kCura’s Relativity Fest 2012 was held this year at the historic Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, featuring education tracks, experience sharing and valuable networking time. CEO Andrew Sieja kicked off the sold-out event that attracted 525 attendees, initially focusing his keynote address on Relativity growth in both users and data under management. kCura has increased the number of Relativity end users to over 71,000 per month, representing 52% year-over-year growth. Even more impressive, the volume of data in the top 100 workspaces has grown over 500% in the last two years, and now averages over 15 million docs.
Another keynote theme was the growing Relativity ecosystem. Fios was pleased to be featured among the ecosystem partners with our new product, Fios Redaction AssistantTM (FRA), an integrated Relativity application that automates repetitive redactions across large document universes. Andrew called FRA “super cool,” and noted the user interface is so seamlessly integrated with Relativity “it looks like we [kCura] built it.”
Also prominent at the conference was kCura’s announcement of the release of Relativity 7.5. This latest version has been in development for a year and provides several exciting new features:
- A brand new processing engine allows for small cases to process directly into Relativity. This will be particularly useful to organizations that are bringing Relativity in-house for the first time.
- A search cancel request that prevents users from inadvertently abandoning or retrying searches that are in progress. This addresses one of the most common user errors in Relativity.
- Huge improvements to Relativity Assisted Review (RAR), including additional automation of the RAR workflow, more transparency and a handy new suite of reporting options.
Relativity Fest had something for everyone, with many people taking advantage of the hands-on sessions, the Genius Bar and the opportunity to study and take the Relativity Certified Administrator exam. I particularly enjoyed the “Relativity Ideas” sessions for Premium Hosting Providers. While it can sometimes be difficult to discuss your challenges and successes with competitors, this forum really allowed us to have open and useful dialogs. My favorite discussion was about non-traditional uses of Relativity. As “big data” becomes the new buzzword and perhaps the most significant challenge of e-discovery, the ideas on ways to use Relativity outside the box are more meaningful than ever.
Guest speaker Casey Neistat was an entertaining and thought-provoking addition to the conference lineup. A filmmaker from New York, he offered up a selection of his YouTube videos and shared his two-part professional philosophy that advocates working with the tools at hand and following your desires—at least that is how I interpreted his message. At first glance, you might wonder how this was relevant to Relativity Fest, but his emphasis on the importance of clearly communicating complex ideas and his firm conviction that execution matters more than ideas resonated with attendees familiar with kCura’s approach to business and the realities we face on a daily basis. Casey’s presentation was immediately followed by a private party at the House of Blues, offering a great opportunity to mingle with all of kCura’s 266 employees while enjoying a bit of Chicago culture.
Overall, kCura delivered a great program that offered significant value to its constituency of service providers and end-user clients, as well as time to network and socialize. It’s hard to imagine how they will top this in 2013, but I look forward to finding out.
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