Relativity Fest 2019. Photo by Zach Warren/ALM. The reason this photo is a bit blurry is because there was a fog machine before the Relativity Fest 2019 opening keynote. This is a conference that wants to make an impression. Photo: Zach Warren/ALM.

I've spent the past couple of days at Relativity Fest, the conference that started 10 years ago as a user conference for the Relativity e-discovery platform and has since morphed into a behemoth, complete with gospel choirs at the opening keynote and parties at Chicago's McCormick Place.

During the conference, I've sat in on a few sessions and talked with a number of people, looking for not only what's being announced, but what it means for an e-discovery industry that continues to expand in style and scope. Coverage of the keynote's big announcements and the judges' panel have already posted on Legaltech News, but here's what else I've found.

The Bug Bounty: Originally announced during the Opening Keynote, Relativity has started a "bug bounty," which the company claims is one of the first centered on e-discovery. The idea of a bug bounty is common in other industries, essentially crowdsourcing finding vulnerabilities in a given application or platform by providing financial rewards for anything that is found. In this case, Relativity is offering researchers invited to the program up to $3,000 for critical security flaws found in its software. These researchers will be provided their own workspace within the 10.2 version of RelativityOne and 700 documents of test data. It's an interesting idea, particularly as crowdsourcing has come more into vogue in general. For an e-discovery industry where sensitive data abounds, it makes sense as well.

All Aboard: Relativity also announced yesterday two new members to its board of directors: Shannon Brayton, chief marketing officer at LinkedIn, and Kevin Scott, chief technology officer at Microsoft. They both bring tech experience, to be sure, but their appointment also furthers a trend that LTN has been reporting on for a while: E-discovery is big business, and the rest of the tech community is beginning to see that. I've heard from more than one person since the appointment of new Relativity CEO Mike Gamson just how indicative it was that an exec from a big tech company like LinkedIn was interested in the e-discovery community, and recent funding—$83 million for DISCO! Nine figures for Exterro!—speaks for itself. I'm not going to claim that e-discovery companies are hitting Microsoft levels any time soon, but it's clear that those analyzing the industry are seeing growth opportunities. I'm curious about the ramifications as more people in the wider tech industry continue to pay attention.

The Hyphen: Yesterday, I participated in the "State of the e-Discovery Union" roundtable, where my team of three (including Mary Mack and Kelly Twigger) faced off against another team of three (Meribeth Banaschik, Ari Kaplan and Ryan O'Leary), with two retired jurists (James Francis, Andrew Peck) serving as, well, judges for the two team's arguments. The whole panel was a lot of fun, with discussions ranging on everything from whether current biometrics is too "creepy" to whether lawyers are technologically competent. But the question that got the room going the most was a simple one: What's your biggest issue with e-discovery? My favorite answer was Kaplan's: why, the hyphen in eDiscovery/e-discovery, of course! For the record, I'm pro-hyphen (my teammates were very anti-hyphen), but I might have to solicit some opinions on this one.

Beyond E-Discovery: I expanded upon this in my Editor's Picks newsletter this week (you should subscribe if you haven't!), but I was struck this week that for an e-discovery conference, a lot of my conversations tended to revolve around topics that weren't purely e-discovery. Last year saw Relativity roll out its Trace compliance product as an initial foray to expand the core platform's capabilities, and this year a number of Relativity's business partners are taking that ball and running with it. Special Counsel vice president Douglas Brush, for instance, told me that clients of his are now using RelativityOne as a data breach response tool, organizing and analyzing data similarly to the middle part of the EDRM. X1 CEO Craig Carpenter, meanwhile, said more companies he works with are collecting data for information governance purposes, since the methods for doing so utilize the same workflows.

Aussie Aussie Aussie: As it has the past couple of years, Relativity Fest closed with an awards ceremony for the company's Innovation Awards. There was the normal pomp and circumstance with the presentation (and my Philly area-raised self will never turn down a soft pretzel), but what really struck me is that two of the big winners came from the same city—half a world away from Chicago. Clayton Utz, who won the Community Choice award for Best Innovation with its AcquiRE platform using Relativity for tracking land acquisition data, is based in Sydney. iCourts, which won Best Innovation From a Solution Provider with its GoX iPad review app, is also Sydney-based. I charted the rise of Australia's legal tech scene in a feature earlier this year, and less than three years removed from the country's first major TAR case, it's clear that Australia is increasingly a market to watch for tech and innovation.