(Photo by Mike Quartararo)
“Relativity Fest is an annual conference designed to educate and connect the eDiscovery community. It’s the place for legal and technology professionals to talk shop, meet new people, and have fun.” So says the banner on the Relativity Fest website.
This week, thousands of people in the legal technology industry descended upon the Chicago Hilton in downtown Chicago to celebrate everything Relativity. With more than 2,000 attendees, over 300 speakers, and 150+ educational sessions, Relativity Fest has become one of the largest must-attend conferences of the year.
This year, the conference kicked off with a keynote that featured Andrew Sieja introducing new CEO Mike Gamson. Readers will recall that Gamson joined Relativity earlier this year from LinkedIn, where he held a global solutions role. Andrew Sieja, who previously held the CEO role, remains as founder and has moved into an executive chairman role that enables him to focus more on product development and getting closer to customers, which are two areas he has always been passionate about. After all, he is a coder at heart.
Sieja described how he met Gamson and, although they were originally going to grab a drink together, they wound up just going for a walk. The next day, says Sieja, he called Gamson and asked, “What if you came on board as CEO?” The rest is history, as they say.
One-hundred days in, Gamson has endeavored to talk to every person who works at Relativity — no small task, given that the company now has 1,000 employees — and he’s been listening to customers of Relativity and promoting the vision of the company: “To simplify and accelerate how the world conducts eDiscovery.”
Gamson also highlighted some of the ways that Relativity is building community and giving back. The Relativity Fellows program, launching in 2020, is going to bring training and education to underserved communities in an effort to kickstart careers in legal technology.
But the big feature of the keynote is Relativity’s SaaS-based product, RelativityOne. It has come a long way in a short time, with the number of customers doubling in a year’s time and over five petabytes of data under management. Gamson introduced Chris Brown, Relativity’s new Chief Product Officer, who also recently joined Relativity with an entrepreneurial spirit and a track record of product innovation at technology companies.
Brown walked the 2,000 people in attendance at the Relativity keynote through some of the innovations within the RelativityOne platform, such as:
- A new solution for automating workflows for repetitive, time-consuming tasks like indexing data, imaging native files, OCR and more.
- A new and faster way to integrate and analyze data from mobile devices using Cellebrite’s LegalView application.
- The new Collect Now product update that provides a secure and defensible process for collecting cloud-based data from platforms like Office 365 and Slack.
- Satisfaction of the FedRamp program, which means Relativity meets the federal government’s stringent security parameters, and the rolling out of Relativity for Government.
Finally, Chris Brown demonstrated Relativity’s next-generation user interface, called Aero. The Aero preview showed off an intuitive and streamlined interface that is built for speed, minimizes the steps to complete tasks, and provides greater insight into the data in a Relativity workspace. Aero will be released in 2020.
Relativity Fest is quickly becoming one of the most significant legal technology events to attend each year, and just one day in this year was no different. With more than 2,000 attendees, 300+ speakers, and 170+ educational sessions, there’s a lot of information still to absorb.
Mike Quartararo is the managing director of eDPM Advisory Services, a consulting firm providing e-discovery, project management and legal technology advisory and training services to the legal industry. He is also the author of the 2016 book Project Management in Electronic Discovery. Mike has many years of experience delivering e-discovery, project management, and legal technology solutions to law firms and Fortune 500 corporations across the globe and is widely considered an expert on project management, e-discovery and legal matter management. You can reach him via email at mquartararo@edpmadvisory.com. Follow him on Twitter @edpmadvisory.