Relativity User Community Celebrated at Annual Innovation Awards Ceremony

Global News

07
Oct
2021

Editor

Relativity, a global legal and compliance technology company, today announced the winners of this year's Innovation Awards at the 12th annual Relativity Fest.

The Innovation Awards program celebrates industry trailblazers building groundbreaking solutions, breaking down barriers and moving technology forward.

The 2021 Innovation Awards have two categories: Technology and Persona. The technology awards celebrate organizations that use Relativity's products in creative ways—solving difficult or unique challenges within and outside of e-discovery. The persona awards recognize individuals who champion legal technology, innovate on Relativity and advocate for their peers in the industry. This year sees the introduction of an inaugural award – the AI Catalyst award.

"We are continuously impressed by the Relativity user Community's ability to come together, even if virtually, to create new solutions to solve complex problems for their organizations and discover new ways to build unique applications upon Relativity's extensible solutions," said James Zinn, Director of Commercial Partnerships at Relativity. "We are excited to recognize the achievements and contributions of our Community members who innovate and drive value for their organizations and customers."

The 2021 technology award winners are:

• Best Innovation: Enterprise: Zeteo by UNITAD; Given the complexity and sheer magnitude of the data involved in UNITAD's mandate, the UNITAD team has sought ways to leverage the latest technology. More than half of digital evidence collected is in video and image formats and nearly all text and audio are in Arabic, which needs to be translated for investigators, analysts and for use in criminal proceedings. Working with a team of technology experts fully engaged in creating a cutting-edge solution, UNITAD developed Zeteo, a custom enrichment pipeline for electronic data using the latest in artificial intelligence (AI), Microsoft cognitive services, machine learning, facial recognition and identification, machine translation and image analysis. Zeteo, which roughly translated means "to seek and reveal" is a powerful system that learns and makes connections the more data it ingests.
• Best Innovation: Solution Provider: Virtual Helpdesk by JND; In 2021, with most of the workforce working from home, synergies between attorney and litigation support teams were disrupted. JND's Virtual Helpdesk creates a simple way to facilitate communication between teams working within Relativity. The application integrates live chat, video and screen share capabilities, an individualized support ticketing system and a resource center for accessing user documentation without exiting Relativity.
• Best Innovation: Community Choice: This year there was a tie between two cutting-edge applications - AI Apps by Lineal Services and HyperView by Gilbert + Tobin.
• Lineal built AI Apps to supercharge the analytics capabilities of RelativityOne. The enhanced threading (LTAi); Bot Detection (to automatically flag messages sent by bots); SnipShow (to display keyword hits in context, allowing reviewers to quickly assess 20-50 hits at once without needing to go doc-to-doc); Ai Priv Finder (a true communication analysis workflow); and auto-priv log generation and machine learning for continuously improving results. In addition, with the proliferation of chat and collaboration data, Lineal built ChatCraft, which allows chat data to be converted into Relativity Short Message Format. Once the data is loaded, individual messages can be tagged, eliminating the need for massive downstream redactions
• HyperView by Gilbert + Tobin; HyperView addresses a classic problem faced during the course of litigation: the circulation of hyperlinked bundles of evidence between various parties. HyperView is designed to focus on the distribution stage of this process, allowing external parties to access the hyperlinked work product from within Relativity. This is done by using a side-by-side viewer that contextually responds to document ID references in a legal document, displaying the associated supporting evidence from within the database—without needing to move away from the source work product. 

The 2021 persona award winners are:

• Academic Innovator of the Year: Sara Skeens, Adjunct Professor, J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College.
• AI Catalyst: Briordy Meyers, Director, Senior Counsel e-Discovery, Boehringer Ingelheim.
• Attorney Tech Evangelist: Alicia Hawley, Discovery Counsel.
• Corporate Tech Evangelist: Siva Palepu, Lead eDiscovery Engineer, University of Southern California.
• Inclusion Breakthrough of the Year: Christopher Campbell, Senior Counsel –Litigation, Baker Hughes.
• Lit Support All-Star: Nikolai Pozdniakov, e-Discovery Production Manager, vdiscovery.
• Stellar Women: Heena Bhambhlani, Executive Director & Managed Document Review Leader, EY Global Delivery Services.

Judges selected Best Innovation winners based on their use of various Application Program Interfaces and extensibility points to streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks and create solutions to Relativity's customers' most strategic challenges. This year, the judging panel featured four Relativians, Rene Laurens, Constantine Pappas, Desiree Mayer and Trish Gleason. The Best Innovation: Community Choice award winner was chosen by votes from Relativity's community of Relativity Certified Administrators. While the majority of persona category awards are determined by a Community vote, the Academic Innovator and Inclusion Breakthrough awards are determined by Relativity committees.