State of the Relativity Union: What to Know From the Relativity Fest Keynote

Andrew Sieja, founder and CEO of Relativity, welcomes attendees to Relativity Fest 2017 in Chicago. October 23, 2017. Photograph by Zach Warren/ALM Media.

 

So far, 2017 has been a year of change for e-discovery giant Relativity—even the company's name changed from the previous kCura to reflect its flagship product. And at Relativity Fest 2017, Relativity's eighth annual spectacle of a user conference and educational seminar, change was at the fore.

“We're in the business of e-discovery. And this business, e-discovery, is messy,” Relativity CEO Andrew Sieja noted during Relativity Fest's keynote. He would know: Sieja said that the company dealt with 164,000 users and 13,000 organizations in 43 countries, and 18.3 billion documents and 97 billion files ingested in the past calendar year.

But Relativity has a three-step plan to sort through this mess: a single technology platform centered around Relativity, a connected platform for an “integrated e-discovery at the core,” and harnessing the power of network effects for “an ecosystem where … innovation can be shared and thrive.”

Sieja broke down Relativity's recent improvements into these buckets:

Upgrades: In April, the company introduced an “Upgrade Readiness Program,” a four-step process to make premise systems upgrades more painless. By taking the upgrade a piece at a time, Relativity hopes to lower downtime and make the process easier. The company has done 91 upgrades in 83 organizations, with another 120-plus scheduled for the future. Now, he said, Relativity 9.5 is the fastest-upgraded version of the software ever.

“We want you to get the most value for your Relativity subscription; we want you to be on the latest version,” Sieja said.

Resiliency: “The big thing we worked to improve in 2017 is the resiliency of the system. … We wanted you to be confident that when you come in the morning, your data is just there,” Sieja said.

In practice, this means that the individual file handler is more resilient, fewer errors overall for users, and an improved error management process if errors do occur.

Fluid: The company worked on processing speed and refining Relativity's user interface to be more “fluid.” This means an upgraded UI with moveable widgets and automatic exporting, as well as faster processing.

He also noted that Relativity will be turning off the classic UI option and moving to the fluid UI full time in Relativity 9.6 next year, as well as in RelativityOne next month.

Document Viewer: In the updated document viewer, Relativity features notification of hidden content, and easier review of actions that have been done in the system through an “audit” sys. Dan Miller, who presented the product during the keynote, provided examples of this hidden content in action: hidden content like tracked changes in a Word document; hidden pages, columns and rows, and formulas in Excel files; and PowerPoint comments and speaker notes, all now available in the native view, meaning users no longer have to open the original documents.

In audit mode, furthermore, reviewers can zoom in on individual user's actions, document changes in the system, see what updates have been made, and revert changes of individual documents or in bulk. “If you want to change the actions of a bad reviewer over the past week, you can select all and say, 'You're done to me!” Sieja joked.

Analytics: Relativity Analytics has grown exponentially in the past year—a 143 percent increase of users on the system, with more than 70,000 users using it on all matters. “This, along with the work that you have done to amplify this technology, has our ecosystem at an interesting tipping point,” Sieja said.

That tipping point means a complete and diverse set of features, that are flexible for any project, with simple and powerful data visualization, Sieja said. In recent updates, Relativity has focused on automated and simple setup, expanded visualizations for more use cases, and active learning.

They also have built out both structured and conceptual analytics. In particular, one upgrade that received some cheers is that of new languages: German and Chinese email header support by end of the year, with other languages coming early next year. The company also touted how conceptual analytics like new APIs allow for broader management and a new cluster visualization—the dial, rather than the previous circle pack, allowing for easier coloring and sizing of data elements.

TAR: Sieja conceded that many people have asked Relativity to keep up with the rest of the industry when it comes to technology-assisted review, particularly when it comes to sample-based and active-based learning. He broke out upgrades in this area into three distinct goals: review fewer documents, make it easier to get started and keep it flexible.

Active learning means fully integrated analytics, real-time intelligence, flexible review and fast and efficient project starting. Reviewers just need to click “start reviewing” for a quicker and easier start to review. Reviewers training the system also don't need to rely on pre-existing documents in the set only: The case team can write a case summary in Word, select the text, and run a concept search on the document set against the content of the Word document. From there, analytics baked into the system will provide a document rank distribution and prioritized review progress.

Production: Of production in the past, Sieja said, “our customers had challenges using it at scale. Productions would crash, and customers had struggles using it easily.” Now, the company touts larger-scale productions that work more easily. “Going to production is stressful, and this is where customers are really under the gun. We want customers to be able to trust the system, no matter how large the case.”

Case Strategy: Fact Manager is Relativity's central repository for key case information, with a database that allows reporting and presenting on a timeline. This tool looks to remove unnecessary workflow steps to complete interviews faster and revisit case information at any point.

New this year is the ability to build a case online “so you can think like a person and not a database,” Sieja said. Notably, Sieja bemoaned Relativity's current transcript tool, and said the company is looking to introduce a new tool shortly within Fact Manager. This, he said, would “do all the stuff that a good transcript management tool should do. … Our ultimate goal is to be your transcript management tool.”

Among the features of this updated transcription tool are the ability to identify people in a transcription outline more easily, identify facts in the transcript easily that can be sorted and edited in a list view, make these facts trackable and searchable for all reviewers in the case, and allow easy linking back to the transcript itself from other parts of the connected platform.

RelativityOne: The full SaaS implementation launched in February this year. Now, Relativity boasts 14 customers with multiyear subscriptions, 471 million documents ingested into the system, 1,139 users, ISO 27001 certification, and even a recent launch in London. “This is not a lightweight version of Relativity; it's the full-service version that you love,” Sieja said.

“The real potential with RelativityOne in my opinion is that it has the potential to unlock the creativeness of this entire community,” Sieja added. The company hopes to get people on the platform through the immediacy of the cloud system: Immediate upgrades mean you don't have to say no to a case because of an old infrastructure, Sieja argued, or worry about losing client data due to constantly upgraded security.

RelativityOne was the main topic of conversation at last year's Relativity Fest, with many people for and against the system. This year, Sieja brought multiple people on stage for testimonials on the system. One in particular—Scott Lombard, senior vice president at e-discovery company JND—was one of those against the movement last year, he said, even walking out of last year's keynote. But now, he said JND is 100 percent cloud-based on the RelativityOne system, with migration to the cloud system of all data taking about 90 days.

Security: Relativity's security program is dubbed Relativity Trust, which Sieja said has been a source of substantial investment in recent days. For both Relativity on-premise and RelativityOne, he noted that security was embedded in the product life cycle from day one, with Relativity running penetration tests and vetting third parties on a constant basis. Furthermore, the software offers project and user permissions, access controls, patch management and malware prevention. Everything in the Relativity platform is ISO 27001 certified, he added. RelativityOne runs on Azure and abides by Microsoft standards, with over 50 security certifications.

Sieja focused particularly on two-factor authentication, for which Relativity is building out a system that will be available in a few months. “Everyone should use two-factor just like everyone should wear a seat belt when you get in a car. But we don't, for whatever reason.” He said the focus of the new system is to promote efficiency, making two-factor safe, but also quick and easy to use, using technologies such as mobile-shared notifications and syncing to make sure only one version of a document exists at any given time. He dubbed it “security through convenience.”

In closing, Sieja noted that even with all of the updates, Relativity has no plans to slow down. “One day, one user, one gig at a time, we worked to develop Relativity and the ecosystem it is today.”

Andrew Sieja, founder and CEO of Relativity, welcomes attendees to Relativity Fest 2017 in Chicago. October 23, 2017. Photograph by Zach Warren/ALM Media.

 

So far, 2017 has been a year of change for e-discovery giant Relativity—even the company's name changed from the previous kCura to reflect its flagship product. And at Relativity Fest 2017, Relativity's eighth annual spectacle of a user conference and educational seminar, change was at the fore.

“We're in the business of e-discovery. And this business, e-discovery, is messy,” Relativity CEO Andrew Sieja noted during Relativity Fest's keynote. He would know: Sieja said that the company dealt with 164,000 users and 13,000 organizations in 43 countries, and 18.3 billion documents and 97 billion files ingested in the past calendar year.

But Relativity has a three-step plan to sort through this mess: a single technology platform centered around Relativity, a connected platform for an “integrated e-discovery at the core,” and harnessing the power of network effects for “an ecosystem where … innovation can be shared and thrive.”

Sieja broke down Relativity's recent improvements into these buckets:

Upgrades: In April, the company introduced an “Upgrade Readiness Program,” a four-step process to make premise systems upgrades more painless. By taking the upgrade a piece at a time, Relativity hopes to lower downtime and make the process easier. The company has done 91 upgrades in 83 organizations, with another 120-plus scheduled for the future. Now, he said, Relativity 9.5 is the fastest-upgraded version of the software ever.

“We want you to get the most value for your Relativity subscription; we want you to be on the latest version,” Sieja said.

Resiliency: “The big thing we worked to improve in 2017 is the resiliency of the system. … We wanted you to be confident that when you come in the morning, your data is just there,” Sieja said.

In practice, this means that the individual file handler is more resilient, fewer errors overall for users, and an improved error management process if errors do occur.

Fluid: The company worked on processing speed and refining Relativity's user interface to be more “fluid.” This means an upgraded UI with moveable widgets and automatic exporting, as well as faster processing.

He also noted that Relativity will be turning off the classic UI option and moving to the fluid UI full time in Relativity 9.6 next year, as well as in RelativityOne next month.

Document Viewer: In the updated document viewer, Relativity features notification of hidden content, and easier review of actions that have been done in the system through an “audit” sys. Dan Miller, who presented the product during the keynote, provided examples of this hidden content in action: hidden content like tracked changes in a Word document; hidden pages, columns and rows, and formulas in Excel files; and PowerPoint comments and speaker notes, all now available in the native view, meaning users no longer have to open the original documents.

In audit mode, furthermore, reviewers can zoom in on individual user's actions, document changes in the system, see what updates have been made, and revert changes of individual documents or in bulk. “If you want to change the actions of a bad reviewer over the past week, you can select all and say, 'You're done to me!” Sieja joked.

Analytics: Relativity Analytics has grown exponentially in the past year—a 143 percent increase of users on the system, with more than 70,000 users using it on all matters. “This, along with the work that you have done to amplify this technology, has our ecosystem at an interesting tipping point,” Sieja said.

That tipping point means a complete and diverse set of features, that are flexible for any project, with simple and powerful data visualization, Sieja said. In recent updates, Relativity has focused on automated and simple setup, expanded visualizations for more use cases, and active learning.

They also have built out both structured and conceptual analytics. In particular, one upgrade that received some cheers is that of new languages: German and Chinese email header support by end of the year, with other languages coming early next year. The company also touted how conceptual analytics like new APIs allow for broader management and a new cluster visualization—the dial, rather than the previous circle pack, allowing for easier coloring and sizing of data elements.

TAR: Sieja conceded that many people have asked Relativity to keep up with the rest of the industry when it comes to technology-assisted review, particularly when it comes to sample-based and active-based learning. He broke out upgrades in this area into three distinct goals: review fewer documents, make it easier to get started and keep it flexible.

Active learning means fully integrated analytics, real-time intelligence, flexible review and fast and efficient project starting. Reviewers just need to click “start reviewing” for a quicker and easier start to review. Reviewers training the system also don't need to rely on pre-existing documents in the set only: The case team can write a case summary in Word, select the text, and run a concept search on the document set against the content of the Word document. From there, analytics baked into the system will provide a document rank distribution and prioritized review progress.

Production: Of production in the past, Sieja said, “our customers had challenges using it at scale. Productions would crash, and customers had struggles using it easily.” Now, the company touts larger-scale productions that work more easily. “Going to production is stressful, and this is where customers are really under the gun. We want customers to be able to trust the system, no matter how large the case.”

Case Strategy: Fact Manager is Relativity's central repository for key case information, with a database that allows reporting and presenting on a timeline. This tool looks to remove unnecessary workflow steps to complete interviews faster and revisit case information at any point.

New this year is the ability to build a case online “so you can think like a person and not a database,” Sieja said. Notably, Sieja bemoaned Relativity's current transcript tool, and said the company is looking to introduce a new tool shortly within Fact Manager. This, he said, would “do all the stuff that a good transcript management tool should do. … Our ultimate goal is to be your transcript management tool.”

Among the features of this updated transcription tool are the ability to identify people in a transcription outline more easily, identify facts in the transcript easily that can be sorted and edited in a list view, make these facts trackable and searchable for all reviewers in the case, and allow easy linking back to the transcript itself from other parts of the connected platform.

RelativityOne: The full SaaS implementation launched in February this year. Now, Relativity boasts 14 customers with multiyear subscriptions, 471 million documents ingested into the system, 1,139 users, ISO 27001 certification, and even a recent launch in London. “This is not a lightweight version of Relativity; it's the full-service version that you love,” Sieja said.

“The real potential with RelativityOne in my opinion is that it has the potential to unlock the creativeness of this entire community,” Sieja added. The company hopes to get people on the platform through the immediacy of the cloud system: Immediate upgrades mean you don't have to say no to a case because of an old infrastructure, Sieja argued, or worry about losing client data due to constantly upgraded security.

RelativityOne was the main topic of conversation at last year's Relativity Fest, with many people for and against the system. This year, Sieja brought multiple people on stage for testimonials on the system. One in particular—Scott Lombard, senior vice president at e-discovery company JND—was one of those against the movement last year, he said, even walking out of last year's keynote. But now, he said JND is 100 percent cloud-based on the RelativityOne system, with migration to the cloud system of all data taking about 90 days.

Security: Relativity's security program is dubbed Relativity Trust, which Sieja said has been a source of substantial investment in recent days. For both Relativity on-premise and RelativityOne, he noted that security was embedded in the product life cycle from day one, with Relativity running penetration tests and vetting third parties on a constant basis. Furthermore, the software offers project and user permissions, access controls, patch management and malware prevention. Everything in the Relativity platform is ISO 27001 certified, he added. RelativityOne runs on Azure and abides by Microsoft standards, with over 50 security certifications.

Sieja focused particularly on two-factor authentication, for which Relativity is building out a system that will be available in a few months. “Everyone should use two-factor just like everyone should wear a seat belt when you get in a car. But we don't, for whatever reason.” He said the focus of the new system is to promote efficiency, making two-factor safe, but also quick and easy to use, using technologies such as mobile-shared notifications and syncing to make sure only one version of a document exists at any given time. He dubbed it “security through convenience.”

In closing, Sieja noted that even with all of the updates, Relativity has no plans to slow down. “One day, one user, one gig at a time, we worked to develop Relativity and the ecosystem it is today.”