This in from Relativity today (27 May):
Relativity has acquired Text IQ, a Top 100 AI company applying artificial intelligence (AI) to identify sensitive data.
Text IQ leverages the latest in unsupervised machine learning (ML), graphical modeling, social network analysis (SNA), natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning to create AI solutions for the world’s largest enterprises to manage and mitigate risks in enterprise data. Text IQ’s AI helps to lower the cost and risk of legal privilege review, speed up and increase the accuracy of data breach response workflows, and quickly identify and manage personally identifiable information (PII) which are often associated with Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Data Subject Access Requests.
The team at Text IQ is comprised of widely recognized, pioneering leaders in their field. They have long been focused on deep learning models that scale horizontally across massive data sets while improving in real-time—identifying people, relationships and sensitive data at scale with limited human input. Text IQ’s technology is applied within legal, compliance and privacy departments in most major industries spanning the Global 2000, uncovering latent risk buried in unstructured data. Text IQ will continue to focus on selling to and servicing the industry and its customers and innovating its technology. It will work with the Relativity team to build a seamless integration between its products while also embedding some of its core capabilities to improve existing AI and ML functionality in RelativityOne and Relativity Trace—providing Relativity’s 300,000 users with access to Text IQ’s leading AI capabilities.
“We’re merely scratching the surface of what the application of AI to our industry can mean. Our customers recognize that while AI offers immense possibility, it must be thoughtfully designed and applied to address use cases that yield specific business outcomes,” said Mike Gamson, Chief Executive Officer at Relativity. “We know that Text IQ’s proven technology, coupled with its incredible team of talented professionals, will be a wonderful addition to Relativity and help us deliver even more value to our customers.”
“Most of the industry’s legal and compliance data already live within the Relativity ecosystem, which adds to our excitement around increasing Relativity’s customers’ access to our AI models,” said Apoorv Agarwal, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Text IQ. “The fusion of our companies and technology will deliver on the promise of AI in a way that our industry has yet to experience all while ensuring that ethical and unbiased AI is at the core of everything that we do.”
In addition to accelerating the pace of innovation in RelativityOne and Relativity Trace, Text IQ’s unique approach to AI and ML and its product offerings will expand the legal and compliance challenges that Relativity can solve for its customers, like privilege reviews. Conducting privilege reviews can take thousands of hours and is prone to human error – leaving enterprises open to risk of sharing privileged information. Text IQ’s flagship product reduces the time and cost of conducting privilege document reviews by up to 75%, and significantly reduces the associated risk.
“Text IQ’s AI has brought intelligence and automation to a process that was ripe for innovation,” said Lynn Charytan, Executive Vice President and General Counsel at Comcast Cable. “Their privilege review solution cuts down a lot of legal expenses while preventing inadvertent disclosures of privileged data in the discovery process.”
Central to a legal or compliance team’s understanding of any data set are the people involved and the roles they play. However, gleaning that information from large amounts of unstructured data is a huge challenge. Text IQ uses NLP, SNA and other leading techniques to extract complete social networks from unstructured data through their Socio-Linguistic Hypergraph. This includes relationships between individuals, how they communicate, and how they communicate differently with different groups of people. Text IQ finds every trace of a person in a data set – providing insights impossible to gain through manual review or supervised review.
Increasingly, Relativity’s customers, which include 198 of the AmLaw 200, use Relativity to run critical data breach response projects. The integration of Text IQ’s AI into this process will result in a new standard for this type of work.
“The timelines for breach response are oftentimes more challenging to deal with than anything you’d see in litigation. A complete response is a substantial manual effort that’s very prone to error,” said Rick Lutkus, Partner, Privacy & Cybersecurity at Seyfarth Shaw. “Text IQ changes that, allowing us to take on more work and deliver better outcomes for our clients.”
Relativity’s global network of partners that provide project-based support and managed services, including world-class consulting, data management, legal, compliance and consulting services will greatly benefit from this acquisition. Offering Text IQ to Relativity’s partner community will provide them with an even stronger AI toolset to deliver more value across the e-discovery lifecycle and solve a wider array of data challenges for their customers.
“As the first certified Text IQ partner, we’ve seen their technology, which uniquely combines machine learning and social network analysis, drive measurable quality and consistency on matters,” said Julia Hasenzahl, CEO at ProSearch. “As a company that is always pursuing portfolio level solutions, we are excited about this acquisition as it sets the stage for Text IQ integration across all client matters within Relativity.”
Text IQ will continue to offer its core products for privacy, legal and compliance teams as well as its unconscious bias detector, which is part of Text IQ’s AI for Good initiative.
The acquisition follows an announcement in March of this year that Silver Lake, a global leader in technology investing, had made a substantial minority investment in Relativity to help the company accelerate growth, innovation and technology differentiation.