By Chris Egan

Relativity turned 25 this year, and the keynote opened with a timeline that ran from the first document viewer in 2001 to claiR in 2026. I did my first eDiscovery project 25 years ago too, so I have watched the industry change from the inside: the mergers and acquisitions, the new technology every few years, and the new roles created each time to support a growing industry. This year's timeline was the clearest picture yet of how fast the current chapter is moving.

Kristina Cvetanovic and I spent three days at RelFest Chicago with our fellow eDiscovery community. RelFest is my favorite conference in eDiscovery because it is focused and the venue is built for conversation. You can have coffee at the hotel, walk to lunch with a colleague, and see the people you have been meaning to get facetime with, all in three days. This year, once the catching up was done, the conversations circled around a recurring theme: AI review has moved from pilot to default, and the business questions that follow are still wide open.

Here is what I heard, and what I think it means for the eDiscovery community, whether you are building a team or thinking about your next role.

What did the keynote actually announce?

The headlines from Phil Saunders and Chris Brown were about scale and adoption:

• Legal tech took in $3.3 billion of investment in 2026. The money is still flowing into the category, and most of it is going to AI-first tools.
• RelativityOne is now Relativity aiR. The platform and the AI are one product with one name. What was called aiR for Review is now simply Review.
• The platform holds 97.1 petabytes of data, with more than 300,000 legal professionals working in it across 40-plus countries. 198 of the Am Law 200 rely on it.
• aiR Review usage is up 14x year over year. Relativity passed its full 2025 review volume by September.
• The share of coded documents reviewed with aiR Review and Privilege went from 4 percent to 57 percent in 18 months. Machine first pass has now passed human first pass on the platform.
• More than 760 million aiR high-value results year to date. Relativity's standard for that number is work a qualified human accepted and used on a real matter.
• AI adoption among general counsel has gone from 20 percent to 91 percent since 2022. The buyers have moved. The question is whether the people serving them have.
• claiR gives lawyers a conversational interface to their matter data. It is in Advanced Access with firms including Skadden, Latham & Watkins, and KPMG.
• The Gavel acquisition brings Relativity aiR into Microsoft Word. Matter intelligence goes to the place lawyers already work and syncs back.
• Relativity now calls itself a legal data intelligence company. More than half of new workspaces this year serve matters outside litigation: investigations, regulatory response, data breach, and FOIA.

The keynote also put up a slide on hallucinations: 1,428 U.S. cases involving AI-generated errors, 556 of them lawyer-involved, and 35 percent of the industry reporting accuracy anxiety. Then a slide of AI regulation stacking up across New York, California, Colorado, Texas, Illinois, the EU, Japan, and South Korea. Relativity's answer was a set of four questions for any AI system: what data can it access, what capability does it have, what expertise can it draw from, and what knowledge can it build upon. Those are good questions for hiring managers too.

What does claiR mean for attorneys?

claiR deserves its own note because it changes who the platform is for. aiR Review was built for the review team. claiR is built for the lawyer. It is a conversational interface across the full matter record, millions of documents and their metadata included, where an attorney asks a question in plain language and gets an answer they can verify and audit inside the platform. Nothing is exported or sampled.

That puts Relativity in the same conversation as Harvey and the other legal AI assistants, with one difference: claiR sits on top of the system of record for the matter itself. A&O Shearman, Foley & Lardner, K&L Gates, Skadden, Latham & Watkins, and KPMG are in Advanced Access now. General availability is planned for early 2027 at no additional cost.

For the attorneys I work with, this is the tool that moves AI from the vendor's side of the matter to the lawyer's side. Litigators who learn to work this way early will be the ones firms build their AI and innovation practices around.

What was the mood on the floor?

Two years ago the RelativityOne migration conversation had an edge to it. Service providers were worried about margin, and that frustration showed up in the hallways. This year felt different. The migration question is settled. Everyone has accepted that aiR is the platform.

"The ship has sailed on migration. The conversation now is adoption, pricing, and how you keep margin when the machine does the first pass."

That is the open question nobody answered on stage. How do law firms and service providers price AI review? How do they show a return on that price to clients? The keynote was about adoption. The conversations were about economics. Whether I was talking to a law firm, a consulting firm, a service provider, or a software company, that was the question on the table.

What does this mean for eDiscovery hiring?

When the platform changes this fast, the roles change with it. This is what I am already seeing in our searches:

• Review economics are reshaping project management. With AI handling first-pass coding at scale, clients want senior project managers and directors who can design, validate, and defend an AI review workflow, not just staff one.
• Solution architects are becoming legal engineers. The people who used to configure workflows are now the people who connect aiR, claiR, and generative tools to how a firm actually practices. Several of those profiles also fit the AI attorney roles law firms are opening.
• Beyond litigation means broader skill sets. Investigations, regulatory, and breach response work rewards AI and analytics professionals and client services teams with compliance and data depth, not just litigation support backgrounds.
• Adoption is now a go-to-market problem. If more than half of the platform's growth is outside traditional litigation, service providers and software companies need sales leaders, customer success, and enablement talent who can sell and prove value on AI review.
• Credentials are catching up. aiR used to be the name of the AI tool. Now it is the name of the platform, and Relativity has launched a certification to match: the Relativity aiR Review Specialist. Expect clients to start asking for it, and expect candidates who hold it to move faster.

What should employers and candidates do now?

If you are hiring:

• Rewrite your senior project manager and director briefs around AI review design and defensibility, not document counts.
• Decide whether your next solution architect hire is really a legal engineer, and budget accordingly.
• Look at consulting and service provider talent for law firm roles. Firms that run eDiscovery like a vendor are hiring from vendors.

If you are a candidate:

• Get hands-on with aiR Review and claiR, and pursue the Relativity aiR Review Specialist certification while it is still a differentiator.
• Build a story around outcomes: accuracy, speed, and cost on real matters.
• Pay attention to the non-litigation side of the platform. That is where the new roles are being created.

Where Celeritas fits

I have recruited across the Relativity ecosystem for more than a decade: law firms, consulting firms, service providers, and the software companies building on the platform. The searches on my desk right now are project leaders who can run AI review, AI and analytics professionals, client services teams, legal engineers, and the sales and customer success people who prove the value of all of it. The migration to aiR is a technology story, but every one of those searches says it is also a talent story. If you want to talk through what these shifts mean for your team or your next move, reach out.