Continuing our history lesson on the Relativity Innovation Awards, let’s take a look back at what we like to call the tech categories’ adolescent years: 2015-2018. They were brimming with energy and still finding their feet, but leave us with a lot of happy memories.
Take a moment here to live for today and finish up your submissions for this year’s Innovation Awards! Applications close on June 30, 2023. If you want to be part of this story, submit your application here.
The Innovation Awards really started to mature during this time. Not only were our jokes getting less corny (some might say that’s debatable), but we really leaned into building a space of celebration for our customers and individuals who were pushing boundaries in the industry.
In 2015, we launched the Community Choice award—inviting everyone in the e-discovery community to vote on their favorite Innovation Awards submissions. In 2018, we announced new people-centric categories. This ensured that we not only recognized the technology being built, but the individuals who were having the greatest impact on the community as well.
During that time, we also noticed an evolving maturity in how our platform was being utilized. As teams and organizations were coming across new, more complex data types, we saw a rise in the different and unique use cases our community was solving with Relativity. It wasn’t only about optimizing the many stages of an e-discovery project, or filling workflow gaps. Teams like yours were coming up with entirely new ways to leverage Relativity, tackling unexpected data challenges and branching out beyond e-discovery altogether to add value for their organizations and clients in other functions.
That’s a trend that continues to this day, and we’re constantly blown away by all the creative ways our community puts Relativity to work. So, in the hopes of inspiring some creative innovation in all of you, today’s look back at the Innovation Awards of yesteryear focuses on those alternative use cases. Sit back, enjoy this look back at some award-winning technology, and give yourself some time to brainstorm your own solutions, too.
2015: Simplifying Data Access
As mentioned, 2015’s Innovation Awards welcomed our first-ever Community Choice winner. Earning more than 4,000 votes from the Relativity community, Kroll Ontrack (now KLDiscovery) took home our first trophy in this beloved category. Their application, Kroll Ontrack Nearline, helped users identify non-critical data and retrieve it on demand without having to reprocess the data. This helped cut costs and reduced review time.
On app development, Kroll shared: “We knew how easy it is to build a basic application in Relativity, and that the open platform also allowed for more complex solutions. But when we got started, we quickly learned that those aren’t mutually exclusive. We really saw how well things come together to create a seamless, intuitive, and robust application.”
2016: Tackling Contract Challenges
A year later, needing to quickly identify all contracts that would require third-party consent, Reed Smith developed Consent Tracker and took home the Enterprise award in 2016. By utilizing analytics to cluster and identify patterns in contracts, Reed Smith was able to home in on “hot clauses” that would require review. Finally, with dynamic objects, they were able to track consent status and provide automated notifications to clients.
2017: Innovating on Real Estate Matters
As we saw with Consent Tracker, the need to develop easy-to-use technology that solved unique use cases was growing in our community. That was certainly the case when Bricker & Eckler developed Land Tracker, our 2017 Enterprise winner.
Land Tracker met a need to organize thousands of documents related to real estate, spanning across multiple landowners, tracts, and lawsuits. The user-friendly application compiled documents from a variety of sources, even creating litigation documents with the click of a button.
2018: Better Duplicate Management
Finally, let’s take a look at one of our partners overseas: Clayton Utz. In 2018, Clayton Utz developed Provisor as a way to capture all duplicate records relevant for different notices, and capture information such as document providers. To streamline this manual process, they built a script to capture the information from the client’s load file and automatically create overlays into Relativity’s custom objects, allowing them to meet requirements, save time, and reduce client cost by 75 percent.
2023: What’s Next?
That’s a wrap for years 2015-2018 in our stroll down the Innovation Awards’ memory lane. With the use cases expanding and technology only getting more advanced, we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg so far. Stay tuned for the next part in our series as we take a quick pause to look at all of this year’s submissions!
And if you want a chance to be on stage this September, don’t forget to submit your application by June 30.
Michael Obregon is a senior pre-sales engineer at Relativity.
