RelOne AERO

Relativity held their annual Relativity Fest London event virtually in May this year and the keynote speaker, Relativity chief product officer Chris Brown, spoke about both their recently announced pay as you go pricing model and the new, currently under soft release, UI for RelOne called Aero.

RelOne has been around for four years and while changes to the interface have been going on for about 3 years, the Advanced Access Group came into play in early to mid-April and began working with this completely new UI. The group consists of 2 channel partners, two corporations, and two law firms, all of which have been instrumental in guiding the development of the UI with their enhanced feedback.

Relativity has been saying that Aero is more than just a fresh coat of paint and current users are being quoted as saying the new “ease of use and simplicity” is “… already having an impact.”

All this discussion of course piqued my interest, so I cast around, watched several of their webcasts and was finally able to arrange a personalized demo firsthand. Aero won’t be officially released until September, but it is commercially available now through providers in the Aero Advance Access program. Here’s what it looks like.

Overall, the 3 main goals of Aero set out by Relativity are:

Intuitive Workflow

Designed to get you to what you need faster, RelativityOne delivers an intuitive and streamlined platform, reducing unnecessary clicks and decisions so you have exactly what you need to accomplish your work.

Light-Speed Performance

Aero delivers what you need fast. Whether you’re flying doc-to-doc, running batch operations, or moving across the platform, everything is available when and where you need it.  Documents with large page counts load much faster now rendering on a page by page basis rather than waiting for the entire doc to render.

Easy Navigation

With logical workflows, step-by-step navigation, and simplified processes you can move through the platform without thinking about where you go next.  The modernized aesthetics have removed ~70k clicks and has minimized cursor travel to increase efficiency.

My specific impressions of the feature set are:

  1. First major change that you will see is that the tabs on the top now become categories on the left
  2. There are no default categories yet but there eventually be some based on a user profile or case defaults
  3. Document previews show in a viewer window which is a view only mode, but you can click on the DocID to bring up the full document and perform coding
  4. The full doc viewer has the complete doc listing on the left and you can jump to any document
  5. You can also pop up document history or image thumbnails as you scroll
  6. The dashboard is collapsible
  7. Ability to save searches as well as the long overdue ability for searching over mass searches feature and a mass copy/move/delete feature
  8. Filtering is available by person or by date
  9. Search enhancements include:
    • Searching for emojis or emoticons
    • Persistent highlights
    • Search for ASCII symbols
    • Highlight one term and focus search
    • Find conceptually similar in a paragraph
    • Display zero hits
  10. Direct loading of documents
    • Can drag and drop up to 100 “loose documents”
    • With large files, can look at pages that have loaded while the remainder of the loading continues.  Large docs are now in essence rendered on a page by page basis
  11. Adjust extracted text size in a manner that is similar to resizing columns in Excel
  12. Hardware agnostic
  13. Browser agnostic
  14. May have some version requirements especially with regards to the working version of Windows
  15. Field creation can occur on the fly
  16. Automatic workflows including:
    • Automated DT search updating as data is loaded
    • Analytics
    • Privilege lists
    • These will require setting a rule simultaneous to loading
  17. Predictive coding
  18. Azure
    • Hosting
    • Invariant processing

A general release was originally planned for September although it remains to be seen if the COVID-19 pandemic has any effect on that. As the graphic below shows, however, Aero is available now. Pricing is a currently said to be a flat subscription fee plus a user charge or pay as you go based on usage.

If you’d like to chat more about Aero or arrange for a demo the way I did, just contact me at toconnor@gulfltc.com.