There are many eDiscovery products on the market today. While Relativity may be one of the largest players today, their market share has steadily been coming down over the years due to a number of factors including product fatigue, pricing fatigue, and increased competition from companies like Casepoint who offer the strongest alternative to Relativity from a feature, function, and price perspective.  

There are a number of corporations, government agencies, law firms, and legal service providers who are still on Relativity’s legacy on-premises product and are determining whether to make the shift to RelOne. It can be tempting to stick with “the devil you know” simply because of human nature to be adverse to change. There is also the analogy that “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” that some firms tend to use as justification for sticking with a tool that is frankly overly complex and overpriced. But these are all rationalizations, not reasons, that people feel stuck with Relativity. It’s a choice that can end up costing organizations a lot of time, money, and inefficiency.  

Moving from Relativity to another eDiscovery solution is a choice with wide-ranging considerations. It is a decision many organizations have made and for the ones that chose Casepoint, they have been extremely satisfied.

Here are some deep-dive questions that will help you make the decision to choose a better alternative to Relativity like Casepoint:

1. What Do Users Think of Relativity and Its User Interface?

Ask how users really feel about using Relativity and you’ll hear a lot of responses that may surprise you. While you will certainly find some fans of the product, a large number of corporations, government agencies, and law firms have told us Relativity comes with a steep learning curve and is not easy to use. There are also many organizations that feel “Relativity fatigue” given their slow pace of innovation and the sky-high prices. On top of that, because of the complexity of software, it often requires additional support from a legal service provider which adds to the cost. There are other limitations to the Relativity as well:

Example: Relativity effectively limits sharing and multitasking by not allowing users to keep a document in more than one folder at a time or have more than one browser window open at a time. Casepoint allows you to have as many tabs open as you need and as many documents in as many folders as you like.

2. Is Detailed Reporting an Option?

Reporting is another vital area where Relativity falls short. Users tell us that Relativity’s standard reports need to be customized to generate meaningful insight on cost drivers in their eDiscovery processes and total cost of ownership. Relativity charges a fee for this. Casepoint’s reporting is more robust and has more options, and our dashboards are far easier to navigate and export to Excel.

3. How Does Relativity Enable Multi-Matter Management?

Attorneys for organizations engaged in a constant stream of litigation that is largely similar can waste a great deal of time searching for and transferring data across different matters. Relativity’s offerings have fallen behind in this area. Casepoint is the only platform that offers cross-matter searching, workspace-to-workspace data transfer of physical files and their metadata and work product replication. Used in conjunction with our portable predictive AI model, these innovative features allow users to dramatically reduce actions required to work across multiple matters — something Relativity cannot do.

4. How Fast Is Relativity When It Comes to Porting Data In and Out of Applications?

Speed is essential to meeting the tight deadlines of eDiscovery projects. Clients and colleagues keep telling us that uploading data to the Relativity platform takes far too long. They also say workspace management, eDiscovery management and searches with Relativity are often slower than with other platforms. Document incrementation can take many seconds instead of microseconds. Because of this, timeouts on duplication workflow scripts on large datasets are frequent. The fact is, Casepoint’s data processing is significantly faster than Relativity’s and more importantly, it is much more thorough. 

5. How Robust Are Relativity’s TAR Capabilities? 

If your matter requires advanced AI/analytics technologies such as predictive coding or technology-assisted review (TAR) users often look elsewhere, While RelOne offers TAR capabilities, a large majority of Relativity users often look to third party solutions like Brainspace or NexLP (both now owned by another provider) which you end up paying extra because they are not content with Relativity’s native TAR and analytic capabilities.

6. Are You Alarmed By Relativity’s Mounting Add-on Costs?

It’s an open secret that Relativity users are not happy with the cost structure. There are many, many hidden costs, depending on the vendors you use. And licensing fees are assessed per-user — adding significantly to Relativity’s expense. Casepoint, on the other hand, does not charge user fees. 

The list of negatives goes on, from vendor-hosted storage charges to customization costs and third-party add-ons. Relativity doesn’t have its own service team, so when issues arise users must reach out to third-party support teams. This is an extra cost. It also keeps Relativity developers further removed from users’ real needs. We offer direct support to users, whose support feedback is an important driver in our development cycle. 

7. How Quickly Can Relativity Write Custom Applications or Connectors?

Relativity is notoriously slow to add new features. If Casepoint users need something developed or request an enhancement to the platform, they have direct access to a development team who will listen to their requirements and add the feature to the product roadmap. Casepoint users can provide direct feedback from within the platform. 

You can see some perspective on these questions by downloading the Relativity Switch Guide.

Relativity Switch for Government

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Popular Posts