N8N Relativity Audit
Automated matter audit workflow that surfaces stale Relativity One matters and notifies DRIs via Slack.
The Problem
Large eDiscovery programs accumulate matters in Relativity One that go stale — review projects with no activity, workspaces consuming storage for closed cases, matters where the DRI has changed and nobody is watching. Manual audits are time-consuming and happen infrequently, meaning stale matters persist for months.
The business problem: stale matters cost money (storage, licensing) and create compliance risk (data that should be purged sitting in active workspaces).
Approach
The REL ONE Audit workflow runs on a scheduled trigger in N8N and executes a multi-step pipeline:
- Matter inventory — pulls active matter list from a Google Sheet maintained by the legal ops team
- Activity check — compares last-activity dates against configurable staleness thresholds (30/60/90 days)
- DRI lookup — resolves the responsible attorney or project manager for each stale matter from the directory sheet
- Report generation — populates a Google Docs template with matter details, last activity, storage usage, and recommended action
- Slack notification — sends a formatted DM to each DRI with a link to their report and a response deadline
Python handles the Relativity One API calls for activity data. N8N orchestrates the rest.
Outcome
In production use. The workflow runs weekly and has reduced average matter-staleness audit time from a manual half-day process to zero — it runs overnight and DRIs have reports waiting when they start their day.
What I Learned
N8N's error handling requires explicit design — a single failed Slack DM can silently stop the workflow without the right error branches in place. Building retry logic and a failure notification channel is as important as the happy path.