Every complex case contains two kinds of evidence. The first is what people wrote and said: the emails, memos, and testimony that document review platforms are built to search. The second is what people did: the calls they placed, the payments they moved, the entities they formed, and the addresses they shared. That second category lives in structured data, and it is where link analysis does its work.
Link analysis is the practice of mapping the entities in your case data, the people, companies, accounts, phone numbers, and locations, along with the relationships that connect them, into a single visual network. Instead of scrolling through thousands of rows, you see the web itself: who is connected to whom, through what, and how strongly.
The methodology was not invented for litigation. It was refined over decades in the intelligence community, where analysts face the same fundamental problem litigators do: too much data, hidden relationships, and high stakes for missing a connection. SentVi traces its lineage directly to that world. The platform, formerly known as Sentinel Visualizer, was originally developed for the United States intelligence community and has spent more than twenty years being hardened by government and law enforcement use. Legal teams adopting it today inherit that maturity.
In practice, link analysis gives a litigation team four core capabilities. Interactive link charts visualize the full network and can automatically find the shortest path between any two entities, answering the question “how does person A actually connect to company B?” in seconds. Social network analysis metrics rank every entity by centrality, separating the key players from the periphery. Timeline analysis arranges events chronologically with a time slider, so you can watch relationships form and dissolve over the life of the dispute. And integrated geospatial mapping places your data on maps, including Google Earth and ESRI ArcGIS, when location matters.
None of this replaces document review. It answers the questions document review cannot: not what was said, but who was connected, when, and how. The video below walks through the platform doing exactly that.
