Innovation has always been the engine that moves our industry forward. It shapes how legal teams uncover insights, streamline workflows, and ultimately deliver better outcomes. Today, the pace of technological change is more staggering than ever. It’s a lot to handle, but it’s also an exciting moment to build, experiment, and transform ideas into meaningful impact.
Whether teams are embracing new data types, exploring automation, or tapping into the power of AI, innovation isn’t just a competitive advantage anymore. It’s becoming essential.
That spirit is exactly what the Relativity Innovation Awards are designed to celebrate. Every year, we recognize teams who push the boundaries of what’s possible on our platform, blending creativity, technical vision, and a deep commitment to solving real-world challenges.
At the 2025 Relativity Innovation Awards, the CDS team was a prime example of this spirit. Not only did they take home the Beyond award, but they were a finalist in multiple award categories. Reaching a lot farther back than that single successful year, their dominance across 2025’s ceremony was the culmination of a long‑standing dedication to building tools that matter and scaling ideas that meaningfully improve their customers’ experiences.
I had a chance to chat with Michael Milicevic, vice president of e-discovery products and solutions at CDS, to learn more about their culture of innovation. Read on for his advice. We hope it inspires your team to up your innovation game this year.
Be sure to follow along with us so you’re the first to hear when submissions for the 2026 Innovation Awards open!
Mike Obregon: How does your team go about deciding what to build? How are clients involved in your innovation cycle?
Michael Milicevic: We start by listening. Our clients are the ones who shape our innovation roadmap, and their real-world challenges are what determine what we build. Nearly every solution we’ve created for our Relativity environments began as a conversation about a workflow pain point, an unmet need, or an efficiency gap they were facing.
We involve clients early in the process with product surveys, discovery workflow discussions, product prototyping feedback, ongoing refinement, and beta testing so the result isn’t just technically strong, but genuinely useful. At the end of the day, our innovation cycle is entirely client-driven, we’re simply turning their needs and ideas into solutions that make their work easier.
What drives the excitement around creative builds for CDS? It must be abundant, as it ultimately led to CDS submitting five applications for the Innovation Awards last year!
Our excitement about innovation is rooted in our core mission and firsthand experience as an e-discovery service provider. We work alongside our clients every day, supporting their matters in Relativity, managing real deadlines, and navigating the technical challenges that come with complex data types and large-scale reviews.
Many of the Innovation Awards submissions we’ve developed over the years came from ideas and real-world experiences shared by our own project management team. For example, our Search Term Analyzer application was born out of a particularly challenging MDL that required our teams to manually format thousands of search terms, an inefficient and error-prone process we knew could be improved.
That’s what makes innovation at CDS so energizing. Our development is driven by real client needs, operational pressure, and opportunities to extend Relativity capabilities in ways that make an immediate impact for the teams we support. It goes beyond the theoretical. That momentum builds on itself; each time we overcome a technical challenge, it sparks new ideas and creates even more opportunities to innovate. The compounding cycle of problem solving and progress is what ultimately led to our record five Innovation Award submissions last year.
We started small, focused on improving individual workflows like reviewer metrics tracking with our AutoTracker tool submission in 2018. But our custom development journey really began a decade ago, in 2016, with our CDS Search Visualization tool. That was our very first Innovation Award submission and the precursor to the CDS Vision suite of today.
We supported Relativity’s expanding roadmap into new and emerging short message data types with our Convert submission in 2020, and most recently, we’ve entered the age of generative AI with our Relativity aiR for Review workflow and suite of aiR complementary Vision AI tools.
Over the years, our investment in Relativity custom development has really continued to grow alongside Relativity’s maturing developer ecosystem.
The stars really aligned in 2025 though. Our Relativity innovations had grown in scale and sophistication, compounding into powerful product suites just as Relativity revamped its award categories with the addition of the new Beyond category. That year seemed like the perfect year for CDS to go “all in” on the Innovation Awards with submissions across all five categories; we were honored and humbled to be selected as finalists in several and the winner of the Beyond category.
Once you had made the decision to go all in, how did you prepare for the nominations internally?
The key was to start early. Before the 2025 awards categories were even announced, CDS formed an interdepartmental submission committee consisting of members from our product, client service, and marketing departments. Each team leader was responsible for contributing key aspects of our submission:
- Product was tasked with identifying CDS tools that best aligned with submission categories once announced, preparing demos, and producing video materials.
- Development provided required technical specifications, screenshots, and diagrams detailing tool functionality.
- Our client service team members provided use cases and client testimonials.
- Marketing provided the polish and storytelling behind our submissions.
Our focus from the beginning was on the problem and end-user experience rather than the product itself. When the submission categories were officially announced, we identified clear, client-driven use cases that explained the real-world problems our products solved, how they meaningfully improve workflows, and why it matters to other users and stakeholders with measurable metrics from real world deployments to validate our narrative.
With the team and fundamentals in place, the process of preparing submissions was actually the fun part. Diving into use cases, interviewing clients, and working collaboratively with colleagues across departments to tell our product stories enriched our offerings and validated our efforts. Winning the Innovation Award was just the icing on the cake.
Were there any initiatives you performed to help drive awareness internally and externally?
Absolutely. We used Relativity's Innovation Awards process as a catalyst to educate and create awareness around our submissions. Externally, we featured our submissions on our blogs and across our social channels. Internally, our team used those resources to act as brand ambassadors and to build excitement and support from our community of partners and clients.
How did it feel to end up with three finalists, plus a win in the first-ever Beyond category?
It was an incredibly surreal and humbling experience to be recognized as finalists in three out of five categories and to be selected as the winners in the Beyond category. The recognition we received from the Relativity community was a wonderful reflection of the hard work, collaboration, and creativity across our teams at CDS. More than anything, it validated that we’re solving real legal technology problems in meaningful ways, and it reminded us how fortunate we are to work alongside people who continuously push themselves to think bigger and do better for our clients. It was an honor and inspiration to keep raising the bar in service to our clients and the e-discovery community.
What advice do you have for other teams who want to build on RelativityOne, especially those who may not have a ton of technical experience off the bat?
Start small with workflows your team knows well and identify features or automations that clients or colleagues frequently ask for but which Relativity may not yet natively support.
Our CDS Vision product suite started with intuitive dashboards and workflow automations that we built within RelativityOne’s existing data visualization and event handler frameworks. These micro-tools and automations quickly stacked into a powerful end-to-end product portfolio that saves our clients real time and money.
Build in areas where Relativity is growing. Our short message tool, CDS Convert, was launched in 2019 when Relativity first released their viewer for short message data. We started by supporting conversion of WhatsApp data to RSMF format for a single client. Today, we support conversion of 36 different short message applications and have run over 9,500 conversions totaling more than 1 billion messages for nearly 300 unique CDS clients.
Partner with Relativity and lean into the Relativity Developer community. There are vast resources available to the developer community, including development advice from Relativity, trusted Relativity custom development partners like NSerio, recommended tools, templates, frameworks, and even open source code to help you get started. If you hit a roadblock or issue, chances are it’s already been encountered and possibly resolved by someone else in the community. Don’t be afraid to ask for a little help.
Has this experience motivated the team to continue innovating on the platform and submit again in 2026?
One hundred percent. Our Innovation Award journey has been 10 years in the making. For a decade, we’ve continued to innovate for our clients and participate in the awards, and while 2025 was certainly our most successful award year thus far, we are just getting started and look forward to continuing our innovation journey with our clients and the Relativity community in the future.
Thank you for taking time to chat with me, Michael. It’s really inspiring to hear how CDS has been answering the Innovation call for over 10 years now! To wrap us up, I thought I’d ask the question that we all are dying to ask: Where is the Innovation Awards trophy now?
Our trophy is embarking on a world tour of CDS offices. It’s currently in our NY headquarters prominently displayed in our CEO Ron Ramnarayan’s office, but will be heading to our London office next to spend time with Mark Anderson, who leads our CDS Convert product line and oversees the EMEA region. After that, I’m looking forward to seeing the award visit our Chicago office, perhaps in time to serve as inspiration for our next round of award submissions.
A Toast to Trailblazers, and an Invitation to Innovate
CDS’s success at the 2025 Innovation Awards is more than a trophy on display: it’s a celebration of teamwork, vision, and the courage to think differently.
Their story reminds us that innovation thrives when we listen to our clients, collaborate across departments, and never stop asking “what’s next?” As the trophy embarks on its world tour, the CDS team is already looking ahead, inspired to continue raising the bar.
If you have an idea, a workflow improvement, or a solution that could make a difference, now is the time to step forward. Be on the lookout: submissions for the 2026 Innovation Awards are set to open in March, and your breakthrough could be the next to shape the future. Let’s celebrate what’s possible—together.
Graphics for this article were created by Caroline Patterson.
