When we started this company in 2001, our aspiration was to build a boutique software consulting firm that specialized in collaboration and knowledge management tools.
When we called ourselves kCura—a mashup of k for knowledge and cura, the Latin root for management—we thought the name was clever. But more importantly, the domain name was available. Every other clever name proposed was, well, already taken.
The work was stimulating, exciting, and the adventure of running a business and carving our own path was thrilling. Over time, we would do more and more work in the legal space, building collaboration and practice management solutions for law firms. One of those projects was the genesis of what is now Relativity.
We had something special with Relativity and were lucky with our timing. It was 2007 and the market was starting to shift—legal discovery was going electronic and the volume of data was skyrocketing. The market needed a solution that could handle the unique demands of dealing with these large amounts of data. With the support of our early customers, we stopped consulting and put all our efforts into making Relativity.
Customer by customer, case by case, gigabyte by gigabyte, we worked with our users to develop Relativity into the market-leading platform it is today. We are incredibly grateful to our customers and partners for the time and investment they have made into the platform, and all the input and support they have given us.
Today, there are more than 160,000 users of the platform in 13,000 organizations—organizing data, discovering the truth, and acting on it for more than 150,000 active matters. In fact, more than 14 billion documents (4.3 petabytes of data) have been ingested into Relativity workspaces this year alone.
Thus, going forward, our company will be known as Relativity.
The change is natural for us. Developing and supporting this product has been our core focus for the last 10 years and our 750+ team members around the globe work hard every day to advance our vision of simplifying and accelerating how the world conducts e-discovery.
e-Discovery should be about focusing on the matter at hand and finding the truth. There is still much work to do to remove the messiness, the slowness, and the risk.
But what do we mean when we say simplify and accelerate?
- Delivering a single technology platform that can power any project. We strive for Relativity to serve the needs of law firms, corporations, and government agencies, and be a platform our partners can continue building their businesses on. To do that, we need to make sure the product is extensible, fast, secure, intelligent with embedded analytics and machine learning, and provides the richest capabilities spanning the e-discovery lifecycle—on-premises and in the cloud.
- Connecting Relativity to everything we can. We will create an interconnected e-discovery experience: Identity can easily span across instances, instances can connect to one another, and Relativity can connect directly with key sources of enterprise data (like O365) and other market-leading technologies. Our goal is to help users more seamlessly and automatically facilitate the transfer of data anywhere, reducing risk and significantly speeding up the entire process.
- Creating a network effect for our users. With so many skilled professionals and organizations using the platform across all segments in our industry, we want to create an ecosystem where cross-party collaboration becomes easier, best practices are shared, templates and applications are easily exchanged, and innovation spreads. We want to attract disruptive software companies and startups to the ecosystem and seamlessly bring their ideas to our users. With so many forward-thinking minds working together, the pace of innovation in this ecosystem can accelerate, while a vibrant and healthy community invigorates and motivates all the members within it.
Our name changes, but the vision remains the same: Simplify and accelerate how the world conducts e-discovery by bringing the entire process and community together in one open, flexible, connected platform.
We want to thank you for sticking with us through our journey over the past 10 years—and are excited to tackle the tremendous challenges of the next 10 years with you, as we work hand-in-hand to advance this vision, as Relativity.
