Litigation Support Tip of the Night - Relativity Short Message Format
Sean O'Shea, RCA, CEDS, CeDP
Legal Assistant at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP
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Relativity has a short message format which should be used for messages exported from Slack, Skype, Instant Bloomberg chat, or standard mobile phone SMS messages. A .rsmf file should include a .zip file attachment, that cannot be encrypted. A manifest file inside the zip file should have a JSON file at its root. These individual JSON files will include the names of participants in messages, and the titles of their conversations - a new and valuable source of metadata. The JSON files will also record events, and can show if a message was deleted. The format appears this way:
Relativity Short Message Viewer is used to display the messages in a workspace. A version of the message is recreated in html. Slightly different styles will be used for different message types. Slack messages look like this:
. . . and Bloomberg chats look like this:
The viewer includes a timeline that you can use to restrict a review to a particular date range.
Hovering over an icon will give you a summary of the number of participants, message total, and date range of a conversation.
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