Your single source for new lessons on legal technology, e-discovery, and the people innovating behind the scenes.

The Journey to New Data Frontiers: What's on the Roadmap for RelativityOne

Chris Brown

Editor's Note: A full recording of this year's keynote is now available here.

We’re back! This community is a sight for sore eyes; we haven’t had everyone in Chicago with us since 2019, and boy did we miss it. Fortunately, the virtual reality of the last few years certainly didn’t put a pause on anyone’s productivity.

During the opening keynote at Relativity Fest, Relativity CEO Mike Gamson began by talking about how we’re working with all of you to activate our mission—to organize data, discover the truth, and act on it—in the real world.

Since last year, our global community has grown with data centers in United Arab Emirates, Ireland, France, India, Japan, and, soon, South Africa. We’ve also made meaningful progress on our product roadmap, delivering innovative, practical, and customized solutions—powered by the cloud and artificial intelligence—that help you accelerate your productivity, do more with less, and confidently achieve your unique goals.

It’s been an unpredictable few years. But your resilience and spirit of innovation remain, and these qualities will keep the Relativity community moving forward well into the future.

Here’s a bit of what we covered in this year’s keynote. To all those who attended Fest in 2022, in person or virtually, thanks for joining us. We were so glad to have you here.

A full recording of this year's keynote is now available here, whether you registered for Relativity Fest or not. You can sign in or register here to view all the other sessions, too, until December 16, 2022.

Connecting with Communities

Building and supporting our global community is the groundwork of what we do at Relativity. From our Relativity Fellows program—which empowers talent from often overlooked communities to explore careers in legal technology—to our Justice for Change program and On the Merits series, we see technology as a bridge for doing more. It’s a great privilege to offer a platform for telling your stories and enabling your efforts toward the pursuit of justice.

On the Merits: Labor Trafficking tells the story of how the Human Trafficking Institute, with support from our partner, Exiger, are fighting trafficking at its source. Watch it here.

Ultimately, we believe we have a responsibility to make a difference. We are uniquely positioned to do that by helping close the technology divide, creating academic and career pathways, and enabling our user community to give back, too.

Earlier this year, our employees, customers, and their loved ones came together in an unprecedented way to support those impacted by the crisis in Ukraine—especially those who fled to Poland, where Relativity has a significant presence. Through the generosity of many people reading this and others around the globe, we donated over $2.2 million to this important cause. Many Relativians have also volunteered to host Ukrainian families, act as medics, and more. And the team is still allocating additional Impact Grants to meet ongoing needs. We couldn’t be more proud.

Solving New Problems with AI

On the product development side, we’re embracing the potential of AI as we help our customers solve new problems related to unstructured, sensitive data in areas like compliance and privacy.

Leveraging the power of AI comes with serious responsibility. Don’t miss our closing keynote session, featuring researcher and activist Dr. Timnit Gebru, for a masterclass on ethical AI.

Here are a few examples of how we’re putting AI to work in use cases beyond e-discovery.

Contract Reviews

Contracts are complex but, of course, absolutely critical to most business transactions. Whether it’s M&A activities, real estate negotiations, or bespoke customer contracts—it’s a lot to keep track of.

Our recent acquisition of Heretik brings contract review to Relativity. Heretik was founded by former Relativians, with more than enough know-how to build a solid app for our ecosystem. Now called Relativity Contracts, and coming to RelativityOne in mid-2023, the solution leverages advanced machine learning capabilities to auto-extract and find data points in an agreement.

With it, you can automatically classify contract types and sections within each document; locate, extract, and store critical data points; and identify textual differences across sections or entire documents in a data set.

Your team can use these insights to understand your obligations, remove risk, and capture new opportunities—using the same familiar, secure platform you leverage for other legal and compliance reviews.

Data Breach Response

Data breaches are on the rise, and a recent survey of executives and security professionals found that dealing with one in 2022 costs an average of $4.4 million. The legal industry is a particularly rich target for data thieves, partly because you handle some of the most sensitive data out there—and partly because firms have historically been viewed as behind the curve on cybersecurity. With secure cloud platforms like RelativityOne, you don’t have to be an easy target—and many of you are already defending yourselves appropriately.

But breaches do happen. It’s a nightmare scenario, but the right technology can help teams quickly assess damage and minimize fallout. Text IQ for Data Breach is one example.

Text IQ for Data Breach is supported by pre-trained AI and machine learning models that find sensitive information across a range of data types. It continuously learns based on context and the inferred relationships of your organization, becoming more effective with each new matter. The solution finds people, aliases, and personal information, to generate an entity-centric report to aid your enterprise in quickly and accurately meeting notification deadlines.  

Swift notification is a crucial way of minimizing the damage caused by a data breach, and many savvy service providers and law firms in our industry are beginning to offer this kind of analysis as a new way of supporting their customers.

The keynote also covered new developments for Relativity Trace and Relativity Patents. Not familiar with these tools quite yet? Explore our communication surveillance and intellectual property coverage to learn more.

Optimizing and Automating Review-based Workflows

Review is our bread and butter. Making the review experience more palatable for admins and end users is how Relativity started our journey from underdog to industry leader in e-discovery software. And today, with the changing shape of data and the many ways businesses like yours can extract value from it, smoother, simpler document reviews are more important to more use cases than ever.

We’re committed to keeping up with the pace of change. So this year, we’ve doubled down on transforming your review-based workflows—including investigations and litigation—to help you manage your data and prepare it for review more efficiently, enjoy a better review experience, and leverage the power of AI to help you discover the truth faster.

Managing Your Data

Say there’s a new project in your lap. You don’t know where it’s going to end up or what the outcome will look like, but you do know where to start: by moving the necessary data from Point A (their native locations) to Point B (RelativityOne).

This isn’t as easy as plugging in a hard drive anymore; with more and more platforms used across business segments these days, often in the cloud, it takes a lot of shepherding to bring those documents into view. Here’s how RelativityOne can help simplify that effort so you can pull in data more quickly—and more securely.

Import/Export

We hear you: getting data in and out of Relativity can be tough if you aren’t a seasoned admin. Desktop solutions for this aren’t ideal for many reasons, and we know it’s challenging for distributed teams to track the progress of all jobs in real time with the current setup.

This is why we’re bringing data transfer capabilities to all our users—and significantly reducing the effort it takes to get data into and out of RelativityOne—with drag-and-drop functionality.

Our new import/export workflows will offer a truly end-to-end experience for all users. No more switching back and forth between different tools and tabs.​ Instead, setting up a new processing job is easier than ever, as unstructured data will be processed automatically. Additionally, a new Express Uploader app working in the background will maximize speed and deliver a seamless experience. And finally, all-new data sharing options and a centralized job page will streamline internal and external collaboration.​

All this will be available in RelativityOne soon. And stay tuned for more improvements—including long-awaited features like profiles, PDF import and export, export of custom data structures, and automated load file error correction—in the coming months.

iManage

This year, we’ve also added another connection between RelativityOne and a widely used enterprise platform in the cloud: iManage. This integration frees up case teams to use their knowledge and expertise rather than focusing on manual work, and supports continuous innovation using knowledge management tools.

With RelativityOne, you can collect data from iManage by custodian. Then, leverage iManage’s API to filter data based on workspace or folder, client or matter names, email metadata, keyword searches, and more. Data transferred between our platforms never leaves the safety of Azure. It’s another step toward a holistic solution for better litigation lifecycle management without so many workarounds.

Prepping Data for Review

Once your data is in RelativityOne, it’s essential to get it ready for your teams to review as quickly as possible. There truly is no time to waste. We’re helping to accelerate your speed to review in a few key areas this year, including increasing the power of our processing engine, introducing more automation to minimize manual steps along the way, and more.

Processing and Automated Workflows

Processing in RelativityOne continues to grow year after year. We’ve seen 5.5 billion documents processed in 2022—a 40 percent increase over data processed last year. And the product is evolving to keep up with your demand.

Notably, you can now process PDFs with Dynamic Web Forms, and we’re adding support for Apple iWorks files. We’re also about to drop an update that allows users to roll up processing text from embedded images into their parent documents—meaning smaller cases sizes and easier searches.

Users can also save time by: automatically kicking of processing jobs from both Collect and, soon, Import/Export; replacing errored files en masse; and leveraging Dynamic Workers, a cloud-native architecture for optimizing resource allocation and queue management in real time.

Even with all this help, managing your caseload can feel like a juggling act. Updating more indexes, processing more documents, preventing errors, managing reviewers—it’s a lot. But we can help with that, too, via Automated Workflows. This out-of-the-box automation helps drive efficiency by eliminating manual steps and time waiting for the system to complete actions, and it significantly reduces the risk of human error.

Earlier this year, our Copy to Workspace option gave you the ability to cascade automation throughout your cases with just a few clicks. Soon, you’ll also be able to sync changes to these workflows just as quickly and incorporate even more efficiency into your case setup, like automatically running mass operations you perform every time you bring in new data.

Learn more about how you can leverage automation and AI in RelativityOne here.

Translate

Over 300 million documents per month are run through our language identification engine—evidence of how many of you are dealing with multilingual data sets in your matters. But identifying the languages used in a data set is just one step toward gathering actual insights from those documents; after all, should they need review, you’ll also need to translate them.

Released this September, Translate in RelativityOne provides machine translations in 112 languages (and counting) right within the platform—no downloading, exporting, or uploading required. And it happens in minutes while preserving original formatting. Soon, you’ll be able to leverage Automated Workflows—which has already automated away 80 percent of tedious case setup tasks for our users this year—on this functionality, mass export translated documents for depositions or interviews, and more.

Improving Review and Production Workflows

Once all of this data is in RelativityOne and ready to go, the real work begins. This industry is always on the clock, and the deadlines are unforgiving in the face of growing data volumes. Technology should help streamline your efforts as much as possible so you can move confidently toward that finish line.

Short Messages

Short messages continue to be a critical data type for you to be able to easily review. Since releasing the ability to slice up short message files, we’ve added new capabilities to help you keep track of each slice’s parent. We also just introduced a new short message focus view that allows you to persistently filter out noise like channel joins/leaves, so you can focus on the message content that matters most.

Case Dynamics and Transcripts

Exceptional case management goes beyond the piece-by-piece review of documents. It also requires building a holistic strategy with a bird’s-eye view of all the important details. Our new case strategy solution will allow you to build fact chronology, annotate transcripts, organize your case, and prepare for depositions and interviews—which will ultimately help you provide the best advice to your clients.

Coming soon to this solution? Case Home, a centralized location in RelativityOne to review documents, build deposition outlines, collaborate, and prepare exhibit bundles—with a presentation mode.

Transforming the Investigator and Reviewer Experience with AI

We’re making thoughtful, strategic investments in how we utilize AI across Relativity to help amplify your team’s efforts, put actionable insights at your fingertips, and enable you to tackle modern legal and compliance challenges—all in a single, secure solution. We believe AI should seamlessly assist you, from start to finish, in every review project. Our product roadmap is marching in that direction.

Sentiment Analysis

You’ve been asking and we’ve been working. RelativityOne will soon offer sentiment analysis, providing machine learning-powered labels that indicate the presence of positive or negative tone in documents, in addition to emotions like desire, fear, and anger. You can then search on these behavior signals to quickly pinpoint items of interest or scan the top positive and negative sentences of each document. Additionally, we’re updating the document viewer to highlight sentences that contain behavior signals, so you can more easily see why documents were flagged.

Sentiment Analysis has been in Advanced Access for several weeks, and we’ve been fascinated to see how some of you are already incorporating it into your data exploration workflows. For instance, some teams have used it against court transcripts to analyze judges’ comments.

Data Visualizations

Another common request we’ve had in the works is improved data visualization in RelativityOne, and I’m excited to share that rollout on our new visualization experience begins in November 2022 (and will continue through 2023). We’re enabling new ways of data exploration through a completely new set of visualization types such as stacked area charts, flows, maps, and more.

Plus, colors used in these visualizations will be consistent and customizable across all widgets.

Review Center

Review Center is RelativityOne’s new destination for review management and administration; building it has been a transformative effort to bring the various components of managing a review project into a single interface.

The solution leverages prioritized review and built-in richness sampling to inform better queues and batches. It’s built with speed and reliability in mind, and offers customizable templates to help get you started as quickly as possible. You can track review progress with “metrics that matter” visualizations, and use a next-generation classifier to accelerate your projects.

The best part? No index setup is required.

Moving the Industry Forward

Every year, we come to Relativity Fest ready to shine a spotlight on how our community is moving the industry forward—combining technology and human intelligence to discover new and better ways of tackling each new challenge. In 2022, as always, you all delivered—and we’re excited to continue showcasing all these developments and accomplishments throughout the rest of the week.

We can’t thank you enough for being an unstoppable force for creativity, efficiency, and good fun in the work you do each and every day. It’s a privilege to help you do it.

See What Relativity Can Do For You


Chris Brown is the chief product officer at Relativity. He leads our product and user experience teams and is responsible for the development of Relativity’s product vision, strategy, and product roadmap in collaboration with engineering.

The latest insights, trends, and spotlights — directly to your inbox.

The Relativity Blog covers the latest in legal tech and compliance, professional development topics, and spotlights on the many bright minds in our space. Subscribe today to learn something new, stay ahead of emerging tech, and up-level your career.

Interested in being one of our authors? Learn more about how to contribute to The Relativity Blog.