RelativityFest kicked off last week with a song and dance number — well, a keynote followed by a song and dance number, anyway — welcoming some 1,834 attendees to Chicago’s Hyatt Regency. As with most user conferences, the opening keynote offered a platform to rile up the crowd with exciting new announcements. And the announcements were indeed significant, though they will end up making more waves with the people outside the ballroom this week.
Unlike the last couple years, where Relativity showed off the promise of new AI-enabled products in the “aiR” family — aiR for Review, aiR for Privilege, and aiR for Case Strategy — this year’s big announcement was less about what’s coming and more about what’s here right now. The products we’ve heard about as speculative forays into an AI-assisted eDiscovery future are going to become the baseline from now on, with aiR for Review and aiR for Privilege moving to a standard offering in RelativityOne. And aiR for Case Strategy, in Limited General Availability since March, will likely soon to follow.
For Relativity customers across the legal industry, this is a big deal. The problem with an announcement like this at a customer conference is that the folks in the room represent the self-selecting population of super users who already jumped at access for these products during their limited run. For this crowd, the announcement isn’t changing much about their day-to-day practice. Relativity aiR Privilege and Review have already been used by 200+ customers in 1,500+ workspaces and made some 100M+ review predictions, and those are the flavor of customers who fly to Chicago for a show. With the audience reacting more with nods of approval than raucous applause, a disinterested observer in the room might have dismissed this as a relatively — see what we did there? — mundane announcement.
But for the Relativity users out there who aren’t sending their people to RelativityFest — the sort of firms that may harbor some wariness over shelling out for new-fangled AI tools — it’s monumental. CEO Phil Saunders stressed that customers shouldn’t be satisfied with improvements when they really want perfection. Part of that approach is Relativity’s cautious product roll out, holding products in limited availability status until leadership is confident that those tools are ready for primetime. Understood through that lens, the announcement wasn’t about adding a new offering to a tier of customers, but a signal that Relativity decided that its aiR products have passed all the internal quality control benchmarks to warrant general release.
That’s a milestone moment and one that the customers who aren’t on the bleeding edge will appreciate.
Purpose Legal reportedly used Relativity aiR for Review to complete a 300,000-document review in just one week, which is the sort of task that used to require an army of junior associates, a lot of luck, and a truckload of Red Bull. And probably cocaine. With these products, it’s about to become routine. “Relativity aiR for Review helped us and our client address demands that otherwise would have been impossible to meet, enabling our team to complete a large-scale, complex review under an extremely tight deadline,” said Jeff Johnson, Chief Innovation Officer at Purpose Legal. “We reduced review time by 85%, eliminated more than 4,000 hours of manual work, and delivered cost savings of more than $70,000.” Now those sorts of gains are coming for everybody.
The second pillar of the keynote announcement dealt with the company’s drive toward the left of the whole EDRM equation. The newest member of the aiR family will be aiR Assist, a natural language search application intended to deliver insights for early stage case assessment. Along with aiR for Case Strategy, aiR Assist is promises “litigators can identify the ‘who, what, and when’ of a matter much earlier in the discovery process, prepare for interviews and depositions with clarity, and dramatically reduce the time required to analyze complex case materials.” In a press release in conjunction with the keynote, Antonio Avant, Director of Legal Technology at Troutman eMerge, described the early case assessment power of the tools, “From early case assessment to deposition prep, the platform helps us see the story we’re trying to tell while helping our attorneys ramp quickly, bring clarity to data sprawl and transform how we build our
cases.”
The final prong of the keynote addressed the company’s long-term vision. Saunders unveiled Rel Labs, a nod to the famous Bell Labs, to embark on investment and innovation projects. As he explained, the pace of innovation is too rapid for any one company to stay ahead of it. Through the Rel Labs initiative, Saunders hopes to identify and then invest in better and better tech.
The keynote wasn’t a flashy spectacle — at least until the aforementioned song and dance number — lardered up with future product announcements promising near sci-fi level results for lawyers. But it did stick to another unabashedly Saunders-driven theme: “get shit done.” This was a get shit done keynote that didn’t leave the audience with a ton of new toys to talk about, but a company explaining its own grind to get better results to more customers.
It’s an approach you don’t see often in the middle of this AI hype cycle, but it’s a refreshing one.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
The post RelativityFest’s Biggest Announcement Will Hit Hardest Far Outside The Conference Hall appeared first on Above the Law.
RelativityFest kicked off last week with a song and dance number — well, a keynote followed by a song and dance number, anyway — welcoming some 1,834 attendees to Chicago’s Hyatt Regency. As with most user conferences, the opening keynote offered a platform to rile up the crowd with exciting new announcements. And the announcements were indeed significant, though they will end up making more waves with the people outside the ballroom this week.
Unlike the last couple years, where Relativity showed off the promise of new AI-enabled products in the “aiR” family — aiR for Review, aiR for Privilege, and aiR for Case Strategy — this year’s big announcement was less about what’s coming and more about what’s here right now. The products we’ve heard about as speculative forays into an AI-assisted eDiscovery future are going to become the baseline from now on, with aiR for Review and aiR for Privilege moving to a standard offering in RelativityOne. And aiR for Case Strategy, in Limited General Availability since March, will likely soon to follow.
For Relativity customers across the legal industry, this is a big deal. The problem with an announcement like this at a customer conference is that the folks in the room represent the self-selecting population of super users who already jumped at access for these products during their limited run. For this crowd, the announcement isn’t changing much about their day-to-day practice. Relativity aiR Privilege and Review have already been used by 200+ customers in 1,500+ workspaces and made some 100M+ review predictions, and those are the flavor of customers who fly to Chicago for a show. With the audience reacting more with nods of approval than raucous applause, a disinterested observer in the room might have dismissed this as a relatively — see what we did there? — mundane announcement.
But for the Relativity users out there who aren’t sending their people to RelativityFest — the sort of firms that may harbor some wariness over shelling out for new-fangled AI tools — it’s monumental. CEO Phil Saunders stressed that customers shouldn’t be satisfied with improvements when they really want perfection. Part of that approach is Relativity’s cautious product roll out, holding products in limited availability status until leadership is confident that those tools are ready for primetime. Understood through that lens, the announcement wasn’t about adding a new offering to a tier of customers, but a signal that Relativity decided that its aiR products have passed all the internal quality control benchmarks to warrant general release.
That’s a milestone moment and one that the customers who aren’t on the bleeding edge will appreciate.
Purpose Legal reportedly used Relativity aiR for Review to complete a 300,000-document review in just one week, which is the sort of task that used to require an army of junior associates, a lot of luck, and a truckload of Red Bull. And probably cocaine. With these products, it’s about to become routine. “Relativity aiR for Review helped us and our client address demands that otherwise would have been impossible to meet, enabling our team to complete a large-scale, complex review under an extremely tight deadline,” said Jeff Johnson, Chief Innovation Officer at Purpose Legal. “We reduced review time by 85%, eliminated more than 4,000 hours of manual work, and delivered cost savings of more than $70,000.” Now those sorts of gains are coming for everybody.
The second pillar of the keynote announcement dealt with the company’s drive toward the left of the whole EDRM equation. The newest member of the aiR family will be aiR Assist, a natural language search application intended to deliver insights for early stage case assessment. Along with aiR for Case Strategy, aiR Assist is promises “litigators can identify the ‘who, what, and when’ of a matter much earlier in the discovery process, prepare for interviews and depositions with clarity, and dramatically reduce the time required to analyze complex case materials.” In a press release in conjunction with the keynote, Antonio Avant, Director of Legal Technology at Troutman eMerge, described the early case assessment power of the tools, “From early case assessment to deposition prep, the platform helps us see the story we’re trying to tell while helping our attorneys ramp quickly, bring clarity to data sprawl and transform how we build our
cases.”
The final prong of the keynote addressed the company’s long-term vision. Saunders unveiled Rel Labs, a nod to the famous Bell Labs, to embark on investment and innovation projects. As he explained, the pace of innovation is too rapid for any one company to stay ahead of it. Through the Rel Labs initiative, Saunders hopes to identify and then invest in better and better tech.
The keynote wasn’t a flashy spectacle — at least until the aforementioned song and dance number — lardered up with future product announcements promising near sci-fi level results for lawyers. But it did stick to another unabashedly Saunders-driven theme: “get shit done.” This was a get shit done keynote that didn’t leave the audience with a ton of new toys to talk about, but a company explaining its own grind to get better results to more customers.
It’s an approach you don’t see often in the middle of this AI hype cycle, but it’s a refreshing one.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
The post RelativityFest’s Biggest Announcement Will Hit Hardest Far Outside The Conference Hall appeared first on Above the Law.
