Robert Ambrogi Blog
Relativity today announced Relativity claiR, a conversational AI interface that lets lawyers ask plain-language questions across an entire RelativityOne matter and get back answers with citations to the underlying record.
Relativity CEO Phil Saunders calls it a fundamentally new way for lawyers to get straight to the answers in their most consequential legal data.
“Conversational AI is now how people everywhere expect to work, and with claiR, for the first time, the full richness of a matter’s data is directly in lawyers’ hands, rather than something they wait on technical legal data teams to surface,” Saunders said.
If that piques your interest to have a conversation with claiR, you will have to wait awhile. The product will not be generally available until sometime early next year.
Until then, Relativity is launching claiR through its Advanced Access program, the pre-release track it uses to refine features with customers. Three firms will be the first to test it: A&O Shearman, Foley & Lardner, and K&L Gates.
Relativity emphasizes that claiR is designed specifically for lawyers, rather than for the e-discovery specialists, litigation support teams and service providers who often staff an e-discovery matter.
claiR v. aiR Assist
If you have been paying attention to Relativity over the past two years, you know that it has released a series of products under the “aiR” moniker, together making up a suite of generative AI and agentic capabilities for review, privilege and other workflows.
One of these is aiR Assist, which Relativity announced at its Relativity Fest conference in October 2025 and made generally available at RelFest London in June 2026. It is a conversational, natural-language tool that searches across documents within a matter and that returns cited answers.
So what is the difference, you may ask, between claiR and aiR Assist? Relativity’s answer is that claiR builds on the foundation of aiR Assist and extends it from indexed document sets to the full depth of a matter.
In other words, aiR Assist works against indexes built from document sets within a workspace, while claiR reasons across the complete matter record, including metadata and the connections among documents.
Grounded On Matter Data
A notable feature of claiR is that it runs on data already stored in RelativityOne, so customers do not have to move sensitive material into a separate AI environment.
“claiR doesn’t replace legal judgment, it gives lawyers more complete access to the facts and insights that judgment depends on,” said Chris Brown, who became president of Relativity in July. “Nothing is exported or sampled, the answer comes from the record itself, right where the data lives.”
That is a significant differentiator from competitors that require ingesting matter data into a separate tool, which is not just inconvenient, but which also raises security and defensibility concerns.
As for pricing, Relativity says it expects to include claiR in RelativityOne’s integrated pricing at no additional cost, once generally available.
The company had previously folded aiR for Review, aiR for Privilege and aiR Assist into the standard RelativityOne offering, but it has kept aiR for Case Strategy as a separately priced add-on.
Feedback From the Firms
In the press release announcing claiR, Calum Burnett, partner and global co-head of L&I at A&O Shearman, one of the three Advanced Access participants, said the firm (then Allen & Overy) brought RelativityOne in-house in 2017 and was among the earliest firm-wide adopters of generative AI in early 2023. claiR, he said, “provides powerful, auditable AI analysis to help our lawyers in their day-to-day work.”
Another Advanced Access user, David Simon, a Foley & Lardner litigation partner and member of the firm’s AI Steering Committee, said claiR’s value is getting to the facts faster and identifying issues sooner. “It’s a practical way to use conversational AI within our existing legal workflows.”
Julie Anne Halter, Seattle office managing partner at K&L Gates and practice group coordinator for its e-Discovery Analysis & Technology practice, said the tool has the potential to further revolutionize e-discovery for large volumes of data.
Pushing Beyond E-Discovery
The announcement of claiR comes midway through a year in which Relativity has moved steadily to expand beyond its e-discovery base.
It shipped aiR for Case Strategy in January, made aiR Assist generally available in June, acquired document automation company Gavel the same month to extend its platform into Microsoft Word, extended a set of Model Context Protocol integrations for administrative work, and has been investing in early-stage legal tech through its Rel Labs arm.
All of this is aimed at owning more of the full litigation lifecycle and, with claiR and Gavel in particular, to reaching the practicing lawyer, in addition to the lit support professionals who are its regular users.
Relativity puts it this way: “claiR is the latest step in Relativity’s commitment to extending its platform to the surfaces where legal work already happens.”
Relativity says it will share more about all this at RelFest Chicago, Sept. 29-Oct. 1.