couple of hours, quantify the potential risk even before a corporate or an outside counsel’s involvement, and ascertain how much exposure they have surrounding a specific legal matter.

Classify360 is a robust connector framework that enables users to achieve regulatory compliance by identifying redundant, obsolete, trivial, and risk data. The Classify360 platform allows users to look into large unstructured data silos, like Isilon or NetApp environments that have been repeatedly and inappropriately used over the last few years. It provides a single pane of glass to view data, at both content and metadata levels, enabling organizations to easily audit, gather intelligence on, and take informed action with the data.

2> Kindly shed some light on the benefits your clients reap through your products.

In my opinion, every sector is impacted by regulatory efforts now more than ever. A majority of companies in America don’t have these retention policies in place. They might be working with these unstructured data repositories, which might impact both their IT and legal department. We understand that data management cannot be done in isolation, so with our holistic approach, we aim to help law firms and other enterprises streamline their internal systems, track data, and integrate the systems with other sources that allow them to isolate relevant data that improve collections and case assessments, and ensures overall compliance.

With our products, our clients can scan vast amounts of data very quickly, take a quick snapshot of the risks in their storage system, quantify that risk, and then move into a long-term storage system like Amazon or Microsoft. We have ultimately helped enterprises gain a thorough insight into their data sets and quantify that workload at upfront. With our solutions, organizations can identify and remedy potential ROT and risk data, properly manage user access to data, and maintain compliance going forward.

3> Could you elaborate on a case study where Congruity 360 has helped its clients overcome their challenges around Legal Tech and attain desired outcomes with your solutions?

Our vast experience in the legal tech space has enabled us to work with a host of renowned entities in diverse industries. One such company is an A-listed law firm with over two dozen global offices, which had client and business data stored across multiple silos, with terabytes of files not tagged properly by the firm’s record management system. The firm required proper classification of sensitive materials received, access restriction, and defensible disposition in compliance with retention policies.

Using Classify360, the customer indexed records across the firm’s varied data stores, including staff laptops and workstations, file shares, and SharePoint. Classify360’s machine learning system used properly coded documents from a document management system to cluster and categorize over a million unclassified legal documents for the firm. Custom workflows enabled the firm’s record managers to view documents from multiple repositories and apply policies to them in a single user interface. The firm was able to retain a single copy of all the existing files, reduce storage, and archive or defensibly delete all non-active data.

4> What differentiates your solutions from the myriad of Legal Tech solution providers in the market?

As our tools are built from the ground up, we are able to leverage the latest advancements in technologies across every product that we’ve made. Although there are a lot of bottlenecks out there with these other legal tech tools, our ability to provide a thorough, reliable overview of relevant datasets in a matter of hours, not weeks, sets us apart from the rest of the pack.

5> What is the future course of action for Congruity 360? Any geographical expansion plans in the pipeline?

We have recently acquired a litigation support company in California and are planning to acquire an Ireland-based development company in the near future. I believe that even though our products have gained high traction, the only way we can stay ahead of our competition is to continuously invest in R&D, make some strategic acquisitions, and try to deploy our products across the globe. There are a lot of tailwinds in the industry forcing enterprises to take quick action to manage their data, and our tools provide organizations with the ability to quickly and responsibly comply with legal requests and regulatory edicts.