At Its User Conference, Relativity Unveils New Tools for E

At its annual RelativityFest user conference in Chicago today, the e-discovery company Relativity announced several new tools and features for e-discovery, privacy and compliance, data management, translation, and more.

The product announcements were made during the conference's opening keynote presented by Mike Gamson, Relativity's chief executive officer, and Chris Brown, chief product officer.

Gamson said that the company had already made substantial progress this year on its product roadmap. Earlier this year, it acquired Heretik to expand its contract intelligence capabilities and offer integrated, purpose-built contract review. In April, it launched Relativity Patents, the first AI-based patent search and workflow tool designed for attorneys. Last month, it released Translate for RelativityOne, for AI-powered document translation.

"We’re acutely cognizant of the critical role technology plays in service of empowering our global community to tackle today's emerging and proliferating data challenges," said Gamson. "And we see this as our opportunity to activate our mission through bold innovation, strategic investment and remaining laser-focused on delivering the cutting-edge solutions our customers need to navigate an ever-changing data landscape."

Announced today were several new products and enhancements to existing products.

Further investing in the use of AI to enhance document review, Relativity said it is currently offering AI-powered sentiment analysis to limited customers and will make it available to all RelativityOne customers in the coming months.

Sentiment analysis uses AI to identify positive, negative and other targeted signals across data, which Relativity says can help reviewers better prioritize data for review and view documents within the context of communications.

Visualizations and integration with a document viewer will allow users to click into documents to see highlighted sentences that contain these signals or overlay sentiment across communications to identify and dig into key conversations, Relativity said.

Relativity provided the statement of Craig Macaulay, data scientist at the firm Phi Finney McDonald, who said that sentiment analysis identified 20 documents that were pivotal to a case his firm was working on – documents that may otherwise never have been reviewed.

"We don't often find a ‘smoking gun’ in our discovery," Macaulay said. "Using sentiment analysis that quickly identifies these powerful, relevant documents has been instrumental in painting a picture that helps us prove our case."

Relativity said it has worked to ensure that cultural biases would not influence the results delivered by the new sentiment analysis AI.

Also slated to be available to RelativityOne customers within the next few months is Review Center, a new dashboard for review management and administration, particularly for management of AI-driven document review and for queuing documents for active learning.

Relativity said Review Center will consolidate previously disparate tasks to produce a comprehensive dashboard to help users understand the nature and status of projects. Users will be able to set up workflow-based templates for reviews, better manage queues for reviews, and get an overview of the status of reviews, among other features.

Noting that the average number of data breaches increased 68% in 2021, Relativity announced several products aimed at data breach response and privacy challenges.

For one, it has expanded its Text IQ product to develop TextIQ for Data Breach, which it said will allows users responding to data breaches to reduce assessment time by as much as 75%, allowing action to be taken in a timely manner when it matters most.

Additionally, Text IQ for Personal Information will be integrated with Redact in RelativityOne and available in advanced access by end of year. Text IQ for PI will combine the redaction capabilities in RelativityOne with the AI in Text IQ to help organizations better adhere to evolving global privacy regulations, Relativity said.

It said that the product will automate and improve the accuracy of PI identification, cutting the PI document population for review by 50% and increasing the speed of review by 5-6 times.

Relativity said that its AI-powered communication surveillance product, Relativity Trace, which uses data cleansing to prevent alerts from being generated on duplicative or non-authored content, will expand its data cleansing capabilities in 2023 by removing more irrelevant content, such as cybersecurity disclaimers, salutations/greetings and duplicative content.

By the end of the year, Relativity will launch new import-export capabilities, enabling all RelativityOne users to more easily transfer data. The solution provides simple drag-and-drop functionality and eliminates the need for multiple tools.

Shortly after the release, an Express Transfer app will be available for large imports and exports to enable greater speed than ever before.

In addition, Relativity said it has partnered with iManage to create an integration that allows customers to directly collect documents from Cloud iManage into RelativityOne, via Collect. Users can stay within RelativityOne and kick off a Cloud iManage bulk export using key filters, ensuring only relevant data is collected and that the data never leaves the secure Microsoft Azure boundary.

Relativity said that it now offers Translate, a product that provides machine translations for 112 languages and more than 100 language pairs directly within RelativityOne, saving customers time and money in translations. Users can translated a single document or a range of files and have the translations rendered in the native view of the original document.

Soon, Translate will be supported with Automated Workflows, enabling triggers to update search and analytics indexes after translations are completed and mass exports of translated native documents for easy use in depositions and interviews, the company said.

In a preview call with Brown ahead of the keynote, he said that Relativity develops its product roadmap based both on customer feedback and by paying attention to the trends that are transforming and disrupting the legal industry.

"We want to harness the forces of disruption, not fight them," he said.

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring "the law's smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders." Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM's Litigation Services Division.