Ari Kaplan recently attended RelFest London 2026, and he recently spoke with the following leaders at Relativity.

• Chris Brown, chief product officer
• Georgia Foster, managing director and vice president of international sales
• David Horrigan, discovery counsel and legal education director
• Phil Saunders, chief executive officer
• Cristin Traylor, senior director of AI transformation and law firm strategy
• Adam Weiss, chief administrative officer and chief legal officer

Ari Kaplan, Principal: What is Relativity trying to convey at RelFest London 2026?

Phil Saunders: The keynote covered a wide variety of topics, but my goal was to get grounded because there’s so much going on, not just in the legal tech market but in the broader macro. For me, getting grounded with our community, who rely so much on what we’re doing and how we’re thinking, meant that if we could create a level of trust in what we agree on, we could then leap together and tackle all the opportunities that are out there and manage the risks as best we can. That was really my focus. To explore those topics closely with our audience, to build that baseline, so that when Chris and his team would talk about all the wonderful new offerings, surface areas and ways to engage with Relativity, there was a baseline and scaffolding we could leap from.

Ari Kaplan: You said that innovating and evolving are less important than transforming.

Phil Saunders: I said that because evolution is something that naturally occurs over a period of time. Transformation is purposeful. It’s more disruptive in a moment. When I think about Relativity over its past 25 years, and when I think about Relativity today and where we’re going, simple evolution and/or iteration are simply not enough. We need to be able to look at what’s taking place and understand whether iteration will get us there or whether we have to stop and positively disrupt how we’re doing work. When we looked at Relativity on our platform, we could have continued to just bolt on cool AI features, or we could have decided to completely transform and disrupt the core to make it an end-to-end AI platform.

Ari Kaplan: You just announced the acquisition of Gavel. How will the combination improve the Relativity ecosystem?

Chris Brown: We are really excited about the acquisition at Gavel, and it’s a quick and long view of where we see the business going. The guiding strategy over the last couple of years has been to meet legal practitioners where they are. They, of course, are inside RelativityOne, but they are now starting to engage across multiple surfaces, including Microsoft Word. When you think about all the setup we did for legal data intelligence use cases and the work you do to organize data, discover the truth and act on it, we often think about examining trigger data and evidence. But if you’re deep inside our platform, you know we’re also generating a lot of work product, and over time, that work product is becoming quite substantial, particularly our products like aiR for Case Strategy and aiR Assist. They’re now allowing lawyers on the platform to pull together deposition outlines, do witness summaries, and a bunch of other things that ultimately get exported to Word. We really wanted to continue the experience for lawyers, not by exporting but by opening in Word and inside that Word experience, be able to ask questions of the data to refine those outlines, documents or references; redline with their boss heading into a deposition; and then have those things synced back. Over time, at our scale, there are just so many work products being built. We wanted to extend that system of action. They’re also a great team. The way they built a very small, budding business with product-led growth, earning one lawyer at a time onto the platform, really excited us. They’re technically extremely sharp, so they’re just a great fit.

Ari Kaplan: In your keynote presentation, you discussed integrations and the success of aiR. Relativity succeeded because it enabled people to build on it, embrace it and use it in their own way. How is this new era continuing that vision?

Chris Brown: What we’re seeing in the market is that aiR is the new way to solve most use cases in incredible ways. One of the themes that goes back to Andrew Sieja is openness and the notion that the platform itself has to be able to be tapped into by practitioners with their own expertise and extended, whether that’s through coding, knowledge sharing or anything else they bring to bear. This week, we announced custom analyses for aiR, which was chiefly about extending the platform and allowing any practitioner to bring in their expertise and get results in a way that’s scaled through Relativity. A lot of what we do in aiR is to unblock the adoption of different parts of the platform. Unleashing the full community of practitioners is a major milestone. And today, I showed a preview of where this is going for practitioners and lawyers. An advanced practitioner could build a custom analysis, and soon, they’ll be able to publish that skill for others to participate in and use on the platform later. It’s also a way to harvest their capabilities and share them with more folks on their team.

Ari Kaplan: The concept of governance and a shifting regulatory environment came up in several presentations. How do you see a difference in the way Relativity is used in Europe versus in the U.S. or even in Australia?

Adam Weiss: The beauty of what we do is that there is differentiation, and we’re able to accommodate it by geography and jurisdiction, but there are also many similarities. Whether you come to a session at RelFest London, RelFest Sydney or RelFest Chicago, many of the topics, speakers and information will be very similar. While laws do vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, Relativity, as the AI platform for legal data intelligence, can accommodate the full range of matters one might encounter or deal with in any given jurisdiction.

Chris Brown: Particularly in this market in London, U.K. and EMEA, governance and defensibility really matter. It’s been part of the platform since the beginning. As people bring more AI into use, they want it to be transparent, auditable, validated and defensible. They understand that, at different stages of managing legal matters, this is essential to delivering results and achieving ROI. From a product perspective, we’re building governance, audit trails and validation capabilities into the platform. It’s something we’ll continue to invest in, and the market demands it.

Ari Kaplan: What was your objective for this year’s RelFest London?

Georgia Foster: Every year, the objective is to bring the community together across all levels and types of work, and we certainly see that again today. Second, we make sure that those who are starting to look at what AI works best for them do so correctly, and that they’re understanding, unpacking and alleviating some of the noise that exists today in terms of how to run defensible workflows in a robust system and how to do it correctly.

Adam Weiss: The objective is, as it always is, to celebrate our customers, recognize them, help them see what’s coming down the pike, hear from them, and share best practices as we all rise together. That’s what we do at Fest, whether it’s in Chicago, London or Sydney. We cannot ignore the elephant in the room, which is AI and the pace of innovation and change. Our customers and partners are very excited. There’s probably a little anxiety, as well. But everybody is leaning into this change, and I think they are well prepared. We’re on this journey together, and the focus on AI, and certainly our AI platform for legal data intelligence, is more acute than ever.

Ari Kaplan: Have you achieved your objective for this year’s RelFest?

Georgia Foster: We used to have major announcements onstage at Fest Chicago, and we can’t wait for October anymore because the pace of innovation is so fast. For Fest London to be announcing such major innovations and upcoming products, and just looking around at all the familiar faces and excellent people who make up this community, really makes us happy.

Ari Kaplan: You hosted several panels at RelFest London this year. What were some of the key takeaways from the perspectives shared?

David Horrigan: We did one with the International Legal Technology Association, where we put together a roundup of AI data law issues. Today, we had the research data session, and we discussed some of the research data we’re working on, including data that you and I have done over the years. One of the big issues was whether or not to disclose your use of any type of AI, and the data show that up to a third do not. But the audience here in the United Kingdom was definitely in favor of full disclosure, probably because there is guidance here in the U.K.

Ari Kaplan: What’s the hope for what people will take away from RelFest London when they leave and return to their teams?

David Horrigan: Usable action you can take, whether it’s from caselaw, the practice guidance, the technical exhibits or the vendors you see here, is something you can take back and use on your job tomorrow. If we can do that, we’ve done our job.

Georgia Foster: This market is particularly unique. It’s not just the U.K., even though the event is here. There are countries across EMEA that we work with that are grappling with different policy changes, requirements and regulations, and coming together to work through some of that, in addition to the technology, is key.

Ari Kaplan: Great panel at RelFest London. What was the focus of the discussion?

Cristin Traylor: To help the industry understand that we’re well past pilots, we’re at the point where we can begin to standardize our use of generative AI in review, disclosure and investigations. We’re also helping people understand how to validate and understand what the technology is doing and how it’s working and to use it in live matters.

Ari Kaplan: What’s different about RelFest London versus RelFest Sydney or the traditional Relativity Fest in Chicago?

Phil Saunders: I see it as an opportunity for rolling thunder. It’s almost like comparing the old way of development, the waterfall method, to a very clear, AI-native, agentic, agile manner. These are stories we are rolling out, and we began in Australia at the start of the year, talking about where we’re going. But it was really the first chapter of a couple of chapters to follow about the further transformation we’re making inside our business. Over the past 30 days, and in the next week, Chris and his team have released three innovation offerings right inside RelOne that weren’t there at Fest Sydney. That’s an example of this chapter after chapter, showing innovation at speed.

Adam Weiss: What I find fascinating about our employee base around the world is the common bond that unites Relativians, no matter their age, country, first language, religion or culture. That bond is our commitment to organizing data, discovering the truth, acting on it and, by doing so, pursuing justice. That commitment is shared by all Relativians. Similarly, our customers share that commitment, no matter where they’re located. Their needs may vary based on how big they are, whether they’re a law firm, a corporation, a governmental entity or a legal service provider. But there are also many shared challenges, no matter where they are. One of the things I love most about RelFest is the sense of commonality, that similar spirit. No matter where one is in the world, we’re all doing the same important work.

Ari Kaplan: Did you anticipate last year that you’d be having these conversations this year? What do you think we’ll be talking about next year?

Phil Saunders: There are no crystal balls to ponder or look at. A year ago, if you had asked me whether we’d be this far along, as a market, in AI adoption, I probably would have questioned it. If I could go back in time, I’d say there’d be more testing. What we’ve acknowledged is that we’re way beyond testing. There’s a full-scale deployment of a variety of tools, which is really wonderful and candidly daunting at the same time. If we did our job right in the keynote, we balanced opportunity and risk in the world we live in. We want to equip our community with the best tech and AI, delivered through aiR, for our clients in a highly trusted, disciplined environment. We’re very thoughtful about the governance required to do that, and it’s that balance. In the keynote, I called it the readiness gap. Part of the power of the AI platform for legal data intelligence is to contain risk, so our customers can take advantage of the opportunity.

Listen to the complete interview at Reinventing Professionals.

Ari Kaplan regularly interviews leaders in the legal industry and in the broader professional services community to share perspective, highlight transformative change and introduce new technology at his blog and on Apple Podcasts.