In a significant move for the e-discovery landscape, Relativity disclosed the grand unveiling of its latest product, Relativity Contracts, on Monday. This integrated contract analysis solution is now a part of their flagship product, RelativityOne.
This development follows Relativity’s acquisition of the contract review enterprise, Heretik, last year. Post-acquisition, Relativity had revealed its plans to reincarnate Heretik’s offerings under the banner of Relativity Contracts, assimilating it into the RelativityOne platform.
Charlie Connor, the director of product management for Relativity Contracts, expressed the company’s optimism: “We now deploy to RelativityOne and being a part of RelativityOne, we can now take advantage of the cloud by sending deployments sooner. Right away, our whole life is simplified by being faster to feed back in the field.”
Diving Deep into Relativity Contracts
At its core, Relativity Contracts is a state-of-the-art contract analysis solution that seamlessly integrates with RelativityOne. Equipped with a plethora of features such as text and image viewers, this tool offers a unique table of contents pane that allows users to easily navigate various contract sections as identified by segmentation analysis. Other salient features include a customizable data points pane and an enhanced keyword search function that showcases the context surrounding the search hits.
Connor elaborated on the product’s functionality, saying, “[Relativity] Contracts as a solution really looks at each document as its own kind of set of clauses.” He continued by drawing an analogy to email threading, emphasizing the dynamic workflow enabled by the segmentation of contracts.
Furthermore, in a bid to provide flexible financial options, this solution is set to be a part of Relativity’s flex commit pricing model, positioning Relativity Contracts as an elective add-on.
Flexibility and Customization at the Forefront
Relativity Contracts stands out by offering its users three distinct operational modes. Users can either utilize the pre-configured machine learning models provided by the company, develop their personalized models, or import data from external models. This customizability aims to cater to the varied contract language preferences of different clients.
David Barnes, a software engineer associated with Relativity Contracts, elucidated the reasoning behind this decision: “Our thesis was, ‘Can we build a system for you to give examples to us to train the model to understand those examples and then ultimately leverage that to speed up your workflow?’”
Barnes also highlighted the essence of human intervention. While the tool uses machine learning, the final review remains a manual task. He stated, “But at the end of the day, after the machine learning, they will have to review the document. There’s no question about that.”
Technological Underpinnings
Relativity Contracts boasts an advanced AI integration, encompassing machine learning, pattern recognition, and optical character recognition (OCR). These capabilities enable the tool to meticulously index, categorize, and dissect contracts.
Detailing the mechanism, Connor mentioned the presence of 32 high-level contract categories, further dividing into 330 section types. “With that structuring of the contract,” Connor pointed out, “I can now start finding information in those sections, speeding up the review process substantially.”
Although not currently powered by generative AI, Relativity is in the experimental phase of integrating GPT-4 via Microsoft Azure’s OpenAI Service. Connor hinted at more announcements regarding this integration, stating, “It’s just not part of this first release.”
Positioning Amidst Rivals
The legal tech domain has recently seen a surge in the customization of AI models tailored for contract reviews. Agiloft, a CLM provider, introduced AI Trainer earlier this month, which focuses on allowing users to train AI models for contract analysis. Corporate contract review platforms like Zuva have also embraced this trend.
Despite the increasing competition, Connor remains confident about Relativity Contracts’ distinguishing edge, emphasizing its viewer. He asserted, “The viewer is where the value is… We now can leverage automated workflows in RelativityOne to assist with that extensively.”
In wrapping up, with the introduction of Relativity Contracts and the hints of future integrations, the legal tech sphere is undoubtedly poised for transformative changes.
