As part of its Relativity Fest London event, (today and tomorrow), eDiscovery and investigations company Relativity has highlighted its rapid growth in the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East & Africa), which includes the UK, stating that ‘data under management for this region grew 98%’ since its last event in London in 2020.
While data volume may not be the most precise way of measuring an eDiscovery company’s growth, it does represent a clear expansion in the use of RelativityOne on this side of the Atlantic.
The expansion has come after starting to host RelativityOne in Germany and Switzerland, with additional team support to be added in the former. The company also said that the SaaS platform will be available in ’13 geographies’ by the end of the year.
In terms of the global and EMEA expansion, Steve Couling, Managing Director and Vice President of Sales at Relativity, said: ‘As Relativity continues to grow globally, we’re committed to driving our EMEA presence forward with the expansion of our RelativityOne footprint and addition of our new Germany team, who will bring unmatched expertise on local market requirements and ultimately best serve our customers’ unique needs.’
Another area of interest that the company has highlighted is the launch this March of its Redact service. The solution offers automated image and native redactions. In the short time the feature has been available, Relativity customers globally have ‘created nearly 40 million redactions and highlights on over 175,000 documents’, the company said.
Other areas where they’ve been busy include new features around data collection for compliance work and investigations, such as:
- ‘Accelerating Collections: Beginning in Q3, customers will be able to seamlessly run targeted and defensible collection from Microsoft Teams in RelativityOne Collect. This expands upon capabilities to collect from Outlook email, OneDrive, Slack and Google Workspace (currently in beta). With the recent acquisition of data management software company, VerQu, (Jan 2021), Relativity is accelerating its ability to collect from a rich array of cloud data sources, targeting 15 by end of year and over 50 in the years ahead including additional chat and collaboration platforms.’
And on the machine learning side of things, one key announcement that stood out involved active learning:
- ‘Later this year, Conceptual Analytics and Active Learning will be added to automated workflows, creating a user experience where a new workspace is created, documents are uploaded, data is deduped, visualizations are displayed and Active Learning is ready to go with one click. Additionally, integrated document translation capabilities with Microsoft Cognitive Services will be added as well as investigative capabilities that will allow users to better understand people and their emotions within their dataset.’
Commenting on this, Chris Brown, Chief Product Officer at Relativity, concluded: ‘As data volumes skyrocket, the shape of data changes and teams move more work in-house, it’s critical that our customers are able to automate and streamline processes and gain insights quickly.
‘Not only did we anticipate this change in the shape of data, but we’ve been actively investing in next generation legal and compliance features to power the discovery of truth in these datasets in the years ahead.’
All in all it looks like Relativity is moving through its strategy of growing globally, and is clearly making an impact now in the EMEA region. It all goes to show there is life for eDiscovery beyond the massive US market. They are also not standing still in terms of the core offering and are now turning out a series of improvements to help them compete.