Relativity Fest 2019. Photo by Zach Warren/ALM. Relativity Fest 2019. Photo by Zach Warren/ALM.

 

Relativity continues to be one of the most widely used legal technology tools on the market—the company says it tallied 354,000 users in the past 12 months from 46 countries, with 129 billion files processed in its system. And for Relativity, its biggest yearly gala is Relativity Fest—the user conference of 2,000-plus attendees now entering its 10th year.

During Relativity Fest's opening keynote, the company detailed its major product changes and coming attractions. Here's the highlights of what you may have missed.

1. Aero UI Set to Take Flight: It's called Aero, and it's set to debut in 2020. Relativity chief product officer Chris Brown debuted the UI with a video and a live demonstration, noting that Aero is currently still at alpha stage and that "we're going to be working on it all in 2020."

One of the main selling points of Aero is speed, cutting down the loading times between documents, jumping in and out of lists, and more. With larger documents, Aero allows review of the beginning of a document before it is fully loaded, and Relativity's upgraded preview technology allows an early look at a document in a right-hand pane before fully diving in.

Brown said that when he joined Relativity late last year, improving the user interface was his number one priority. He drew an analogy to Microsoft Office, with a Microsoft Word product that used to have a number of toolbars now having a more simple look—while still retaining power behind the scenes.

"It knows when to serve that power, and when to melt that power away," he explained.

This new UI follows a number of incremental changes the company has made throughout 2019, drawing from a UI team that Brown said has tripled in size. Among these changes are a faster image and production viewer, an updated filters list, and the ability to group fields together within document analytics.

2. RelativityOne Remains the Focus: Similar to the past couple of years, the cloud has remained at the forefront of Relativity's strategy—it was the first of what Brown called the "four strategy pillars" for Relativity's products. He noted that the cloud platform now has support in seven global regions (with two more coming in 2020), 133% file count growth over the past year, and over 122,000 jobs on the platform so far in 2019.

Central to this year's RelativityOne strategy is storage and computation. A new storage tier, which Relativity named Store, allows for large batches of raw evidence stored for longer periods of time and closed cases to be held for multiple years, with security and disaster recovery built in. For computation, Relativity is progressively building on native cloud technologies through the Kubernetes system, which allows for multiple parallel enterprise workloads.

3. Overall Platform Changes: Within its core platform, Relativity made a number of changes across the EDRM aimed at streamlining and cutting down the time needed for various parts of the e-discovery process.

For collection, the company is building upon its Relativity Collect product announced earlier this year with a series of integrations and a streamlined interface to collect from different sources, such as Office 365. The company revealed at Fest a Slack integration into Relativity Collect through the messaging program's governance and risk capabilities, and that it is further partnering with X1 for computer endpoints and Cellebrite's Legalview platform for mobile end points.

When it comes to analytics, Relativity is building out automated workflows within RelativityOne. Users can create customer workflows, with a "trigger" to begin the process. From there, the platform allows for the automation of a number of different actions, from structured analytics to imaging and OCR to running a script. In the end, users can even automate posting a note to an outside platform.

Review is seeing an upgrade with the Viewer itself, particularly with a document preview that puts the Viewer to the forefront and allows for early viewing of documents. Relativity's partnership with Cellebrite for mobile discovery also includes integration with the Viewer, allowing for more simplified viewing of mobile messages.

Finally, production has seen an upgrade particularly in the platform's active learning projects. Now, it's possible to review Family documents right within the active learning queue if desired, giving users options for how to group documents. In addition, a new capability allows users to reproduce documents right from within Relativity if a user needs to make late changes.

4. RelativityOne for Government: As part of the cloud strategy, Relativity has heavily invested in security—the company's Calder7 team has grown to 55 dedicated staff since beginning in early 2018, and it says 10% of the company's revenue is now being invested in security.

With that comes security certifications, and the one Relativity chief security officer Amanda Fennell says the company has been chasing is the stringent FedRAMP certification for government security. Now, Relativity has received a government sponsor in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and is moving towards obtaining FedRAMP certification in collaboration with the EPA in 2020.

Once that is up and running, the company announced it will be offering a dedicated service offering, RelativityOne for Government, beginning in 2020. Many of the specific details of the service remain under wraps for now.

5. First 100 Days and Initiatives: This year's Relativity Fest represented the first for Mike Gamson as the company's CEO. Founder and now executive chairman Andrew Sieja introduced Gamson at the top of the keynote, and Gamson ran down some of the tasks he's taken on in his first couple of months: taking the Relativity Certified Administrator exam, meeting with a number of Relativity stakeholders, and speaking with every Relativity employee.

Gamson spoke on some of the core missions and values of the company, as well as introduced some of the justice initiatives the company is undertaking. One of those in particular is upcoming for 2020: the Relativity Fellows program, which aims to give those in underserved communities the opportunity for e-discovery education and training.

Relativity Fellows will be partnering with local community organizations to identify candidates, then teaching those candidates about the platform and the industry from within Relativity's offices with pay. The goal, Gamson said, is to ultimately certify those candidates, and place them in jobs in the industry.

"We believe very deeply that talent is distributed evenly, and opportunity is not," he explained.