This year, Relativity Fest London, our annual springtime conference, was our largest yet. Attendees joined us virtually from around the globe, and it was a privilege to see so many new and familiar names on the roster.
As with Relativity Fest Chicago, Fest London is an opportunity to get out into your world and tell you just what we’ve been up to here at Relativity. Even more importantly, it’s a time to recognise and celebrate what you’ve been up to. This year, as always, the answer to both questions is “a lot.”
Let’s take a look.
Recent Global Expansions & Investments
Since Fest London 2020, data under management in RelativityOne has grown by 98 percent in the EMEA region. During our Day 1 Keynote, we heard from the Relativity team—including CEO Mike Gamson, Chief Product Officer Chris Brown, and many of our talented product and marketing managers—who shared that we’ve delivered more than 350 new features to RelativityOne since Fest London last year.
Some of our favourite updates from this bunch include RelativityOne Redact, Connect, automated workflows that make artificial intelligence in the platform more accessible, and notable enhancements to Collect. In the months ahead, we’re on pace to deliver Collect integrations with 15 data sources by the end of this year; make it easier to produce short message data from RelativityOne; and translations on the fly powered by Microsoft’s Cognitive Services.
For the compliance teams in the room, we heard that Relativity Trace has come a long way over this last year, too. Trace offers all kinds of pre-built machine learning models to remove irrelevant content from your surveillance workflows. In fact, we recently saw its out-of-the-box spam and newsletter models recently reduced alert volumes by 12 percent.
Incoming features for Trace include dynamic rules that can integrate with any structured data to set up automatic alerts; trade reconstruction, which integrates trade data from your OMS or other systems to automatically create links with related communications; and a new control room, designed to expose new risks in areas like information barrier breaches and the sharing of private information.
These enhancements are only helpful, though, if they’re accessible—so we’ve also been investing in the reach of RelativityOne.
In our Day 2 Keynote, we shared that RelativityOne is currently available in 11 locations. And in 2021, we’ll have data centres in the United Arab Emirates and Ireland, too.
We also announced that we’re expanding our own team as well: for the first time, a dedicated team of Relativians will this year be based in Germany to support our customers in the DACH region.
A Holistic Focus on the Community
With this being our second virtual event in London, following a year of trying circumstances around the globe—and still in the swing of the COVID-19 pandemic—it’s never been more apparent that global social issues have a massive impact on our community and its future.
Much too familiar with the pandemic-related afflictions of Zoom fatigue and burnout, our team was keen to offer content that goes beyond the product updates and thought leadership sessions attendees expected. So, we introduced something new to Fest London this year: an Inclusion, Diversity, Belonging, & Wellness track.
These sessions included topics like “Starting the Conversation: Mental Health and Wellness in the Workplace” and “Walk the Talk on Diverse Hiring and Retention.” We’ll share more coverage of these unique discussions in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, we were humbled to hear some wonderful insights from speakers and attendees during the live events:
“Mental health and wellness, to me, is about having radiant health. This means you come to work fully and make health a top priority. Without your health, you cannot contribute much to work, family, or your community.” – Cherry Mangat, Relativity
“When it comes to intersectionality, I encourage people to be hyperaware of issues impacting others. Be aware of your colleagues’ burdens. Sometimes, something that be another news story for you may be re-traumatizing for someone else. Ask before talking about topics and ensure it is a safe discussion to have for everyone involved.” – Adrian Garcia, Mental Health Consultations LTD
“Passive allyship is a starting point and often a case of people committing to a program to stand behind cases whereas active allyship is taking the action. That is the key difference. Most people want to increase diversity and inclusion, but when it comes to actively promoting that, that is where there is a drop-off.” – Samuel Clague, The Stephen James Partnership
“We live in a diverse society globally. Diversity and inclusion is not just a moral, but a legal imperative that concerns all of us.” – Harvinder Chana, AlixPartners
“Ally is a verb. It is not a noun. It is not about doing it to be seen as a good person, but doing it when it is uncomfortable and when someone is not necessarily in the room.” – Karimah Campbell, Relativity
Stories from the Field
Of course, those diverse perspectives are what make the Relativity community so impactful. And their stories help drive all of us to make Relativity what it is.
During the event keynotes, we heard from the teams at KPMG UK, with whom we’ve joined forces to help the UK Post Office advance its e-discovery practices; and BDO, who have a presence in more than 160 countries and territories and have leveraged our new data centre in Germany to cement BDO Germany as the hub of their EMEA operations.
“Based in Germany, we have clients across the globe and over the last five years we strategically focused on expansion of our services to support and align with our global clients,” Steffen Idler, senior manager of forensic, risk, and compliance at BDO Germany, shared during his team’s segment. “For our team in EMEA, we needed a solution that was flexible and scalable and empowered us to handle critical client requests on a moment’s notice. With RelativityOne we are processing and hosting data in a secure platform that delivers the efficiency we need to best serve our clients’ global needs.”
In case you missed it, check out BDO’s story in the video below.
We know more of these inspiring stories are out there, and plenty were discussed during our networking events and the one-on-one meetings that happened during Fest London.
Remember: If you have a story to share with the world, we’re here to help! Whether it’s about an incredible innovation, a commendable colleague, or a step toward social justice, we’d love to tell your story. Reach out any time to tell us about it.
See You Again Soon
In my role at Relativity, I’ve had the opportunity to work with so many talented, innovative, and passionate members of the Relativity community both in EMEA and around the globe. Events like Fest London, where we get to highlight and celebrate that talent, innovation, and passion, underscore the amazing community by which we’re surrounded. Thank you to everyone who registered, attended, and participated in building such a great experience.
Our customers in the EMEA region continue to impress us with their growth and sophistication year after year. We can’t wait to see what new and exciting trends emerge next year.
And while we’re certainly excited by the energy of Fest London 2021 this week, we can’t wait to see you again soon. If, like us, you can’t wait until 2022, Fest Chicago is also returning as a fully virtual event this fall—stay tuned for information on registering soon.
