RelativityApp

Overview

Early career lawyers and paralegals become excellent at changing filenames. Tab, highlight, delete, tab, highlight, delete. At the speed of light, they move through the files in File Explorer, changing what could be hundreds of documents and billing the client a few Jacksons for it.

Unfortunately, this is business as usual at U.S. law firms thanks to the dominance of Relativity, a database storing documents collected during a stage of litigation called Discovery, when parties must exchange data relevant to the case. Litigation lawyers export files from Relativity all the time, and for some odd reason (one of the many mysteries of the legal industry), all exported files had numerical prefixes to their names. So, for example, when I export the files "helloworld.docx" and "thisisappt.xlsx", they would be named "01_helloworld.docx" and "02_thisisappt.xlsx". Since exports can involve hundreds, if not thousands, of documents, you can imagine why this is a task inducing hair-pulling.

RelativityApp solves this issue. It accomplishes one simple task: remove those godforsaken prefixes. Nothing more, nothing less, but great for that reason.

It's written in Python. To make it more accessible, I made a user interface using Tkinter and made it into an executable program via PyInstaller (.exe available on GitHub).