Relativity Fest Chicago is, at the heart of it, a time to joyfully bring this community together. Our goal each year is to celebrate you, in a setting steeped in learning: about our industry, the skills you need to build your career, all that’s new in RelativityOne, and what’s ahead. It is truly a celebration of our entire community.
As long-time fans, users, and employees of Relativity, one of our favorite events at Relativity Fest Chicago has always been the Innovation Awards.
The Innovation Awards give our team an opportunity to recognize some of the brightest members of our community for the incredible ways they support others, and use our platform to transform their work and serve their clients.
For 2025, we’re super excited to share that the Innovation Awards are evolving—mirroring the way our industry has evolved over the last few years. Keeping the focus on Relativity’s community and everything that makes this space so special, we’re jazzed to shine this spotlight in new and exciting ways.
Overall, our goal for the Innovation Awards remains fundamentally the same: to celebrate our community’s curious changemakers. We want to spotlight the innovators who build amazing things on top of our platform, update their processes to meaningfully up-level the way they work with their customers, support the next generation of professionals as they learn about the exciting world of handling legal data, and help empower their colleagues, neighbors, and peers.
Submissions and nominations for this year’s awards will open soon. Next week, we’ll share more details about each category for 2025—and invite you to throw your name or innovation into the hat to receive a trophy on stage in Chicago this October.
In the meantime, we want to do a little storytelling; read on to learn more about why we’ve made these changes (and what to expect between now and Relativity Fest Chicago 2025 this October 7-9).
Keeping Pace with Our Industry
The new structure of the Innovation Awards better aligns with Relativity’s mission: to help our community organize data, discover the truth, and act on it. More importantly, though, it aligns with what you’re asked to do every day—the extra-mile work that makes you a true expert within and well beyond e-discovery.
The Innovations
The Innovation Awards began here: in the spark of excitement our team feels every time we see the amazing applications, solutions, workflows, and customizations our users build on top of Relativity, day-in and day-out. More than a decade ago, we launched the Innovation Awards to share that excitement with the world at Relativity Fest Chicago. It’s been an absolute blast ever since.
Back then, our customers were already crafting solutions that went well beyond traditional e-discovery. Today, it’s become clear that those diverse stretch projects have simply broken the e-discovery mold itself: our community is full of well-rounded, exceptional Legal Data Intelligence professionals. This shift gives a name, model, and vocabulary—in a word, credibility—to everything your teams are asked to do in this great balancing act of managing huge amounts of data more efficiently while extracting maximum value from it.
As a result, in 2025, we look forward to celebrating innovations that focus on both traditional litigation use cases and the many ways our community is innovating for new disciplines and matter types.
Now, as before, the fundamental questions are: what challenges are our community facing; what qualities and values help them confront those challenges with grace; and where are they leveraging RelativityOne to solve those challenges in unique ways? It’s just that now, these challenges span focus areas like contract review and lifecycle management, data breach responses, personal data identification and anonymization, and operational efficiency (to name a few).
As part of this shift, you’ll notice that we are moving away from singling out specific company types by category. The new categories lean on that diversity of experience and focus on the amazingness you’re creating, rather than what sort of team it’s coming from.
The Innovators
Next, we took a step back and took a good look at the people making waves in the legal technology community.
First, the Education and Mentorship award is now the Legal Education award. Mentorship is just one of the admirable, impactful qualities that will be an important component of the judging criteria for this category (as it will for all other innovator categories!).
Similarly, it was clear to us that cybersecurity and AI must, at this point, be woven throughout everything we do in the legal world. We realized that calling these out as separate categories—and noting that we have the AI Visionaries program to shine a light on AI-focused innovators as well—during the Innovation Awards sort of made them seem optional. In reality, security best practices and AI savviness are critical to all of our success. Both are sure to come up across all of our innovation and innovator award submissions, as they have for several years now.
Finally, we also see so many of you stepping up to help those in need, whether it’s by offering reduced rates, finding creative solutions to narrowing the access-to-justice gap, or participating in pro bono work. It’s our honor to recognize that essential work with our new Best Innovator: Access to Justice award.
While these are some of our most notable changes, you might note a few other pivots, too. Our team is excited about shifting the awards to put the focus on you and your innovations more intentionally, and we look forward to seeing everything you have to share with us when applications open next week.
The 2025 Innovation Awards Categories
To sum up this year’s awards, we are excited to announce the full list of 2025 Innovation Awards categories.
Check it out below, and start thinking on the technology and people you may want to flag for us when nominations open next week.
- Best Innovation: Beyond
- Celebrates an exceptional innovation or workflow that goes beyond litigation and e-discovery to offer a solution to an alternative use case involving legal data.
- Best Innovation: Organize
- Celebrates an exceptional innovation that develops a solution or workflow that significantly enhances the use of Relativity's storage, structure, collection, processing, or overall organization of data within a workspace, or across multiple workspaces. The recipient’s solution improves the accessibility, management, and efficiency of critical data.
- Best Innovation: Discover
- Celebrates an exceptional innovation that develops a solution or workflow that significantly enhances the use of Relativity's visualizations, search, structured/conceptual analytics, review features, or fact identification features within a workspace, or across multiple workspaces, to bring greater strategy, clarity, and articulation of intelligence within a data set.
- Best Innovation: Act
- Celebrates an exceptional innovation that develops a solution or workflow that significantly enhances the use of Relativity's redaction, quality control, reporting, case strategy, or production features within a workspace, or across multiple workspaces, to save time and costs for users or clients while producing superior results.
- Best Innovation: Workflows
- Recognizes an individual who is customizing Relativity’s default framework to create time- or cost-saving solutions that reduce clicks and stress, or otherwise improve productivity in day-to-day tasks without the use of APIs, developers, or custom coding.
- Best Innovator: Customer Experience
- Recognizes an individual who builds excellent customer relationships, grows through feedback, and drives their organization to apply new technologies or processes to improve their customers’ experiences.
- Best Innovator: Legal Education
- Recognizes professors at academic institutions in law, paralegal, computer science, or applied science who are advancing the technical competency of the next generation of legal professionals.
- Best Innovator: Access to Justice
- Recognizes an organization or individual who has demonstrated a commitment to empowering communities by providing technology and services at no or reduced charge to those in need.
- Best Innovator: Inclusion
- Recognizes an individual who is a catalyst for creating an equitable organization, industry, or community where everyone belongs and has opportunities to learn and grow.
- Best Innovator: Stellar Women
- Recognizes female leaders in the legal data industry who are creating opportunities for female peers to grow and shine.
Keep your eye on The Relativity Blog next week, where we will take a deeper dive into each of the 2025 Innovation Awards categories and provide nomination links.
Graphics for this article were created by Sarah Vachlon.
