At Agile Data Solutions, I was in charge of developing a suite of applications for helping lawyers and paralegals search through, categorize, and produce gigabytes of data for use in e-discovery cases. I joined the company in May 2013 as Agile’s first employee and started with a prototype version of Start:Review, which had been developed by a group of undergraduate students at the University of Montana. My team would also inherit Start:Collect, another product that began as an undergraduate student’s capstone project. I was promoted to Technical Lead in August 2014 and stayed with the company until its closure in April 2017. Over the course of my time with Agile, I contributed to all aspects of the applications from their interfaces to their databases as an MSSQL/T-SQL, SQLite, C#, and XAML programmer and designer.
Start:Review – Agile Data Solutions’ flagship product can OCR, index, search, filter, mark, redact, manage, display, convert, and Bates stamp gigabytes of documents.
Start:Collect – This complementary application to Start:Review searches through gigabytes of documents for given keywords. It exports the found subset for a more detailed treatment in Start:Review. This reduces the processing time and amount of non-relevant information imported into Start:Review to speed up the user’s review process.
Start:Recognition – Start:Review and Start:Collect use this console application to OCR PDFs and images. I proposed the idea for this module and oversaw its development when my team discovered that our third-party OCR library, Nuance, had a tendency to randomly crash. This module safely separates the library from our applications. Start:Review also uses this module to redact text from PDFs with the Nuance library.
Start:Conversion – Created with a similar goal as Start:Recognition, instances of this console application are invoked by Start:Review to convert documents to HTML and PDF. For 32-bit versions of Start:Review, this module gives our third-party file converter library, Aspose, access to more memory. It also protects Review from crashes and hangs that emerge from within Aspose.