Leadership Perspectives From RelFest London 2026

Welcome to Reinventing Professionals, a podcast hosted by industry analyst Ari Kaplan, which shares ideas, guidance, and perspectives from market leaders shaping the next generation of legal and professional services. This is Ari Kaplan at RelFest London 2026. My name is Phil Saunders, and I am the CEO of Relativity. And proud to be here.

Can you share a little bit about what Relativity is trying to convey at this year's RelFest London? Thanks, Ari, and pleasure to chat with you once again. It's always enjoyable. The keynote covered a wide variety of topics, but what I tried to accomplish was to get grounded because there's so much taking place, not just in the legal tech market, but in the wider macro.

For me , getting grounded with our community, who rely so much on what we're doing and how we're thinking, that if we could create a level of trust in what we agree on, we can then leap together and tackle all the opportunities that are out there and manage as best we can the risks. That was really my focus. To explore those topics closely with our audience, to build that level of baseline so that when Chris and his team would talk about all the wonderful new offerings and surface areas and ways to engage with Relativity, that there was a baseline and scaffolding that we can leap from.

You said innovating and evolving is not as important as transforming. I did say that ' because evolution is something that naturally occurs over a period of time. Transformation is purposeful. It's more disruptive in a moment of time.

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 is simply not enough. We need to be able to look at what's taking place and understand, is iteration going to get us there, or do we have to stop and positively disrupt how we're doing work? When we look at Relativity in our platform, we could have continued to just bolt on cool AI things or decide we're gonna completely transform and disrupt the core and make an end-to-end AI platform.

My name is Chris Brown, and I'm the chief product officer at Relativity. You just announced the acquisition of Gavel. Congratulations. How does that improve the Relativity ecosystem?

We were really excited about this acquisition at Gavel, and it's a quick and long view of where we see the business going. The guiding strategy the last couple years is meeting legal practitioners where they are. They, of course, are inside RelativityOne, but they are now starting to engage in multiple surfaces as well, and one of them is Microsoft Word. When you think about all the setup we did on 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 so 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 in the platform to pull together deposition outlines, do witness summaries, to a bunch of other things that ultimately get exported to Word. We really wanted to continue the experience to the lawyers, not exporting, but opening in Word, and inside of that Word experience, be able to ask questions still of the data to refine those outlines or those documents or those references, redline with potentially their boss heading into that deposition specifically, and then have those things synced back.

Over time, at our scale, there's just so many work products being built. We wanted to extend that system of action. That's number one why we're excited about Gavel and a longer term vision, they're also a great team. The way they built a very small budding business, product-led growth, earning one lawyer at a time into the platform really excited us, and they're technically extremely sharp, so they're just a great fit.

In your keynote discussion, you talked about integrations and the success of aiR. Relativity became successful because it was able to create a way for people to build on it, embrace it, and use it in their own way. How is this new era continuing on that vision? What we're seeing in the market is that aiR is basically the new way to solve most use cases in incredible ways.

One of the themes that really go back to Andrew Sieja is this theme of openness, and this notion the platform itself has to be able to be tapped into by the practitioners with their own expertise and extend it, whether that's through coding, knowledge sharing, through anything else they bring to bear. This week we announced custom analyses for aiR, and that was chiefly one of the motions to extend the platform and allow 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 unblock 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. You could have an advanced practitioner build a custom analysis. Soon they'll be able to publish that skill for other people to participate and use later in the platform.

It's also a way of harvesting their capabilities and offering it to more folks on their team. My name is Adam Weiss. I'm the chief administrative officer and chief legal officer of Relativity. The concept of governance, of a shifting regulatory environment came up in several presentations.

You're the chief legal officer of the company. How do you see a differentiation in the way Relativity is used in Europe versus in the US or even in Australia? The beauty of what we do is there is differentiation, and we're able to accommodate that differentiation by geography, by jurisdiction, but there's also a lot of similarities, and whether you come to a session at RelFest London or RelFest Sydney or RelFest Chicago, a lot of the topics, a lot of the speakers, a lot of the information is going to be very similar.

While laws do vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, Relativity as the AI platform for legal data intelligence is able to accommodate the whole range of matters that one might experience or deal with in a particular jurisdiction. Particularly this market in London, UK, and EMEA, governance and defensibility really matters. It's been part of the platform since the onset. What we're seeing is with people bringing more AI to use, they want it to be transparent, auditable, validated and defensible.

They understand that at different parts in managing legal matters, that's essential to delivering the results and getting the ROI. From a product perspective, we're building governance, audit trails, the ways you validate into the platform. It's something we'll continue to invest in and the market demands. I'm Georgia Foster.

The managing director and the vice president of sales for international. That encompasses EMEA and APAC region, so bringing all the goodness from the US out to the international markets. What was your objective for this year's RelFest London? Every year the objective is to bring the community together at all different levels and types of work, and certainly we see that again today.

We've exceeded capacity in most rooms, and there were 70 people standing outside the keynote, which was phenomenal. Second was making sure that those that are starting to look at what AI works best for them and correctly, 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 they do it correctly. The objective is as it always is to celebrate our customers, to recognize them, to help them see what's coming down the pike, to hear from them, and to share best practices as we all rise together.

That's really what we do at Fest, whether it's in Chicago, London, or in Sydney. We cannot ignore the elephant in the room, which is AI, and the pace of innovation and change. Our customers and our partners are very excited. There's probably a little bit of anxiety as well.

But everybody is leaning into this change, and I think 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 it's ever been. Have you achieved your objective for this year's Rel Fest? We used to have major announcements on the stage at Chicago Fest, and we can't wait for October anymore because the innovation's coming out so fast.

For Fest London to be announcing such major innovation and products to come, and just looking around at all the familiar faces and excellent people that make this community, really happy with it. David Horrigan, Discovery Counsel and Legal Education Director at Relativity. You hosted several panels at RelFest London this year. What were some of the key takeaways from the perspectives that were shared?

We did one with the International Legal Technology Association, where we did a roundup of various AI data law issues, and today we had the research data session, and we discussed some of the research data we're doing, including some of the 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 are showing that up to a third are not. But, the audience here in the United Kingdom was definitely full disclosure, probably because there is guidance here in the UK.

What's the hope for what people will take from RelFest London when they leave and go back to their teams? Usable action that you can take, whether it's from case law, the practice guidance, the technical exhibits, the vendors that you see here, it's something you can take back and use on your job tomorrow. If we can do that, we've done our job. This market is particularly unique.

It's not just the UK, even though the event is here. There are countries all across EMEA that we work with that are grappling with different policy changes and requirements and regulations, and coming together and trying to work through some of that in addition with the technology is key. Kristin Traylor, Senior Director, AI Transformation and Law Firm Strategy, Relativity Great panel at RelFest London. What was the focus for that discussion?

To help the industry understand that we're way past pilots. We're at the point where we can start to standardize on how we're using generative AI in review, in disclosure, in investigations, helping people understand that there are ways to validate and understand what the technology is doing, how it's working, and to use it in live matters. What's different about Rel Fest London versus Rel Fest Sydney or the traditional Relativity Fest in Chicago? I see it as an opportunity for rolling thunder.

Almost like if you compare it to the old way of development in a waterfall method versus a very clear AI native, agentic, agile manner. These are stories that we are rolling out, and we began in Australia with the beginning 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 that we're making inside our business. Chris and his team, in the next week and over the past 30 days, 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 that innovation at speed. What I find fascinating with our employee base throughout the world, is there is a common bond that binds relativians, no matter their age, country, first language, religion, or culture, and that is our commitment to organizing data, discovering the truth, and acting on it, and by doing so, pursuing justice. That is shared by all relativians. Similarly, that's shared by our customers, no matter where they're located.

So their needs may vary based on how big they are, whether they're a law firm or a corporation or a governmental entity or a legal service provider. But there are also a lot of the same shared challenges, no matter where they are. One of the things I love most about RelFest is getting that commonality, that similar spirit. No matter where one is in the world, we're all doing the same important work.

Did you anticipate last year that you'd be having these conversations this year, and what do you think we'll be talking about next year? There are no crystal balls to ponder upon or to look at. A year ago, if you would have asked me we'd be this far accelerated as a market in terms of adoption of AI, I probably would have questioned that. If I could go back in time, I'd say there'd be more testing.

What we have acknowledged is that we're way beyond testing. There's full up 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, it was this balancing of opportunity and risk in the world we live in. We want to enable our community with the best tech and the best AI in the form of aiR for our clients in a very 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. This is Ari Kaplan at RelFest London 2026, speaking with Phil Saunders, Chris Brown , Adam Weiss, Kristin Traylor, Georgia Foster David Horrigan.

Chris Phil thank you thank you very much Adam, what a privilege. Thank you so much. Thank you, Ari. Appreciate it.

Kristin, thanks so much. Thank you. David, it's a privilege to collaborate. Great to talk to you.

Ari, great working with you as always. Georgia, congratulations. Thank you. Thanks again for coming.

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