Relativity Short Message Format

eDiscovery
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Part of the challenge associated with capturing conversational data from services such as Slack or Zendesk is presenting it in a readily usable format for downstream eDiscovery processing, review, and productions.

Relativity Short Message Format is an interesting recent development. In essence, this looks like an extension of the RFC 5322 format with additional data to represent conversations, events, reactions, etc. You can read more about the details here:

https://help.relativity.com/RelativityOne/Content/System_Guides/Relativity_Short_Message_Format/Relativity_Short_Message_Format.htm

Is anyone in our community using RSMF? If so, do you consider it a successful output format for conversational data? Any other tools that support RSMF besides RelativityOne? Other viable alternatives?

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I have created the output using Cellebrite. I used the tool with the output at early stages of it being available as an add on to the regular license. There were a lot of teething problems. A lot of feedback and hours on the phone with their support, aventually they released an update with some of the problems fixed. Would be good if they added a path to show where a particular message came from. Reporting during creation did not reflect a true number of messages being exported therefore couldn’t verify what was pulled out for review. Not all message icons were supported I believe. Can’t exactly remember what were the rest of the problems, as not using the tool currently. Overall, it gave you a fair output for processing into relativity.We used Relativity on prem and only learnt after some time that on prem did not support the output fully (there was a problem with HEIC and HEIF files). Not perfect, but if you haven’t got any other tools to play with, at least you get some data in for a review.

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Thanks for sharing your experience, Magdalena! :slightly_smiling_face:

I’m not surprised there were some hiccups—both the software creating the export, and the one importing the data needs to be able to work well with the format for things to go smoothly. I expect the success of RSMF will ultimately depend on how well the specification is written and industry adoption.

I’m happy to see Relativity’s effort. Without a data exchange specification, complex data remains in the silo of the application that captured and/or parsed it. To get the data out of Physical Analyzer or UFED Reader and incorporate it into the mainstream review workflow is very valuable.

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