Your single source for new lessons on legal technology, e-discovery, and the people innovating behind the scenes.

Heretik and Relativity: Purpose-Built Contract Review and Intelligence Capabilities in RelativityOne

Relativity

In 2015, three cofounders began building a contract review solution on Relativity, selecting the platform for its reliable infrastructure, extensive document hosting capabilities, rapidly growing cloud offering, and robust security. (Two of those founders had professional roots at Relativity, then known as kCura, and deep experience developing in our ecosystem.)

Their goal was simple: to help organizations review and make decisions about their contracts more efficiently and intelligently.

That is how Heretik got its start. And today, we’re happy to share that Relativity has acquired Heretik and their technology, which combines machine learning and advanced analysis to help organizations gain immediate insight into contract data.

Expanding Contracts

Heretik is an end-to-end contract review solution, built on Relativity, that helps organizations make smarter, faster, and more favorable decisions with their contract data. The solution enables teams to transform existing agreements into structured, actionable data to efficiently address a variety of corporate transaction and regulatory response use cases. 

The software offers a few key features in service of this work, including:

  • The Viewer, which was purpose-built for reviewing contracts. It provides a modern and lightning-fast review interface, tailor-made for quickly locating, extracting, and storing critical data points from contracts. 
  • Analysis, with models engineered to help teams turn insight into action, comprised of contract classification; section segmentation and classification; data extraction to fields; and imaging and OCR.  
  • Compare, which allows users to quickly identify textual differences across sections or entire documents within a data set.  

Whether managing massive corporate transactions, extracting critical data in global lease agreements, or comparing messy bespoke contracts, legal teams use Heretik to quickly identify relevant insights, risks, rights, and obligations within large data sets—reducing weeks of work to minutes.

Many of Heretik’s current customers are also members of the Relativity community, and use the software to tackle regulatory responses like LIBOR and CCPA; corporate transactions and due diligence exercises; contract lifecycle management; and more.

Empowered Review

Moving forward, Heretik’s end-to-end contract review solution will be known as Relativity Contracts. It will be integrated into RelativityOne, and available as an add-on for all RelativityOne customers beginning in mid-2023.

In the future, we have big plans to build upon and integrate some contract viewer-specific functionality into the RelativityOne viewer so it can be leveraged on other data types. 

We are excited to bring this world-class solution into our platform, where it can empower our customers to do even more with RelativityOne. Much as we have with Milyli’s Blackout (now known as Redact), Text IQ’s enhanced AI capabilities, and VerQu’s connections to dozens of cloud data sources and archives, our engineers—joined by Heretik’s employees—are hard at work integrating this software so it can be seamlessly available to our customers as soon as possible.

A Better Experience

Contract-based initiatives like compliance reviews, M&A due diligence, corporate restructuring, and more are often mission-critical and defined by high-stakes consequences, but the manual work that goes into tackling them responsibly is cumbersome and prone to human error. These efforts have traditionally required poring over dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of detailed contracts (and sometimes many drafts and iterations thereof) to gain an understanding of the stories they tell about a company’s legal obligations, risks, and agreements.

Adding a purpose-built contract review solution to RelativityOne will help our customers tackle even more of the data-driven, risky, and time-consuming projects that are vitally important to organizations across industries and geographies.

Integrating Heretik is a prime expression of our vision for how artificial intelligence and the right data management technology can transform once-burdensome workflows into value-adding exercises for legal teams across industries. Heretik exemplifies this—so bringing this kind of work into the same platform where you and your colleagues conduct e-discovery, compliance exercises, second requests, internal investigations, and more just makes sense.

In addition to the added efficiencies, keeping and working with all of this incredibly sensitive data in a single cloud platform—where it’s protected by a world-class security strategy—minimizes its exposure to risks that could threaten your business.

In short, we’re better together. After years of close collaboration, we’re thrilled to welcome Heretik to the Relativity team. Our mission is to help you organize data, discover the truth, and act on it. We can’t wait to give you yet another, powerful way to extract more value out of your data with RelativityOne.


The Relativity Blog is your single source for new lessons on legal technology, e-discovery, and the people innovating behind the scenes.

The latest insights, trends, and spotlights — directly to your inbox.

The Relativity Blog covers the latest in legal tech and compliance, professional development topics, and spotlights on the many bright minds in our space. Subscribe today to learn something new, stay ahead of emerging tech, and up-level your career.

Interested in being one of our authors? Learn more about how to contribute to The Relativity Blog.