At Relativity Fest in Chicago, I interviewed Bryon Bratcher, Managing Director of Gravity Stack. The tagline on Gravity Stack’s website is “Delivering collective intelligence in law”; I knew there were connections with Reed Smith and with Relativity, but I knew little beyond that.

Bryon Bratcher said that Gravity Stack is a data company born out of Reed Smith. It is a solutions company that “builds things round data”. Reed Smith is its biggest, but not its only, customer.

It has four main activities – systems counselling for businesses without skills to undertake development in-house, managed solutions including data centre hosting for Relativity and other products, a data science team stitching together structured and unstructured data, and its own products.

One of these is called Periscope which, Bryon Bratcher said, is Gravity Stack’s flagship product, an eDiscovery Business Intelligence Platform sitting on Relativity. There are many moving parts in litigation, and Periscope connects to data products like Relativity, Nuix etc and to financial systems, all tracking to one interface.

Gravity Stack is demand-led, that is, it gets involved in things which clients identify as problems. These are not only law firms but include eDiscovery providers, corporate legal departments and others.

I was aware that Gravity Stack invested in contract review company Heretik, and I asked Bryon Bratcher why Gravity Stack had done this. Bryon Bratcher said that Gravity Stack is a Relativity shop. Relativity, he said, is a full platform “Swiss army knife” of legal technology on which many other things can be built, including Heretik.

Heretik brings assisted review and real intelligence to an organisation’s contract portfolio. Armed with that, you can start analysing risk, and move from being merely reactive about contracts to being proactive. This was a problem which Gravity Stack needed to solve, and it made sense to become a partner with Heretik, helping them to develop the products.

When asked where future developments lay, Bryon Bratcher said that contract management would continue to grow as a problem to be solved.

Home