Legal data analysis platform, Relativity, has hired its new CTO from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and also announced plans to grow the company by more than 300 staff across 2019, in a major expansion drive.
Starting in March, Keith Carlson will join Relativity, where he will be responsible for the e-discovery platform’s technology and architecture strategy. He will also oversee its Engineering Delivery, Engineering Operations, and Production Engineering functions.
Commenting on the hire, Relativity told Artificial Lawyer: ‘At AWS Keith was General Manager, Payments and Fraud Prevention, where he developed one of the first cloud fraud prevention and detection organisations and grew it to where it was evaluating ten trillion pieces of data a day.’
‘Keith is excited to apply his extensive developer experience to help mature RelativityOne’s SaaS delivery model and expand Relativity’s reach into the unstructured data realm,’ they concluded.
At the same time the company is planning to hire 300 more staff this year. The company currently has around 850 people, across Chicago, London, Kraków, Hong Kong and Melbourne. So, this is an expansion of around 35% in one year – and that is a huge expansion for a mature tech company.
The company also told Artificial Lawyer that the new hires would mostly be in Chicago, and that despite the surge in growth they would not be looking for any additional external funding at present.
While we often see startups double in size over a short period, such as going from perhaps 25 people to 50, in Relativity’s case the company is already very well-established. Expansion on this scale demands a huge investment from a business, for example, consider the extra office space needed and the additional rent that will have to be paid, the cost of training staff, all the extra management time, and of course, all those additional salaries. It’s therefore a very signifiant expansion.
It also shows that Relativity is extremely confident about its growth prospects, as you don’t add so much additional cost to your balance sheet if you don’t believe 100% that the investment will pay off.
The news comes at a time when it is rolling out its SaaS product, RelativityOne, and continuing to expand its ‘App Store’ facility that allows users to tap into a range of other applications provided by Relativity partners, such as the M&A doc review system, Heretik, and the dynamic web data analysis system, Hanzo.
Consolidation is occurring across the legal tech stack. Relativity with its 13,000 customers globally wants to ensure it remains the “Adobe” of unstructured data investigation. Perhaps rather than acquiring companies to innovate, they prefer to build new features & functionality themselves. One could surmise that they’ll build in functionality that’s currently available through their App Hub. With RelOne they’re offering free unlimited analytics. Is that to keep Brainspace and ayfie from substituting their analytics?