eDisclosure Information Project

Relativity has reached an agreement with Silver Lake for an investment to support and accelerate Relativity’s growth in cloud-based eDiscovery, AI, and communication surveillance.

The press release is here. It emphasises Relativity’s dominating position in the market, with 300,000 annual users in 49 countries managing 145 billion files. Recent growth derives from a doubling of RelativityOne users in 12 months, and from the success of Relativity’s communication surveillance platform Relativity Trace. The Silver Lake investment will enhance both, with RelativityOne extending to four additional regions in 2021, and even more resources devoted to the artificial intelligence in Relativity Trace. There will also be investment in expanding Relativity’s offerings to law firms. Continue reading →

Redaction is one of those functions of which, mercifully, we hear little these days – or so I thought till this week. I wrote about it in 2008 after a calamitous .PDF redaction failure in the US. Redaction was then (and still is for some) largely a manual process involving two stages Mark for Redaction and Apply Redactions, and it was easy to forget the second stage (I know – I had to do it, though only once. I don’t think I missed any, but, in those days, how would you tell?).

if you missed the second stage, the redactions were reversible, and the underlying text could be read and recovered from the OCR text. Spreadsheets raised what were then almost insuperable difficulties.

Since then, the technology has improved, staff have been trained properly, and QA procedures are much better designed to pick up mistakes. The stakes are even higher now than they used to be, as privacy and data protection pushes itself to onto every discovery agenda. This week has brought us some new technology from Relativity to address the problem, and two embarrassing failures from people who ought to know better. Continue reading →

Relativity has acquired VerQu, a company which specialises in the migration and capture of communication data for record retention and compliance purposes. The press release is here.

Relativity itself has been constantly evolving to keep up (and enable its clients to keep up) with the ever-changing nature of communications.  The last time I had the chance to talk face to face with service providers was at Relativity Fest in 2019. My standard closing question when interviewing them is usually “What Relativity developments and pending developments excite you most?”. The ability to capture and manage comms data, particularly short message data, came top of most feature lists.

I spoke this week to Relativity Chief Product Officer, Chris Brown, and asked him what the VerQu products brought to Relativity’s already advanced capture tools. Part of it is a story familiar to any problem-solver – scraping away one layer immediately reveals others. The 2019 developments were a big leap forward for Relativity’s clients, but solving them brought others to the surface, not least the proliferation of collaboration tools and the vastly increased use of them as pandemic imposed a widely distributed user base. The acquisition of VerQu allows Relativity to jump over the next tier of restraints and friction-points encountered by users trying to capture ever more data from an ever-widening range of sources. Continue reading →

I have the luxury of writing about what interests me and what is important rather than about the things which seem urgent or time-sensitive, and Relativity’s late November news about its Australia expansion seemed worth leaving on one side until I could write about it properly.

There is quite a lot to unpack from a fairly short press release (that’s much better, by the way, than long PRs which use many words to say not very much).

Relativity’s approach to Australia has always seemed well-thought-through – they waited until they were ready, with a product and service package which worked well in the US and Europe, and then stepped into the market properly. The curve has been a steep one with, for example, a 40% increase in Relativity certifications (the best measure of user involvement) over the past year.

Once you have a product which people want, the next key thing is to employ the right people, not just to sell it but to support users. Relativity has recruited Georgia Foster as Managing Director APAC, bringing many years of experience in all the disciplines needed to promote both the uptake of Relativity and its use to its customers’ best advantage. Continue reading →

To most of its users, Relativity is a review tool for use in litigation or regulatory investigations. It is robust, does its job well, is well supported and, with the launch of its new interface, Aero UI, is user-friendly and easy to work with.

There are layers beyond that, however, which most users are not directly concerned with. Relativity Trace, for example, is a compliance and monitoring tool built on Relativity which diverts its functionality to a more proactive role.

Beyond that is a further layer which most users take for granted, but which matters very much to their administrators and clients. That is the implementation of security protection, keeping data safe against threats from outside or within. Relativity has thrown a great deal of resource at security in the last few years, both in terms of development and in the number of people employed with that function.

That has been recognised in two developments in the last few days. One is the attainment of FedRAMP Authorisation for RelativityOne Government, and the other is Relativity’s membership of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association. Continue reading →

At RelativityFest in Chicago, I interviewed Marc Zamsky of Compliance Discovery Solutions. I asked him why Compliance had moved to RelativityOne and about the benefits which RelativityOne brings to Compliance and its clients.

Marc Zamsky said that Relativity’s future lay with RelativityOne and that the future of eDiscovery lay in the cloud. The ability to run multiple processes at the click of a button was important on its own, even before looking at the processes themselves. It altered the whole approach to discovery, moving it towards the point where one can get quickly to looking at data and drawing conclusions from it.

For the clients, the main attraction was the security given by Azure in the cloud. It also helps them to build truly end-to-end processes, particularly with the arrival of Relativity Collect. Continue reading →

Many factors influence software buying decisions. You hear of organisations buying a particular product for the sake of one feature which it considers important. People buy software after long and detailed comparison or on the strength of what someone said in the pub. They buy because everyone else is, or because they want to be different. They buy because they like the person doing the selling, or because they didn’t take to the rival demonstrator. They buy because they understand the technology or because they don’t want to have to understand it.

Two factors are always relevant to a software purchasing decision. What does it look like? And what does it cost? These factors may influence different constituencies – the person who sits looking at the interface all day may have a different view from the one who signs the purchase order, but the one doing the authorisation will be influenced if the user interface will increase productivity and reduce errors.

Relativity has addressed both these things recently, with the launch of a new pricing model on top of its recent publicity for its new Aero UI. Both are covered in this article by Relativity’s chief product officer, Chris Brown. The context is both what Chris Brown calls “empowerment” (a theme at last year’s Relativity Fest), and the more mundane-sounding (but important) ambition to “make it easier for everyone to use” RelativityOne. Continue reading →

Pavan Kotha is a manager at Deloitte. I met him at Relativity Fest in Chicago where he won Relativity’s Lit Support All-Star Award.

Pavan Kotha is clearly a man who loves his job. He says that he likes to share his knowledge with the discovery community, and that the recognition given by the All-Star Award encourages this approach. He appreciates the support which Deloitte gives to its staff

I asked him what he found most exciting among the new Relativity functions. Like several others to whom I spoke, he most values the new ability to handle short message formats. Exchanges between people may take many forms – perhaps originating with an email, transferring to WhatsApp, and ending in a phone call. The result is complex to review and it is very difficult for reviewers to get a sense of the story if they work only with email. Relativity’s storyboard approach, Pavan Kotha said, gives reviewers an ‘eagle’s eye’ overview. Continue reading →