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Unleashing the Power of the Legal Data Intelligence Community

Phil Saunders
Unleashing the Power of the Legal Data Intelligence Community Icon - Relativity Blog

Relativity is transforming review with seamless access to our generative AI document review solutions, prioritizing speed to insight with early case intelligence, and investing in the future of legal data intelligence with Rel Labs.

As we gather for Relativity Fest Chicago this week, I felt compelled to open our keynote with a moment of reflection. We could talk all day about stats and attempt to wow you with charts and cool stuff we’ve built. But where I want to begin is different. We’ve been training for this moment.

I’m nearly three years in here at Relativity and this community, and it’s so much more than just a job. It’s personal. There’s something super special about our space—this magical environment where the collective “we” work together to build better tech and awesome outcomes. The combo of boldness, fearlessness, and curiosity underpins this community and the team here at Relativity. A loyalty to a higher purpose. We share this uniqueness, and it provides us the firepower to unlock so much opportunity together.

Numbers do help tell this story: the number of passionate Relativity users in our community, the number of certifications you’ve all earned, the vast amount of truly worthy causes you have supported. But that’s not all there is to it. I’m talking about all the legal data challenges we’ve tackled together. We’ve put in the reps. We’ve been training for this moment. The time is now to unlock the power of this community.

Evolution ‘and’ Transformation

We can’t be Relativity without each of you, the work you do, and the input you provide. How far we’ve come in the last 24 years is as much a reflection of your collective effort as it is ours.

With your help, we’ve evolved to keep pace with the external influences that have seriously altered the “what” and “how” of what you need from Relativity: the explosion of data and varied data formats, the rapid dominance of short message applications, and the necessity and power of a cloud-native architecture. And of course, generative AI.

I’m incredibly proud of that evolution. Again, this stuff is personal. It’s brought us to where we are today, where RelativityOne actively helps legal data intelligence professionals manage and organize massive amounts of data, discover the truth in it all, and act on it.

News flash: This is way beyond just evolution. It’s transformation. We need to all get comfortable being uncomfortable as we continue to evolve ourselves and our businesses. Let’s enjoy the positive disruption of transformation.

Because what we’re all experiencing right now isn’t just a push to ingest new data types or go faster. It’s a step-level change in how the work is done. It’s going from “just” e-discovery all the way to Legal Data Intelligence—and learning to leverage artificial intelligence to augment human intelligence and help us do more, faster, and better.

We need this. Transformation is an intentional decision to change the way we build and deliver our offerings, so you can change the way you build and deliver your outcomes.

The good news? We have a community unlike any other I’ve ever seen. You all are the best at what you do—and we’re ready to deliver the next version of our best for you. So while what got us here won’t alone get us to what’s next, we have the investment, know-how, the desire we need to create a new motion for success. And, much more importantly, we share the personal attributes—boldness, fearlessness, and curiosity—we all need.

Commercial break: It's not enough.

As any good marketer will tell you, keep it simple and refine it to a singular message. I tried, but one thing isn’t going to do it. It’s just not enough. And as we worked through the critical items we need to tackle ahead of us, this “it’s not enough” theme was born.

Ok, so let’s go. We’ll start with “table stakes” and then run forward with three notable advancements.

A System of Success

By table stakes, I mean our commitment to our core system in Relativity: RelativityOne. Since our company’s inception, we’ve made a commitment to offering an open, extensible platform that served as both a system of record and a system of action. The former is where your most relevant and governed data lives; it’s the place you trust to be your source of truth. The system of action is where you execute tasks, make decisions, and orchestrate agents and workflows across multiple systems.

The “so what”? A system of record gives us the intelligence and a system of action is where that intelligence comes to life. Our core belief in these system-level capabilities has been enduring over the many years. For us to accomplish what we all need to, for us to get from here to there, we're advancing RelativityOne by further investing in our extensibility and emerging agentic architecture to scale in a world requiring nearly endless data compute and connect.

With our system of action as a launchpad, we acknowledge that it’s cool ... but not enough.

So I am super excited about our three big advancements shared in my keynote:

  • aiR for Review and aiR for Privilege are now included in the standard pricing and packaging for RelativityOne. We believe generative AI is the future of document review and we want to put these tools in your hands with no barriers. 

We believe in our bones that generative AI and our superpowered aiR capabilities will change the way you conduct reviews. Many of you share in this belief. In fact, more than 200 customers have used aiR across more than 1,500 workspaces to make more than 100 million review decisions. aiR for Review and aiR for Privilege are now integrated in our RelativityOne offering—so you can truly transform document review.

Yep, cool. But not enough.

  • We’re committing to a step function change to traditional early case assessment (ECA) by actioning early case intelligence for our customers and partners—leveraging the sheer horsepower of purpose-built AI in aiR (aiR Assist, coming soon!) closer to the point of ingestion to drive more proactive, efficient, and informed strategies and outcomes.

By building that case intelligence early on in a workflow, legal teams can continuously and proactively understand their data and the strategies it informs. Embedding aiR will power a knowledge layer that learns the facts, entities, privilege considerations, and other insights contained in your data corpus, enabling you to accelerate the speed with which you reach those insights and shape the early story of your investigation or case with better information, sooner.

Umm, still not enough.

  • We’ve established our new investment arm and innovation hub, Rel Labs, helping us take legal tech advancements a giant-sized step further—with help from our community. We’ve launched this new initiative to accelerate innovation and enrich the extensibility of RelativityOne amid rapid industry transformation.

We have this industry’s best community of builders: technology partners, service providers, and entrepreneurs who build on RelativityOne and help it do more, in more creative ways than our own team can come up with alone. Empowering and emboldening this community to do their best work by extending our platform has always been central to our ethos as a business. And now, in this transformative moment, we believe in that more than we ever have.

As part of Relativity's commitment to investing in legal technology through Rel Labs, we’ve also partnered with The LegalTech Fund (TLTF) as an investor and industry operating partner to identify and back legal technology's most promising startups and entrepreneurs.

Rel Labs is our new launchpad for innovation, and yeah, it’s personal. Because we get to build it with you. I’m really looking forward to it. If you’d like to learn more about applying to join us, visit this page.

It’s enough. For now.

The thing about both evolution and transformation is that there’s no set destination. It’s a fearless, bold journey—and it’s one we’re embarking on with you. We’ve been training for this moment, together. That’s huge, and we’re grateful.

If you want to nerd out a bit, check out our exciting product updates from our chief product officer, Chris Brown, and his incredible team of co-presenters.

For those in Chicago with us this week: I hope you’re having a great time, learning a ton, and making meaningful connections across our community. Please strike up a conversation with me or anyone on the Relativity team if you have questions or feedback to share—we’re here for you.

-- Phil Saunders

Graphics for this article were created by Kael Rose.

Exciting Product Updates from Relativity Fest Chicago

Phil Saunders is the chief executive officer of Relativity.

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