My Diary of Relativity Fest 2023

I had been really looking forward to Relativity Fest London as this would be my first big event since Legal Week 2020. Unfortunately, there were travel disruptions due to engineering works on the east coast main train line so I took the decision to fly.

Flying brought its own challenges, such as getting up in the middle of the night in order to get to Newcastle in time to fly to Heathrow. As my alarm went off at 02:50 I was surprisingly ready for my days excursion, the taxi was booked for 03:30 and I was raring to go!

Newcastle Airport is a cool hours’ drive from home but clear roads led to a nice comfortable journey, if only the London end would be so smooth.

The morning was gorgeous, weather was sunny, and I could feel it was going to be a tremendous day, full of enterprise and reconnecting with people I hadn’t seen in a few years.  

We managed to get an earlier air slot, so we were up and away and in no time, and 40 minutes later we were beginning to descend into the Capital and I was fortunate enough to have a window seat and a prime view of how good London was looking on this sunny morning.

Registration at Fest was a breeze and its nice been greeted by the team from Relativity as they’re always cheerful and it had already been a long day by the time I arrived so it was re-energising.

The Keynote was really interesting and set the tone for the whole day. I will come onto my highlights later but I think it is important to recognise that this is the last time that Steve Couling would be running the event as he has been promoted and is moving to Chicago in June. Steve has done a phenomenal job in setting up the international Relativity teams and I have had the privilege of meeting him a quite a few occasions. When I set up the FTE department for CityDocs Steve along with Graham Jackson welcomed us with open arms with a few beers into the Relativity Community. The positive attitude of the International team is set by his excellent tone in how to deal with customers and how he treats them. My experience is exceptionally positive and all my interactions with the that international team set very high standards for any future vendor I would come to work with, as they would be compared to Steve, Paul Gordon, Steve Rodriguez and Graham, which is a tall order to follow. Good luck in the new role Steve!

My highlights and takeaways from the Keynote:

TextIQ for Personal Information

Leveraging machine learning and natural language processing to help the user identify personal data. Using context and document understanding to zone in on the personal information to achieve greater accuracy and ultimately reduce the risk.

Relativity say that this comes as a self-service tool with some preconfigured AI based detectors that automatically highlight personal information. The AI models can be retrained and refined to further fine tune the results.

This looks like a great tool and something that will greatly improve challenges when working with personal information and will make life easier when producing for areas such as Data Subject Access Requests (DSAR’s).  

Import / Export improvements (automated workflows)

For many years the way to get data in and out of Relativity has been the reliable Relativity Desktop Client (RDC), now there is a new web interface that allows you to both import and export. The import comes with some excellent automated workflows so that you can drag and drop your data and the ingestion, discovery and publish will complete, the automation will even push it through to review centre, making sure that any index is updated along the way.

I am a huge fan of automation as it reduces the human error and saves so much time and money for clients.

Review Centre

This functionality makes managing review streamlined and simple, it allows the user to have a much cleaner way of pulling documents to review.

Communication Analysis

This is Relativity’s answer to Brainspace and wow its looks awesome.

For the full Keynote, why not check it out here.

Tracks:

As usual Relativity Fest had some cracking tracks and a full listing can be found here. I was particularly interested in End-to-End Short Message: Tackling the Paradigm of a Unique Communication Type as I wanted to see the state of play and the roadmap for dealing with short messages. Throughout the sessions I attended various presenters spoke about the fact that short messages would soon overtake emails in the same way that email data surpassed paper scans. Dealing with short messages has its own issues, most platforms are unable to de-dupe the messages and Relativity is no different, in fact it isn’t even on the roadmap to start to de-dupe in 2023.

There are some really cool features that Clare Longworth and Mike Deuerling soke about and one that I particularly liked was the ability to splice messages up so when it comes to productions you can produce just the message(s) you need to and you do not need to include all the irrelevant messages.

As mentioned above currently Relativity has no de-dupe scheduled for its short messages, one option available is to reach out to the brilliant folks at TCDI, who have been de-duping this data type since 2018! They also have some really cool emoji analysis, allowing the users to tally on the number of different types of emoji as they convert the icons into short codes for searching.

All in all it was a great event and I am looking forward to my next one!