Deloitte. |

Deloitte recently announced it entered into a new partnership with e-discovery software provider Relativity, previously known as kCura, as part of its “Deloitte Alliances Program.”

The new partnership, which comes after an almost decadelong working relationship between the two companies, will see Deloitte and Relativity working closely to leverage and innovate on Relativity's platform, including its cloud-based RelativityOne solution, to provide data governance solutions to Deloitte's clients.

Chris May, principal at Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory, who leads the company's discovery practice, noted that Deloitte approached Relativity about joining its Alliances Program, which currently includes “very few” technology companies.

He said that Deloitte pushed for the alliance because “we have a good understanding of [the Relativity] technology, and we think it will be a differentiator in the market and help us solve the problems our clients are having today.”

In addition, May noted that Deloitte wanted to have a “tighter integration with a software provider or vendor to develop solutions to problems we think are coming” in the future.

In the short term, the new partnership will allow Deloitte to take “the Relativity application as it exists today” and use its “flexibility and the APIs they already have made available to us to meet our clients' needs,” May said.

In the longer term, it is “entirely possible” for Deloitte to use the Relativity platform “to develop proprietary solutions to go to specific markets,” he added. “Mostly, I think that would be outside of traditional discovery markets, and we have a couple of ideas on how to do it.”

May said that, if such innovation were to occur, Relativity would be a partner in the development and release. “I think we are going to be going to market together to do this.”

Deloitte is no stranger to utilizing the Relativity platform. In 2016, for example, the company released an “Audio Assistant” tool for Relativity, which allowed for audio data transcription, collection and analytics.

Nick Robertson, chief operating officer at Relativity, noted that “In the last couple of years, there has been a community of software developers that have been starting to build more and more on top of the platform.”

He added, “One of our goals and what we bring to this relationship with Deloitte is to help them accelerate [their] innovation” with Relativity.

Exactly how Deloitte intends to innovate with Relativity remains to be seen. However, May noted that the Deloitte regards Relativity's software as not only just an e-discovery platform but also as a tool that can be used toward broader data governance needs.

“A lot of people in the industry sort of pigeonhole Relativity as a platform that is only useful for the review cycle of discovery, and I think it's much broader than that,” May said. He added, “You will see more and more solutions coming out of this alliance that proves that to the market.”

To be sure, Deloitte's new partnership with Relativity does not mean it will exclusively use Relativity software for all its e-discovery and data governance needs.

“We're going to continue use all [e-discovery] services that in some circumstances are in direct competition with Relativity. We are going to use whatever is best to solve our clients' needs,” May said.

Relativity itself has partnered with Guidance Software in 2017 to offer an integrated enterprise solution that covers the full EDRM life cycle.

Relativity's relationship with Deloitte has spanned nine years. Robertson noted that, over that time, Deloitte achieved “partner level certification,” which among other things means the company has “individually certified experts on staff” that are specialists at using Relativity software for e-discovery related needs.