[EDRM Editor’s Note: This article was first published here on June 5, 2025, and EDRM is grateful to Trusted Partner Relativity for permission to republish.]
Earlier this year, Relativity CEO Phil Saunders shared our vision for what’s on the horizon for the legal industry. It’s exciting stuff: the activation of Legal Data Intelligence, the transformation of legal work with the help of generative AI, and, of course, the continued innovation of teams like yours.
As part of our strategic planning for our community’s bright future, Phil also announced a new policy that recognizes a significant milestone in legal tech’s journey to the cloud:
By 2028, all new matters and workspaces will be hosted in RelativityOne with some limited customer and geographic exceptions. Existing matters and workspaces can continue to be supported in Relativity Server.
Our goal with this policy is to ensure that each of our customers can take full advantage of the innovation that only a cloud-native architecture can provide. These are all the things that make RelativityOne the go-to platform for Legal Data Intelligence projects of all types and sizes: superior scalability and performance, unmatched security to protect sensitive data, generative AI, streamlined collections and data imports, and more.
We believe in RelativityOne and its ability to help you organize data, discover the truth, and act on it, right now and well into the future. And we’re thrilled to say that our cloud customers agree; whether they moved from Server, an alternate system, or a collection of tools, they are reaping the benefits of working in an end-to-end, cloud-native, rapidly innovated platform.
Still, we know that migrating to the cloud represents a big change for some, and with any change naturally come questions. To help you plan your path forward, I want to share the most essential things you should know as you embark on this journey to the cloud with us.
#1: Now is the time to get started.
While this policy does not mean that Relativity Server will reach “end-of-life” status on January 1, 2028, it does mean that all new matters must live in RelativityOne from that point forward. Limited exceptions will be made only in circumstances where regulatory or similar requirements demand it. Please do not rely on any conflicting information you may hear on this subject. Instead, contact us directly if you believe you have a project that may require an exception, so we can provide accurate clarification.
While this policy does not mean that Relativity Server will reach “end-of-life” status on January 1, 2028, it does mean that all new matters must live in RelativityOne from that point forward.
Andrew Watts, chief customer officer at Relativity.
While Server will remain accessible and stable for any existing matters you have on the platform, this is the time to start getting your arms around RelativityOne to ensure the success of future projects. We urge you to spend the coming months exploring what’s ahead, what the cloud will enable for your team, and where to begin. Waiting until 2027 to start planning will mean you’ve already fallen behind for several reasons.
First, stakeholders matter. It can take time to get the signoffs you need to move data and change workflows. Whether it’s from corporate IT, security checkpoints, project management timelines, or other types of constraints, these agreements rarely come together overnight. Best to start early.
Second, there is no time to lose when you consider the pace of change in our space. It’s been just two and a half years since ChatGPT hit the market and generative AI first made waves in virtually every industry. Today, generative AI is already transforming everyday legal tasks like document review, contract analysis, and research. How much more technological advancement—and competitive advantage—will you miss out on if you’re sitting on the bench for another two years?
#2: There’s already a ton of momentum bringing our community into the cloud.
Many teams just like yours have made the transition to RelativityOne already.
Take the major financial services company who completed their migration last year. They reported that it took just 3 months to fully migrate to RelativityOne, deprecate their Server instances, and begin to take advantage of the human time and money saved.
To date, more than three-quarters of Relativity customers have moved to the cloud. This year alone, our team has completed more than 30 cloud migrations with our customers and partners, with many more underway. There are nearly 26 billion documents already in RelativityOne, and users process more than a terabyte of new data each day.
As Kelly Friedman, chief Legal Data Intelligence officer and senior counsel at Heuristica, notes: “All the really cutting-edge technology is made for the cloud.”
All the really cutting-edge technology is made for the cloud.
Kelly Friedman, chief Legal Data Intelligence officer and senior counsel at Heuristica.
All across our ecosystem, everyone is in the midst of transformation. Whether it’s leveling up operations or looking into strategic improvements for their organizations, our community is reinvesting time saved back into the new opportunities made possible by a cloud-enabled future. Take a look around: there is no remaining fear or doubt about whether the cloud is the right fit for today’s most innovative, secure, and successful legal teams.
#3: You’re going to love RelativityOne’s cloud-native features, including AI.
Once you make the leap, we know you’ll find RelativityOne to be pretty amazing.
Supported by the flexibility and computational power of the cloud, there’s a long list of benefits you can only find in RelativityOne:
- All of Relativity’s generative AI capabilities, which transform workflows—from improving accuracy to reducing review time and cutting costs. Relativity aiR can help your team do in hours what used to take days. In fact, some of our early aiR adopters have seen up to 70 percent cost savings and 80 percent reductions in review time.
- Plenty of AI everywhere else, too.I think you’ll be excited to see how we’ve built AI into RelativityOne. It isn’t there to replace you or your work; it’s there to help augment the work you do, so you can work smarter, faster, and with your finger on the pulse of legal tech innovation.AI-enabled features across the platform include an AI Help Chatbot to answer your how-to questions about RelativityOne, automated workflows, streamlined redactions and translations, sentiment analysis, Relativity Data Breach Response, Relativity Contracts, and more.
- Unmatched scalability and performance, allowing teams to scale up and down as needed while handling massive data sets faster and more efficiently. RelativityOne users enjoy processing speeds that are four times faster than Server, .20-second doc-to-doc speeds, huge time savings thanks to workflow automations and improved performance, and the latest and greatest features we can give them.
- Workflow and usability upgrades to simplify administrative tasks, minimize rote work, and reduce your projects’ exposure to human error. Picture streamlined data imports, more intuitive and automated batching, and better insights from usage and billing data.
- Continuous innovation and automatic updates, so you’ll benefit from new features, fixes, and user experience upgrades that meet your evolving data management, processing, enrichment, review, and production needs in real time—without scheduling or babysitting software upgrades.
- Expert cloud and AI support to help you realize long-term success with the platform. Our team is like an extension of your own, ready to provide technical support as well as advice on extracting maximum value from RelativityOne (and the data you put in it).
Global law firm Ashurst has experienced the benefits of being in the cloud since making their move just a few months ago.
“Since implementing RelativityOne, we have seen notable efficiency improvements in our document review and data management,” Hilary Goodier, partner and global head of Ashurst Advance, shared with us ahead of Relativity Fest Sydney. “The solution’s automated workflows have significantly reduced the need for manual intervention, and the speed of data transfer and processing enables us to be more agile when responding to clients’ time-sensitive requests, getting documents in front of our lawyers at a much faster pace.”
The solution’s automated workflows have significantly reduced the need for manual intervention, and the speed of data transfer and processing enables us to be more agile when responding to clients’ time-sensitive requests, getting documents in front of our lawyers at a much faster pace.
Hilary Goodier, partner and global head of Ashurst Advance.
We live in a high-stakes and even higher-volume legal landscape. To keep up, being in the cloud isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s become essential. The complexity of legal data is growing rapidly, and our solutions are evolving just as fast to help you tackle it all effectively.
Wondering How to Begin?
Most importantly, you should know that there is no need to assemble, execute, and troubleshoot a cloud transition plan all on your own.
My team and I have helped more than 500 customers move to RelativityOne and transform their work with new capabilities that only the cloud can provide. Along the way, we’ve tackled dozens of different types of moves, including migrations from other technologies, diverse volumes of projects and data, varying levels of client complexities to consider, multi-geography teams, differing migration deadlines, requests to help modernize workflows, and more. And it isn’t just us: we also have an incredible network of strategic partners who are ready and waiting to help.
I invite you to reach out to me directly with any questions, or to contact our team at any time to point you in the right direction as you begin your journey to the cloud.
In addition, we’ve assembled quite a few resources to help support you along the way.
First, if you haven’t already, start exploring Relativity Learning. Located within our Community site, Relativity Learning offers courses covering everything from ethical considerations in e-discovery to document translations. It’s a pretty robust library of educational resources that you can peruse to get up to speed on everything there is to know about RelativityOne.
To support your cloud journey specifically, there’s our “Transitioning from Relativity Server to RelativityOne” learning path. This self-paced series provides lessons on data migrations, the differences in features and workflows between these platforms, and more. It’s a great place to start if you need to wrap your head around what this journey will look like for your team—and the promise of everything you’ll unlock by the end of it.
If you need to migrate from an alternative technology, reach out to our partners or contact us for a review of your particular needs.
Additionally, if you’d like to follow along with all the latest and greatest enhancements in RelativityOne, subscribe to our monthly product update newsletter.
And finally, lean on our community. You are an important part of it, and we are eager to hear from you at in-person events like Relativity Fest, local user groups, and industry conferences, as well as virtual experiences like webinars (this one is relevant) and trainings. Jump in to take advantage of the learning opportunities you need to be successful, as well as enjoy the connections and knowledge sharing that can help us all benefit from our industry’s ongoing transformation in the best ways.
You can also learn more about migrating to the cloud—and find links to all of these resources—on this page. I highly recommend bookmarking it; it’ll make a great companion as you undertake this journey with us.
Read the original article here.
Assisted by GAI and LLM Technologies per EDRM GAI and LLM Policy.
