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Extract from article by John Pletz
When it comes to software companies, talk of platforms—products that are so widely used that other companies build ancillary software on top of them—is almost always more aspirational than actual. Except maybe in the case of Chicago’s Relativity.
All but one of the country’s 200 largest law firms employ Relativity’s software to sift through mountains of emails and other documents turned over during the discovery phase of litigation. It’s also used by legal departments of 73 of the Fortune 100. Companies from startups, such as Chicago’s Milyli and NexLP, to large legal services and consulting firms have built over 75 apps for Relativity. Formerly called kCura, Relativity has invested in two other Chicago startups, Esquify and Heretik, and just launched a formal venture-capital program.
The company’s annual Relativity Fest, which drew nearly 2,000 of its 150,000 users to the Palmer House in October, “has been the e-discovery conference to go to the past couple of years,” says Chris Bojar, litigation-support manager at Chicago law firm Barack Ferrazzano Kirschbaum & Nagelberg.
What CEO Andrew Sieja has done “is straight out of the Marc Benioff playbook,” says Mark Tebbe, referring to the founder of San Francisco-based Salesforce.com, which dominates sales software. Tebbe, who leads ChicagoNext, the tech arm of economic development agency World Business Chicago, has known Sieja since hiring him as a coder at tech consulting firm Lante during the dot-com boom almost two decades ago.
Read the complete article at Could this company become Chicago’s own Salesforce?
Additional Reading:
- Apparently Size Does Matter: eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey Results – Winter 2018
- eDiscovery Mergers, Acquisitions, and Investments in 2017