The Immediate ROI of Using Chronicle's Name Normalization
- Tim Randall
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
As document universes expand with the adoption of AI, the pressure and expense of correctly identifying privilege in those documents increases – as does the time spent by reviewers identifying participants and normalizing names.
Fortunately, review teams are no strangers to the complexity of privileged documents. They need software that justifies expenses with simple ROI formulas, multiple use cases, and integrations into existing workflows.
In multiple conversations with dozens of Milyli customers, I discussed the time-consuming approaches review teams used to identify participants and ensure their names appear in top-level Relativity fields.
My conversations confirmed that the majority of the review teams are required to manually extract names from threads and child documents into these top-level fields, often due to the inability of processing engines to do so. As a result, our partners who do not yet own Chronicle were required to clean up and normalize names entirely in Excel.
These discussions led to organizing the privilege review process into three different buckets with opportunities for cutting costs with technology.
3 Cost-Recovery Opportunities Identified in Privileged Document Review:
Review and Determination
Name Normalization
Logging
While tools like aiR for Priv or Forest AI help improve review and determination, Chronicle can trim the cost of #2 and #3.
The Numbers Explained
When name extraction was done adequately, either manually during review or with technology, teams could normalize between 20 and 40 names per hour. Whether this work was performed at an AM Law 100 law firm or a technology service provider, this number was consistent for logs ranging from 500 lines to 2,000 lines.
We also saw that as log lines increased and the number of names that required clean-up expanded, this per-hour number fell off quickly after roughly 5,000 log lines and 300 names.
We also discussed normalization rates with our Chronicle customers. Most teams provided numbers approaching between 20 and 40 names every 10 minutes, or roughly 240 per hour.
Benefit 1: The ROI
I'll start with a chart.
Comparing Name Normalization Rates:
Log Lines | Manual Normalization | Chronicle Normalization |
0 - 2,000 | 40 names/hour | 240 names/hour |
2,000 - 10,000 | 20 names/hour | 192 names/hour |
10,000+ | 10 names/hour | 154 names/hour |
Second Requests | 5-10 names/hour | 120-150 names/hour |
Most review teams shared that the majority of their spending was on the nuances of making privilege calls when reviewing for privilege, fighting threads and document families, extracting name aliases, and normalizing those aliases. Teams that incorporated Chronicle for normalizing aliases appreciated significant cost savings when choosing Chronicle for their project!
The infographic below explains the potential ROI in greater depth based on partner data. Please review it and contact me if you have questions or want to learn more!
Benefit 2: Way More Than A Priv Logs
We launched Chronicle as "a privilege log" tool, but since then, we've realized it can do a lot more than that. For example, it's useful in redacting metadata and improving Relativity's communication analysis.
Chronicle can also be used for:
Here are the two use cases I dove into extensively in my conversations:
[1] Internal Employee Investigations/Disputes
Employee investigations and disputes often involve review teams reading many documents while relying heavily on the names that appear in the Relativity coding pane. This process becomes problematic when document fields contain names with misspellings, common alternate spellings, nicknames, or honorifics. Review teams often share lists of known name associations and aliases with reviewers, which slows the review.
By using Chronicle, project managers can painlessly create mappings at the onset of investigation. Writing the mappings back to new document fields with Chronicle's apply normalization operation ensures review teams have access to a simplified view of names without major name variations, significantly reducing the time it takes per document to identify involved employees.
[2] Second Requests
Nearly every Chronicle customer discussed relying heavily on Chronicle's Name Normalization functionality when completing a second request. With document counts exceeding hundreds of thousands, these teams shared that Chronicle's Name Normalization was critical in meeting their deadlines.
One customer shared: "...and I've only used it on very large matters so far, but it's been a game changer--it's so helpful!"
Don't forget! Blackout's great for redacting during 2nd Requests, too.
Benefit 3: No Forced Change
Adding Chronicle does not mean you must rework every workflow. We want to help replace Excel where it's burdensome!
In this video, I show how normalizing names on a privilege log in Excel compares to the same task performed with Chronicle. The resulting side-by-side showed that even though I knew the normalized format for every alias on the log, doing the same work with Chronicle was significantly faster and freed up additional time for more thorough QC.
But this is where making a change makes sense. No one will break up with Excel anytime soon, given just how complex certain tailored workflows are. And that's fine! Even when your work product lives in a worksheet, Chronicle offers advantages.
Chronicle's Name Normalization provides ample opportunity to start from HRIS exports, STR lists, or CSVs of known mappings you created earlier in the project. Check out how easy it is to import work product, even ones that Chronicle has not explicitly created!
If you're interested in discussing how to improve your priv workflows with Chronicle and you are planning to attend Relativity Fest 2025, stop by the Milyli booth! Chronicle's Name Normalization with aiR for Priv is nominated in the ACT category, and I'd be happy to chat whenever there's time.
Author's note: I want to extend a huge "thank you" to everyone who shared their time and expertise with me. When gathering this data, I had the privilege of meeting with and interviewing a large number of talented and hard-working review team members and project managers from both existing Chronicle customers and non-customers. I'm immensely grateful for your support and enthusiasm, and I hope you find the information I outlined above useful.
- Sincerely, Tim Randall