Relativity One: A Modern Cloud Platform for Legal Discovery

Relativity One represents a modern, cloud-native approach to eDiscovery that empowers legal teams to scale their review workflows, improve governance, and accelerate case timelines. Built to handle large volumes of data across diverse sources, Relativity One combines powerful analytics with secure collaboration features, all delivered as a managed service. For organizations seeking greater speed, accuracy, and control, Relativity One offers a practical path from provenance to production.

What is Relativity One?

Relativity One is Relativity’s cloud-based platform designed specifically for legal discovery and investigations. It moves the heavy lifting of data ingestion, review, and production into a secure cloud environment, enabling teams to work from anywhere with consistent performance. The platform integrates ingestion, organization, review, analytics, and production into a single workflow, reducing handoffs and minimizing data silos. In short, Relativity One is a comprehensive solution for end-to-end eDiscovery that aligns with modern litigation needs and enterprise governance.

Core capabilities and how they fit into the workflow

Ingestion and data sources: Relativity One supports a wide range of data types—emails, documents, chat messages, social media, and more. It offers connectors and import tools for common repositories such as email archives, cloud storage, and collaboration platforms, helping teams normalize data early in the matter lifecycle.
Organization and exception handling: Once data is in Relativity One, it can be organized by custodian, matter, or issue, with flexible tagging, folders, and dashboards. Deduplication, near-duplicate detection, and concept-based grouping help reduce review burden and surface relevant items faster.
Review and analytics: The platform supports traditional and technology-assisted review, including explicit coding, comment threading, and automated clustering. Features like email threading, concept search, and clustering help reviewers understand relationships and prioritize decisions more efficiently.
Redaction and production: Redactions can be performed within the secure workspace, and productions are configurable to meet specific court or client requirements. A clear audit trail and reproducible workflows help ensure defensibility.
Collaboration and governance: Role-based access, granular permissions, and task management enable teams to collaborate without compromising data security. Governance tools help maintain data quality, retention, and compliance across matters.
Security and compliance: Relativity One emphasizes strong security controls, including encryption, access controls, and comprehensive audit trails. The platform is designed to meet industry standards for data privacy and regulatory compliance, supporting organizations that handle confidential information.

Security, privacy, and governance

Security sits at the core of Relativity One. Data is protected both in transit and at rest, and access is governed through role-based permissions, multi-factor authentication, and session controls. The platform maintains a detailed audit log of actions, which supports investigations, compliance reporting, and legal hold enforcement. Data retention policies can be defined at the matter or user level, helping organizations align with internal governance and external regulatory requirements.

Beyond technical controls, Relativity One emphasizes privacy through careful data handling practices and robust access monitoring. In regulated industries or environments with sensitive information, teams can implement compartmentalized workspaces, ensure that only authorized users can view privileged data, and apply redaction workflows that preserve context while protecting confidentiality.

Data sources, ingestion, and normalization

Relativity One is designed to ingest data from diverse sources in a way that preserves metadata integrity and makes later review more efficient. By normalizing common fields (dates, authors, custodians, file types), reviewers gain consistent visibility across datasets. The platform also supports bulk operations for tagging, privilege reviews, and issue annotation, which can speed up early case assessments and reduce rework during later stages of the matter.

In practice, a typical Relativity One workflow starts with data discovery and hold enforcement, then proceeds to filtering and prioritization through analytics. As reviewers work, stakeholders can access real-time dashboards that track key metrics such as volume by custodian, coding distribution, and production status. This visibility helps legal teams stay aligned with clients and opposing counsel while maintaining defensibility.

Review workflows and analytics

One of Relativity One’s strengths is its flexible review architecture. Teams can run traditional linear reviews or leverage technology-assisted review (TAR) to accelerate decision-making. TAR workflows can be tuned for precision and recall according to the matter’s risk tolerance, enabling faster milestones without sacrificing quality. In addition, advanced analytics—such as concept search, clustering, and near-duplicate detection—help reviewers uncover patterns that might otherwise remain hidden in large data sets.

For teams pursuing collaborative review, Relativity One offers features that support workload distribution, reviewer comments, and reversible coding decisions. The audit trail across the entire review journey helps maintain defensibility, while redaction and production tools ensure that sensitive information is appropriately protected before disclosure.

Collaboration, production, and client transparency

Relativity One is built for cross-functional collaboration. Attorneys, analysts, IT staff, and clients can participate in the discovery process with clearly defined roles and access. The platform’s production workflows are designed to meet court rules and client requirements, with configurable output formats, privilege logs, and document-level metadata. Transparent production tracking reduces back-and-forth with opposing counsel and helps ensure that produced sets are accurate and auditable.

From a client perspective, feature sets such as secure sharing, restricted access to sensitive documents, and auditable activity logs provide confidence that data is handled responsibly. For firms and corporations managing multiple matters, centralized controls and standardized templates in Relativity One simplify onboarding and ongoing governance.

Migration, deployment, and best practices

Moving to Relativity One typically begins with a readiness assessment and a data map that identifies sources, custodians, and data volumes. A phased migration plan can minimize disruption, starting with a pilot matter to validate ingestion paths, review workflows, and production configurations. Relativity’s cloud infrastructure is designed to scale with your needs, enabling you to increase storage, processing power, and analytics capacity as a matter grows.

Key best practices include establishing clear data retention and hold policies, defining security roles early, and setting up standardized review templates. It is also wise to plan for a robust testing phase that validates redaction rules, production outputs, and privilege handling before going fully live. Effective change management—covering people, processes, and technology—helps ensure that teams realize the full benefits of Relativity One.

Use cases across industries

Law firms handling complex civil litigation with large email and document sets
Corporate legal departments conducting internal investigations or regulatory reviews
Public sector agencies performing compliance reviews or FOIA requests
Organizations migrating from on-premises eDiscovery platforms to a scalable cloud solution

Across these contexts, Relativity One supports faster discovery timelines, tighter data governance, and more precise, defensible productions. The platform’s flexibility makes it suitable for matters ranging from small investigations to multinational litigations.

Getting started with Relativity One

If you’re evaluating Relativity One, begin with a needs assessment that covers data sources, review staffing, and current pain points in your eDiscovery workflow. Engage stakeholders early—litigation teams, IT, security, and compliance—to define roles, access controls, and success metrics. A pilot project can help test ingestion, review, and production in a controlled environment before expanding to additional matters.

During onboarding, focus on creating repeatable templates for privilege reviews, redaction workflows, and production outputs. Establish reporting dashboards to monitor progress, identify bottlenecks, and demonstrate value to clients or leadership. With proper planning, Relativity One can become the backbone of your enterprise eDiscovery program, delivering speed, reliability, and governance at scale.

Conclusion

Relativity One represents a practical fusion of cloud technology, robust analytics, and rigorous governance tailored for legal discovery. By simplifying ingestion, streamlining review, and enabling defensible productions, the platform helps legal teams move faster without compromising quality or security. For organizations navigating the complexities of modern investigations and litigation, Relativity One offers a scalable, secure, and user-friendly path from first data touch to final disclosure.