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Best known as an e-discovery giant, Relativity is taking its first major steps into expanding its platform into the adjacent compliance field with the release of a new offering: Relativity Trace.

Relativity Trace is an add-on to the core Relativity platform that focuses on proactively monitoring internal communications for compliance purposes. The platform is geared towards regulated industries, particularly financial services, with an eye towards preventing issues such as collusion and price fixing, bribery and corruption, or unsound investment management practices.

The offering is available through either Relativity or the cloud-based RelativityOne, though the company says Trace's automation makes it “optimized for RelativityOne.” In addition to the core Relativity license required for the add-on, Trace is priced “per person being monitored,” though no specific prices have been made available at this time. Trace is available by contacting Relativity through the company's website.

Jordan Domash, general manager of Relativity Trace, told Legaltech News that Trace has been a year in the making. The impetus to launch the platform came after speaking with financial services clients and service providers who are increasingly worried about the large illegal communications-related fines handed down by regulators worldwide.

“These are real issues that are causing a massive impact in certain industries, and we think that what Relativity has done to the legal community… we can provide that same transformative change to the proactive side of the compliance industry,” Domash said.

Relativity touts Trace as an end-to-end compliance solution, with a wide range of features specific to the offering. These include:

  • Data ingestion, with automatic direct connections to more than 40 different data sources like Office 365 Bloomberg and Skype;
  • Post-ingestion data processing, with automatic indexing and implementation of custom scripts like data normalization or quality assurance; and
  • Rules to define relevant content and take action on data automatically, such as those that tag content automatically, and the ability to create alerts off of those rules.

Of course, as an add-on rather than a separate product, Trace also features the full suite of Relativity tools. Domash pointed Relativity Analytics in particular as having an impact when paired with Trace, as users can use the analytics to train a system over time to identify more compliance specific alerts unique to an organization. “I think the unique value of Relativity is applying this proven suite of analytical tools to superpower your compliance team's review process and go beyond just terms-based searching,” Domash said.

The expansion beyond just e-discovery into compliance is naturally part of the value proposition for Relativity as well. Domash noted that one of Trace's earliest customers bought a full implementation of Relativity specifically for the Trace add-on. And as more organizations begin to invest in compliance monitoring—Relativity's press release announcing Trace notes consultancy PwC as an early adopter—the company hopes to create an ecosystem of compliance-focused service providers similar to what it has in e-discovery.

And compliance monitoring may be the first expansion, but likely won't be the last stop for Relativity, Domash noted. “We think that by developing a hopefully large business outside of e-discovery, we can show that the Relativity platform is mature and extendable enough to be able to operate outside of e-discovery, and hopefully be a guidepost that our service providers or entrepreneurs can use to build other businesses externally as well.”