You may have heard, but the 2025 Innovation Awards have undergone a thoughtful transformation. A transformation that’s meant to help the awards more accurately reflect the evolving needs of our community and the direction of our platform.
This is because innovation isn’t just about invention. Sure, I automated my coffee machine with a Slack bot—but that doesn’t mean I’m redefining workplace productivity. It’s about intention. At Relativity, we believe that the most meaningful progress happens when technology is applied with purpose—with the purpose and intention needed to solve real-world challenges.
This year, we challenged ourselves to reimagine our award categories to spotlight the solutions that are pushing boundaries, streamlining workflows, and delivering measurable impact. Our 2023 Spirit of Innovation Award winner, Juan Ramirez shared, "As data challenges grow more intricate and technology advances, legal intelligence is undergoing a transformation. Innovators are at the forefront of this shift, shaping the future with groundbreaking ideas. It's inspiring to see their contributions recognized in the updated Innovation Awards categories."
Before we take a glimpse at this year’s new categories, which we hope will help to define this new era of innovation, it’s important to call out that this year’s Innovation Awards saw a surge in submissions that reflect the growing sophistication—and measurable impact—of legal tech solutions. These submissions included quantifiable success metrics, from cost savings and time reductions to adoption rates and AI accuracy benchmarks. One solution reduced redaction turnaround from weeks to under 24 hours, while another utilized generative AI to cut review volumes by over 90 percent, saving an estimated $225,000 on a single matter. These aren’t just incremental improvements; they’re transformative shifts in how legal teams operate at scale.
To see all of this year’s submissions and to vote on your favorites check out the Community Choice Best Innovation voting ballot!
Best Innovation: Beyond
This category honors solutions that extend the power of Relativity into new frontiers—beyond litigation and e-discovery. The Beyond award recognizes those who are applying legal data intelligence in creative, unexpected ways to drive operational efficiency and insight. No better example than those utilizing Relativity aiR to tackle fraud detection like JND, or HaystackID who created a comprehensive compliance infrastructure to address national security concerns, and CDS providing financial analysis to transform raw data into actionable insights by leveraging a mixture of existing Relativity features and their own proprietary technology.
These innovations demonstrate how legal technology can transcend traditional boundaries, unlocking new value. In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, this kind of cross-domain application is essential for staying ahead of emerging risks and opportunities.
Best Innovation: Organize
Data chaos is the enemy of clarity. The Organize award celebrates innovations that bring structure to complexity—enhancing how data is collected, processed, and managed within Relativity. From creativity with Relativity Legal Hold to Azure integrations, these solutions improve accessibility and control across workspaces. Take Lineal and CDS, for example, who are working to automate processes and improve lifecycle management and visibility. While Law In Order provides data conversion tools designed to streamline and accelerate document production.
By bringing order to complexity, these solutions empower legal teams to act with greater confidence and speed. As data volumes grow, structured workflows become a cornerstone of scalable, resilient operations.
Best Innovation: Discover
Discovery is more than a phase—it’s a strategy. This award highlights solutions that elevate how users search, analyze, and interpret data. Whether through advanced visualizations, conceptual analytics, or custom dashboards, Discover recognizes innovations that bring intelligence to the forefront of legal workflows. Teams like HaystackID and Sky Discovery are integrating generative AI into early case intelligence and document analysis to push these efforts forward. Herbert Smith Freehills is providing image classification and Forensic Risk Alliance is offering more clarity around search hits.
These innovations elevate discovery from a reactive task to a proactive intelligence function. In a world where data is both abundant and nuanced, strategic discovery is key to informed decision-making.
Best Innovation: Act
Once insights are uncovered, action must follow. The Act category rewards innovations that streamline redaction, reporting, and production—delivering results that are not only faster, but smarter. These solutions help teams move from insight to impact with precision and confidence, as Milyli and Allens did by streamlining privilege log and chronology creation. Or, how HaystackID is leveraging custom RDOs and CDS utilizes entity extraction that allow their clients to take better action across their data.
Turning insight into impact is where innovation proves its worth. In today’s high-stakes legal environment, speed and precision in execution are critical differentiators.
Best Innovation: Workflows
Sometimes, the most powerful innovations are born from necessity. The Workflows award celebrates the everyday heroes—admins and power users—who build elegant, out-of-the-box solutions to solve real problems without custom code or developer support. It’s about creativity, grit, and making the most of what’s available, proving that innovation comes in all shapes and sizes. Kilpatrick and Ashurst are doing just that by leveraging core-platform components to bring structure to fast moving legal projects. Control Risks are providing better insights into the battle against business email compromise while Intrepid is mixing aiR with CAL to reduce human-review of documents.
These solutions show that innovation isn’t always about big budgets—it’s about bold thinking. In a climate of constant change, adaptability and creativity are the true engines of progress.
Why These Changes Matter
By aligning the awards with Relativity’s long-term vision and product strategy, we’re not just recognizing great work: we’re reinforcing the values that drive our community forward. These categories reflect a shift toward more technical, outcome-driven recognition, and they invite every innovator—regardless of title or team—to showcase how they’re solving today’s most pressing data challenges, redefining what’s possible with AI in legal workflows It’s clear that innovation is no longer confined to the edges of our platform – it’s embedded in how we work, collaborate, and solve problems.
As we look ahead to Relativity Fest Chicago and the 2025 Innovation Awards ceremony, we’re excited to celebrate the changemakers who are not just using our platform—but transforming it.
If you want to learn more about all of this year’s innovations, and to vote for your favorites, check out our Community Choice Best Innovation voting ballot. Don’t forget, there’s still time to register for this year’s Relativity Fest to see who our winners will be!
Graphics for this article were created by Sarah Vachlon.
