It’s great to be back at RelFest Chicago and thanks to all of you who joined us in person or read this from afar! It’s no secret our industry is in an unprecedented moment: wave after wave of new models, headlines, and claims moving faster than anyone can swim. Some days, it does not feel like a technology cycle; it feels like open water.
But this is also a moment we can harness by staying grounded in who we are, focused on who we serve – the Legal Data Intelligence community – and by being ambitious, together, about what this community can achieve. That is the path we’ve been walking since the end of 2022, when ChatGPT first launched and our applied scientists began exploring what would become aiR for Review. In 2023, we introduced our AI Principles, which still guide us today.
For 25 years, you have known Relativity for our work. But over the last three years, your work has changed. You are not just reviewing data on the platform anymore; you are running agentic AI against it every day, for your most complex work and your most important matters. In fact, in September 2026 to date, we have already surpassed the volume of aiR Review usage we delivered through all of 2025 – an increase of over 14 times year over year. Relativity has produced more than 760 million high-value results with aiR so far in 2026. We wanted the name of our platform to reflect that. This month, it did: Relativity aiR.
I'm grateful to the hundreds of thousands of you who've built this with us, both in the room this week at RelFest Chicago, and everywhere you're reading this from now.
Let’s recap just how much there is to celebrate. What follows is what we covered on stage during the keynote: the momentum behind the platform, what capabilities are live or coming soon, and where this community is headed next.
claiR: Giving Lawyers Full Command of a Matter
claiR is the newest way for lawyers to access Relativity aiR and it's built specifically for them: the practitioners working in litigation, investigations, and regulatory requests, who need to quickly gather deep insights from their matter data to inform sound legal judgments.
claiR offers an intuitive experience with tailored capabilities: you can interact naturally with the full corpus of data, ask complex questions about what unfolded, and get robust answers grounded in the record with citations back to referenced documents. claiR also lets you generate work product like memos, timelines, proof matrices, and more, complete with direct links to the documents that support them. Your team can also codify best practices and expertise with reusable skills, driving quality and accelerating your work over time.
An important goal of claiR is enabling greater collaboration across the case team. It adds a way for lawyers to explore earlier and independently, so this collaboration becomes less about routing every question through lit support and more about partnering on what matters: sharper questions, tighter scope, and a clearer sense of when deeper expertise is actually needed.
claiR has been in Advanced Access since August and is being shaped by leaders in our community, including A&O Shearman, Foley & Lardner LLP, K&L Gates, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, Troutman Pepper Locke, Latham & Watkins LLP, Ashurst Perkins Coie, and KPMG.
What's Live Today: Three GA Solutions
claiR is built on the foundation laid by three solutions that became generally available earlier this year, to help you build the rhythm you need to approach every new wave with confidence – from performing the first pass on a document population to tackling the questions that follow.
Assist handles cross-document exploration. You're in a document and come across something you don't understand – who a person is, their role in the matter. Simply ask about it, and Assist will comb through the data, piecing together the relevant information and answering your question in natural language with citations back to the documents that support its answer.
Case Strategy is the through-line connecting that exploration back to the bigger picture, helping teams build and track the narrative of a matter as it develops.
Custom analyses in aiR Review put your expertise into the platform directly. You define what matters for your project – what to extract, what to classify – and aiR Review runs an exhaustive analysis across the entire document population, providing results for each individual record. That includes images and handwritten text, not just searchable text, so whatever your case turns on, you can teach the solution to go find it.
How are your peers harnessing the AI platform already? Investigations. Litigation. Regulatory requests and second requests. FOIA requests. Data breach responses. DSARs. Subpoenas. And more.
Legal data intelligence use cases all come with different stakes, deadlines, and rules. But it’s all possible in the Relativity aiR platform: one system of record, one system of action, where workflows are fit for purpose and new capabilities expand your abilities to act on data.
Getting to the Truth Faster with Early Case Intelligence
Agentic AI offers benefits at every stage in the lifecycle of a matter. As Phil Saunders, CEO of Relativity, introduced on stage in 2025, we’re providing AI solutions closer to the point of ingestion so the data that serves as your source of truth becomes accessible and understandable much sooner in a project.
This year, we’ve delivered on that vision in the following ways:
- Assist is now available in repository workspaces, so you can ask questions and start shaping strategy directly against that data before formal review begins.
- Case Strategy is also available in repository workspaces, so you can extract key facts and dates, start building chronologies, and identify the strengths and weaknesses of your case right up front.
- In Advanced Access, an Early Insights dashboard helps you visualize what’s in your data set from the moment it enters Relativity aiR. The dashboard combines metadata with AI-generated insights, surfacing key people, file types, document categories, personal information, language, topics, and document summaries before anyone opens a single document.
And we're not stopping there. We will continue to bring agentic AI capabilities to your data the moment it enters the platform, so you start every legal data project from a stronger position.
Meeting You Where You Work
Relativity aiR is the platform for lawyers and legal teams to build legal data intelligence. It has full access to the data, purpose-built capabilities (designed for litigation, investigations, regulatory, and other LDI use cases), and the context that is necessary for humans and agents to identify the most defensible decisions and strategies. It does this without putting the matter at risk: chain of custody holds, data controls stay tight, and legal teams stay in lock step. We’re prioritizing investment in Relativity aiR and will continue to do so moving forward.
Lawyers today work in many different places, so our mission to organize data, discover the truth, and act on it does not stop at the edge of our platform. The valuable intelligence created here must reach all the places decision makers work, because that is how we deliver the best outcomes for our community and their clients.
Over the past four months, we’ve brought the Relativity aiR platform into the AI assistants your teams already use: Claude by Anthropic, Google Gemini Enterprise, Microsoft Copilot, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Today, that means you can handle administrative work in our platform without leaving those assistants. In 2027, we’re taking the next step: matter intelligence. You would be able to ask Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or ChatGPT a question about your matter and get an answer grounded in the actual documents with citations.
Meanwhile, our integration with Gavel, Relativity Drafting, will bring that intelligence to a new Microsoft Word document – the landing place for a lot of legal work. With it, lawyers can develop critical work product directly in Word, with full knowledge of the data corpus that drives their strategies. Changes will sync back to Relativity aiR, so nothing gets lost between the drafting and the record.
All of this means that our AI platform for legal data intelligence now reaches you across our core aiR workflows, claiR, Microsoft Word, and other AI assistants driven by one idea: meet legal practitioners where they're already working today, and keep building toward where they'll work tomorrow.
What's Next
The last question is the one I think about most: what, together, should we build next? We invested more than $200 million in R&D in 2025, and we build with you – through Advanced Access programs, meeting with you throughout the year, listening, and ideating, together. What we’ve learned is that the force multiplier of the future will come from agents: something that can assist you, support you, and that you can delegate real work to.
An agent is much more than the model powering it; those change weekly. What makes an agent strong comes down to four questions, which I challenge you to ask of every AI product you come across:
- What data can it access? Full record, all the metadata, past decisions, secured and permissioned.
- What capability does it have? Actions that are purpose-built, tested in live matters, benchmarked, evaluated, and scalable.
- What expertise can it draw from? Honed by you over years, capturing institutional know-how, preferences, and practices specific to your firm and clients.
- What knowledge can it build upon? Your past matter learnings, present analyses, collaborative insights from colleagues, and outputs from other agents.
Here's the thing: you already have all four. Over 25 years, Relativity has brought together the data, the capability, the expertise, the knowledge. Now, they’re working with an agent harness that we're building, grounded in our AI Principles.
Stay tuned for more to come and thank you for being part of this work. It's all here in Relativity aiR. And what comes next, we’ll build together.
