Legal teams don’t struggle because they lack data. They struggle because there’s so much of it, and it’s tangled – sprawling document sets, scattered communications, and complex relationships that take time to work through. Early momentum gets lost translating real questions into brittle searches, pulling back piles of documents, and spending days confirming what you hoped was true.
Conversational AI changes the opening act. With aiR Assist, you ask questions in plain language, and the solution does the first pass of finding, reading, and connecting what's in the record. It returns grounded, referenced answers you can validate, so you can see the shape of the matter sooner, spot risk earlier, and make smarter calls about where to focus review.
We recently explored this shift alongside Steven Lutkus, director of forensic technology services at KPMG, who shared how aiR Assist has changed the opening days of his teams' matters – and how it fits into the broader workflow with Relativity aiR solutions, from early insight through aiR for Review and aiR for Case Strategy.
The result is faster, defensible early case insight with a lot less grind to get there.
From Data to Decisions, Sooner
Think of aiR Assist as a practical investigation partner. It helps you find the right documents, pinpoint the people who matter, and surface the messages that explain what happened and when. You stop guessing at keywords and start asking case-driving questions like "What evidence supports X?" or "Who is communicating about Y?"
This shift moves you from uncertainty to a working theory, fast. It's most valuable early, when budgets are still taking shape, the facts are incomplete, and you need to know whether an allegation signals real risk. Review still happens; the value here is cutting the time between intake and intelligent action by surfacing the themes and relationships that explain a dispute or investigation while you can still steer the outcome.
aiR Assist is built for the scale of high-stakes legal work. It operates on hundreds of thousands of documents per index, with the ability to span multiple indexes within a workspace – and it does more than “chat” with you. It retrieves answers and anchors them in the evidence. Every meaningful statement ties back to specific documents and excerpts so you can verify and defend the result because, in court or in front of your board, that defensibility is non-negotiable.
For KPMG, the combination of speed and traceability is what makes the difference in forensic work:
“In forensic investigations, the first few days set the tone for everything that follows. aiR Assist lets us ask plain-language questions and get citation-backed answers in hours instead of weeks, so the early decisions are informed ones, not guesses. It’s genuinely accelerated early case intelligence, and never at the expense of defensibility.”
— Steven Lutkus, Director, Forensic Technology Services, KPMG
Getting the Most Out of aiR Assist
aiR Assist is useful from the first question, quickly surfacing “unknown unknowns” through a conversational experience. You can ask key questions like, “Who knew about this before it surfaced, and when?” or “Where are people taking conversations off the record?” and let the solution do the finding and connecting.
It is especially good at surfacing what search terms miss or would take far longer to catch, like coded language, subtle references, or signs of conversations moving off-platform (“call my cell,” “step outside,” et cetera).
It’s important to be aware of some best practices. aiR Assist is built to return strong, representative evidence, not every instance of something – so it’s the wrong tool for “give me all emails from X” or “how many documents mention Y,” or proving a negative like “show me this never happened.” Use it for orientation and targeting: to understand high-level timelines, capture headline issues, and flag potential gotchas exponentially faster, then point your more exhaustive methods at exactly where they’ll pay off.
Putting aiR Assist to Work with aiR for Review and aiR for Case Strategy
Once you have that early understanding, aiR Assist becomes a force multiplier for the rest of the aiR workflow: pressure-test your approach on a small subset, confirm the concepts are real, then take what you’ve learned into the tools built to take your analysis to the next step.
You can use aiR Assist to make your review sharper: going in with tighter prompt criteria, a clear sense of which populations to focus on first, and the additional people and communication channels you might have otherwise missed. aiR for Case Strategy turns that same groundwork into chronologies, fact extraction, and deposition and transcript summaries, helping you build the full narrative and stay ahead of surprises. aiR Assist will help with triage; it won’t replace the “find everything” mandate when you need it, but it cuts the time you spend figuring out where “everything” actually lives.
“What makes aiR Assist stick for our teams is how naturally it hands off. We use it to find threads worth pulling, then carry those into aiR for Review when something needs to be run exhaustively, and into aiR for Case Strategy to build out the chronology and narrative. It’s not one tool doing everything – it’s the right tool pointing the others where the work is.”
– Steven Lutkus, Director, Forensic Technology Services, KPMG
A Seamless Addition to Your Legal Data Intelligence Work
Adoption matters as much as capability, and this is where we believe aiR Assist will shine. The interface is familiar – people already know how to ask questions in a chat-style workflow – so ramp-up is minimal. As a user at a global AmLaw 100 firm shared recently, “I used to do a lot of digging through things before; this was much quicker. It took maybe an hour or two and I got all the answers that might’ve taken me a few weeks to find previously.”
This intuitive experience invites broader participation: associates can produce useful early insights with little effort, and senior stakeholders can get answers directly instead of navigating email chains and intermediary searches. You get less back-and-forth and more time to validate and act on findings. When you can leverage outputs with citations and move straight into drafting, planning, or QC, the workflow feels less like data wrangling and more like legal work.
None of this makes your substantive legal tasks effortless, and it shouldn’t. aiR Assist simply removes the drag: it turns messy data into something navigable and keeps every answer anchored in the evidence. With the right permissions and auditability behind it, and aiR for Review and aiR for Case Strategy ready if your project demands more, it’s a way to move faster without cutting corners. Your expertise stays in charge; you just spend less time wrestling with mechanics and more on the decisions that matter.
aiR Assist is now generally available, included in 2026 RelativityOne pricing with integrated aiR in both review and repository workspaces. Reach out to your Relativity account executive to learn more.
Graphics for this article were created by Kael Rose.
