What were you doing 10 years ago? Maybe growing your practice? Making a career change? For me, I was working at one of Relativity’s amazing service providers. I had recently obtained Relativity Certified Administrator status and, I’m sure, was waiting for that dreaded Friday night production to roll in.
Ah, good times.
It’s fun to think back and reminisce. So much has changed: the projects we tackle; the technology we use; where we work.
In 2023, the Relativity Innovation Awards celebrate their tenth birthday—and so much has changed for this program since its inception. We’ve gone from PowerPoint presentations humbly introducing our winners, to mimosas and muscle suits on the big stage.
Still, though many changes have evolved over time, there have remained some constants. Our ability to adapt, our focus on community, and our dedication to building the best end-to-end e-discovery platform for our customers have never wavered. In a world that demands better and faster, we’re utilizing the cloud to achieve things that were barely on the horizon 10 years ago. Even better, our efforts don’t happen in isolation; in fact, over time, our community has redoubled their own commitment to innovating with Relativity, and we’re just blown away by everything they’ve built along the way.
So, as the technology categories of our Innovation Awards turn 10 this year, let’s celebrate! Let’s celebrate all the pioneers who laid the groundwork for where we are today. Let’s celebrate the amazing, groundbreaking applications and moments we’ve experienced over the years. As we open submissions for this year’s Innovation Awards, we’ll share a series of blog posts to help us look back and celebrate some previous winners.
Put your innovations and peers in the running to receive a 2023 Innovation Award at Relativity Fest this September!
Who Were the Innovation Awards’ First Winners?
For today’s story, where better to start than with our first-ever Relativity Innovation Awards winners?
In 2014, we launched the Innovation Awards at Relativity Fest Chicago “to showcase the best solutions created by Relativity customers … recognizing groups who have created workflows, applications, and integrations that streamline their internal processes, increase productivity, and positively impact business strategy.”
Enter Arq by Iris (now part of Epiq) and SynQ by Troutman Pepper.
I recently had a chance to chat with Chris Haley, managing director of Technology at Troutman Pepper and a 2023 AI Visionary, to get his thoughts on the Innovation Awards and SynQ.
As Chris told me: “SynQ is a custom application—that we still use today—built to reduce the manual effort needed to extract data from Relativity to our custom project management application for reporting purposes. When I first heard of the Innovation Awards, I thought it was a great opportunity to showcase all of the cool things we were doing at Troutman to help our clients! Even before the Innovation Awards, we had been creating customizations in Relativity to solve challenges we were facing and to make our work more efficient. The fact that Relativity was now providing an avenue to recognize groups doing this work, was just icing on the cake.”
From a technology perspective, Chris explained why Troutman decided to go all in on Relativity.
“Relativity provided us the flexibility to tackle challenges differently. Part of the reason we originally selected Relativity over other discovery document review applications was its customizability and platform capability to build solutions on top of the platform,” he explained. “The challenges we face and the work we do are constantly evolving. By leveraging Relativity, and now RelativityOne, we are able to provide strategic solutions for our customers. We are able to expand the investment that we make in Relativity through the customizations and new capabilities that we create.”
As we were winding down our conversation, Chris also shared how eMerge has evolved over the years. “Our goal,” he told me, “is to provide the best end-to-end e-discovery solutions for our clients and leverage technology. This is baked into our core values. As data and technology evolve, so does eMerge. It’s a real differentiator for us with our clients and potential clients.” (Read a little more about the firm’s history in this blog throwback!)
“Our clients are not just getting Relativity; they are getting eMerge’s awesome, supercharged version of Relativity,” Chris proudly continued. “We’re constantly looking at different technologies and how they can help solve problems. Whether it be by utilizing our most recent Innovation Award-winning application—eMerge Xtractor—or new technologies we are looking into, our main goal is to maximize and build technology solutions to solve the challenges faced by our clients. The Innovation Awards have been a great way for our team to showcase the work we are doing.”
Start Gathering Your Submissions for the 2023 Innovation Awards
Whether our past submissions and winners tackled day-to-day workflows or were uniquely created to solve a specific challenge, the Innovation Awards have seen it all. Looking back, do you remember what thought of our inaugural winners? Be on the lookout for more of these stories as we continue our journey down memory lane.
And while you’re at it, use those stories to inspire action. Submissions for this year’s Innovation Awards are now open until June 30, 2023. If you think you have the next award-winning application on your hands, learn more about the award categories here and tell us about it today!
Graphics for this post were created by Natalie Andrews.
