Relativity Fest 2018 stage. Photo: Zach Warren/ALM

Relativity remains a giant in the e-discovery industry, as the company boasts 180,000 users, 191,000 active matters, and 113 billion files in the system. But to Andrew Sieja, CEO of Relativity, the focus right now is on a time of change.

“Our industry is going through some significant change and evolution, and it's really a continuation of decades of evolution,” Sieja said.

Sieja gave an update on Relativity's current focus during the keynote speech of Relativity Fest 2018, held in Chicago. As always, he started with panache—this time, he was introduced on stage by a mariachi band—but quickly pivoted to taking a look at the e-discovery industry.

And it was change that was at the forefront. Due to the cloud and new technologies, Sieja said, it's becoming a new era in e-discovery. “We are going to rethink and reimagine a lot of things, and a lot of this are going to change. The broad adoption of SaaS platforms will free up the intellectual energy of a lot of people in our industry.”

Relativity's SaaS offering, of course, is the cloud-based RelativityOne platform that the company introduced at Relativity Fest two years ago. Understandably, RelativityOne will be a key piece of the company's strategy moving forward, especially now that it has had the time to work out many kinks. “It was truly a slog at first … now we've been live with the offering for more than a year, and it's working really well for our clients.”

Sieja noted that back in June 2017, RelativityOne users had only looked at 637 navigations over the course of the day, and average document load time was 3.38 seconds. But now, there were more than 206,000 navigations in a given recent day, and median load time was 0.1 seconds. Now, Relativity has 29 RelativityOne customers and represents 11 percent of its under-contract revenue. Indeed, the platform has experienced growth as more users in the marketplace begin to trust the cloud.

For what's new with the platform, combining potential search terms into a single “entity” is one new function that may draw the attention of some lit support managers. Now, Relativity allows for the combining of different pieces of metadata, from different email addresses to phone numbers and more, into one “entity” profile after drawing from the active directory and running an automated name normalization. As Sieja put it, “We've made the entity a first-class citizen in the workplace, and it's accessible.”

The entity also allows for greater insight through Relativity's Analytics tool. There, users can break down a search by entities, as well as running what's called a “communication analysis” to see which entities are interacting.

Sieja also spoke on the Relativity integration with popular messaging tools such as text messages, Slack, Yammer, and even development platforms like Jira and Asana. The platform allows for native insight into not only text, but total number of messages, a timeline of messages, easy search, and more. Relativity also combines this with the entities feature to allow for multi-channel review, following a conversation across multiple platforms.

Sieja said this was a natural place for the development team to focus: “People are aware this data is out there, but they've had trouble wrestling with it as part of an e-discovery platform.”

With the growth in customers, the company has also begun focusing particularly on integrating user feedback and tightening the nuts and bolts of RelativityOne in particular. Sieja focused a large part of the middle of his presentation, for instance, on a new quarterly cycle for update and API changes; global expansion with data centers in Brazil, the EU and Australia; automated security processes and customer-managed encryption keys by the end of the year; and increased system transparency into document viewing and tracking users.

He also focused on data storage in Relativity One, as the company is introducing new, flexible data tiers in addition to the previous Staging and Review workspaces. The Repository workspace will used for early case assessment and storing documents for future use, while Cold Storage allows for storing inactive spaces for a long period of time.

“I'm really proud of the progress we've made since we met here last year, and we really couldn't have gotten here without our customers,” Sieja noted, pointing to RelativityOne success stories from Epstein Becker Green, Rio Tinto and D4 Special Counsel.

But even the nuts and bolts have some new flair. For instance, Sieja focused on the programmability of the platform, particularly processing. In fact, he said, those who are so inclined can now run an entire e-discovery instance entirely through code. “We're working hard to make processing a non-event, and in order to do that, we need to make it faster and more programmable,” he said.

In addition, Sieja spoke on increased Case Dynamics functionality, such as the company's investment in transcript functionality. “We truly believe that legal teams will get a tremendous amount of value, if we do it right,” he explained.

It may not have been the flashiest presentation compared with past Relativity Fest earth-shattering announcements like the RelativityOne introduction, but it's those nuts and bolts that will drive the future adoption necessary for innovation and, yes, change, according to Sieja.

“Together, this community, we can together reimagine the future of e-discovery,” Sieja said, in closing.