One Million Japanese Documents. One U.S. Legal Team. A Better Way to Review.

International Trade Commission investigations frequently involve large-scale document productions from parties operating across multiple jurisdictions. When a matter involves a respondent whose primary business language is Japanese, the discovery challenge is not simply volume — it is accessibility. A collection of one million Japanese-language documents is effectively unusable for a U.S. legal team without a solution that can operate at scale, preserve document integrity, and fit within the review platform the team is already using.

The traditional approach — retaining bilingual reviewers or translating documents through external vendors — creates its own problems. Translated documents often lose their original formatting, making exhibits and productions cumbersome. Bilingual reviewers operate in a separate workflow from the broader team, limiting collaboration and creating bottlenecks around the limited pool of qualified reviewers available at any given time.

BlueStar's AI Translation workflow was deployed directly within the client's Relativity environment. Rather than creating separate translated copies or exporting documents to an external platform, the translation was embedded in the native file — the original document structure, formatting, tables, and images were preserved, and the translated content appeared alongside or in place of the original text within the same Relativity workspace.

The result was a collection that the full legal team could access and review using their existing workflows. Attorneys who could not read Japanese could evaluate documents, code them, run searches, and collaborate on strategy alongside bilingual colleagues without waiting for separate translation queues. The matter's review timeline compressed significantly, and the cost per document was a fraction of what external translation vendors would have charged at the same scale.

The preserved native-file format also simplified production. Translated documents could be produced in the same format as the originals, with full metadata intact, without the formatting irregularities that commonly accompany vendor-translated productions.