Last week on The Relativity Blog, we highlighted what’s changing with the Relativity Innovation Awards for 2025—and why we’re more excited than ever to celebrate our community onstage this October in Chicago.
As promised, we’re now back with a deep dive into our new awards. Read today’s article for a detailed guide on each category, plus information on how to submit an innovation or nominate a peer.
Let’s start with some quick background.
First, you’ll notice that all of our categories fall into two overarching themes: innovations (for which you’d submit an application, workflow, or other customization) and innovators (for which you’d nominate yourself or a peer). We’ve grouped those together in the below guide.
Second, you’ll notice that some of these categories feel similar to ones we’ve had in years past, and others are new. Most of the new ones are listed first, with the more familiar ones toward the end.
Take some time to give this a close read and familiarize yourself with this year’s program. Then, start sending those applications and nominations our way! We can’t wait to learn all about your team’s brilliance and share it with the world.
When you’re ready, you can start your submissions for the innovation categories here, and the innovator categories here.
Best Innovation: Beyond
The Best Innovation: Beyond award celebrates an exceptional innovation or workflow that goes—you guessed it—beyond litigation and e-discovery to offer a solution to an alternative task involving legal data.
Outside of litigation and e-discovery, there are a variety of ways you and your team may use Relativity. Think of contract reviews, FOIA requests, data breach responses, invoice review, document archiving and categorization, or any other project type that comes to mind.
This award is meant to recognize the huge diversity of work you do as Legal Data Intelligence professionals. Noodle on the solutions you’ve created to address exciting new challenges, make complex workflows more automated and repeatable, or otherwise build scaffolds around novel legal data challenges.
Best Innovations: Organize, Discover, Act
The following three awards seek to celebrate how our community helps bring Relativity’s mission—to organize data, discover the truth, and act on it—to life.
Best Innovation: Organize
This category recognizes an application that improves the accessibility, management, and efficiency of critical data. For example, do you have a legal hold automation that significantly enhances internal processes? Or perhaps you have a unique way of centralizing and categorizing data across workspaces? This category is for you.
Best Innovation: Discover
Here, we recognize an application that offers true transparency and intelligence into data sets. A winning application may leverage visualizations, analytics, or AI to help users not only understand what’s in their data, but also uncover the most important information faster.
Best Innovation: Act
The Best Innovation: Act award recognizes an application that best puts learnings into action. A winning innovation in this category might offer solutions that significantly improve outputs utilizing customized reporting, quality control, or other features that save time and costs for your team and clients.
Best Innovation: Workflows
Finally, this category recognizes an innovation from a team customizing Relativity’s default framework to create time- or cost-saving solutions that reduce clicks and stress, or otherwise improve productivity in day-to-day tasks—without the use of APIs, developers, or custom coding.
We have all had those moments where we find ourselves waiting way too long for a process to complete, or simply needing an easier way to do “a thing.” That thing could be tracking all plaintiffs related to a class action, creating a RAP with all the elements that the IP case team wants to use for every case (so it can all be installed into workspaces and templates), or comparing requests for proposal when seeking a service provider.
Maybe someone reaches out to their Relativity administrator or project manager to talk about these challenges. The next day, that colleague comes back with a brilliant approach, solving the challenge and making our lives easier. And they do it using what’s already available in RelativityOne—without any fuss over APIs or coding.
These are the types of workflow innovations we want to celebrate with the Best Innovation: Workflows award.
Best Innovator: Access to Justice
This award recognizes a team or individual who has demonstrated a commitment to empowering communities by providing technology and services to those in need at no or reduced cost.
We are faced with injustices every day, and the price of due process often inhibits access to legal services for the people who need them most. Those in the justice system understand this hard truth—and many in our community seek out opportunities to lend their brilliant minds and unmatched services to those in need.
They may provide direct legal support to individuals with limited means through pro bono efforts; offer legal assistance to secure or protect civil liberties, civil rights, or public rights for low-income or protected class individuals; or use RelativityOne (via the Justice for Change program) or other technologies, including generative AI, to enhance pro bono legal workflows or case outcomes. These are the types of teams and individuals we hope to celebrate with the Best Innovator: Access to Justice award.
Best Innovator: Legal Education
Our Legal Education category recognizes professors at academic institutions in law, paralegal, computer science, or applied science subject areas who are advancing the technical competency of the next generation of legal professionals.
As we move through our lives, we are constantly learning and educating. Our understanding of simple and complex topics shapes who we are and how we interact with the world. When it comes to exploring technology, litigation, e-discovery, data science, artificial intelligence, and many other subjects, we are reminded that we all must have a starting point. Often, that starting point is a structured educational approach that seeks to find the best, most innovative ways to educate learners who have varying learning styles, shrinking attention spans, and challenging work/life balance. Curating these educational experiences is no easy task and calls for bright minds who value their students’ education and think ahead to where they will land after their educational goals are met.
The Best Innovator: Legal Education award seeks to recognize those educators who have used innovative learning techniques to educate future leaders in the legal data industry; identified gaps in learning and developed solutions that positively impact students’ future careers; provided students or mentees with opportunities to get hands-on experience in Relativity and grow their Relativity, industry, and professional knowledge; and empowered students or mentees to own their learning through self-development opportunities.
Best Innovator: Customer Experience
This award recognizes an individual who builds excellent customer relationships, grows through feedback, and drives their organization to apply new technologies or processes to improve their customers’ experiences.
You work with your customers every day. You often anticipate what they will need, often before they do. They provide feedback and you adjust your ways of working to ensure they feel heard and recognize the changes you made to help make their work lives a little easier. You tackle their challenges head on and don’t give up until a solution is discovered. The time and effort you put into customer relationships show up in the resulting data (e.g., increased satisfaction scores, more projects heading your way). Your customers are happy, and it shows!
When we think of customer experience, this is what we mean and who we seek to recognize with the Best Innovator: Customer Experience award.
Best Innovator: Inclusion
This category recognizes an individual who is a catalyst for creating an equitable organization, industry, or community where everyone belongs and has opportunities to learn and grow.
At their core, most people want to be part of something bigger. They want to be seen, heard, and understood for who they are. Each person comes from a different perspective, with varying backgrounds and experiences that make them one of a kind and able to provide deep insights into topics and situations that, on our own, we may never have considered. Having these perspectives makes us all better, at work and at home.
Identifying ways to amplify the voices of underrepresented groups and empowering people from all backgrounds to share their stories, raising awareness of inequity and creating change, and championing systematic change within your organization or community to create a better, more equitable workplace or society—these are the criteria by which we seek to recognize the winner of the Best Innovator: Inclusion award.
Best Innovator: Stellar Women
As always, Stellar Women recognizes female leaders in the legal data industry who are creating opportunities for female peers to grow and shine.
The Women Tech Network provides evidence of growth of women in STEM roles; however, a gap remains. That gap exists in the legal field as well. But every day, we see the women in our community speaking up and speaking out, supporting each other, and succeeding in big ways.
With the Best Innovator: Stellar Women award, we aim to celebrate women who have embodied a spirit of “paying it forward” to build the pipeline of women in technology; broken barriers by questioning the status quo to work toward a more gender equitable workplace, industry, or society; and demonstrated a commitment to lifelong learning and sharing what they’ve learned—inside their organizations and in the greater community.
Start Submitting Your Innovation Awards Nominations
Nominations for all of our categories are now open. Please note that the deadlines for the innovation and innovator categories differ this year.
As a quick overview, here are your guidelines for submitting an innovation:
- The deadline to submit is Friday, June 13, 2025, at 11:59 p.m. Central time.
- Upon submission, you will need to provide the name, overview, and success metrics of your innovation.
- During the review process, our team may follow up to ask for additional materials, including: a brief recorded demo, screenshots, additional technical details, and/or a live demo with your team.
- Innovations created with either RelativityOne or hybrid environments with Relativity Server are eligible for nomination.
- You can submit your innovation here.
And here’s what you need to know about nominations for the innovator categories:
- The deadline to submit is Friday, May 23, 2025, at 11:59 p.m. Central time.
- You may nominate yourself.
- You may nominate up to two professionals in each category.
- You are not required to nominate someone in every category; feel free to fill in the one(s) you have in mind and leave any others blank.
- You can nominate an innovator here.
Once again, we’re proud of the evolution the Innovation Awards have made this year—and simply cannot wait to get to know the innovators and innovations you send our way during this nomination period.
Stay tuned to learn more about the awards, our finalists, and our winners in the coming months. And best of luck to you and your team!
Graphics for this article were created by Sarah Vachlon.
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