From the ‘City of Big Shoulders’ to the 'City of big tech:' Inside the Chicago company on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence

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CHICAGO — The LaSalle Street canyon — Chicago’s traditional Financial District – is now the crossroads of the new economy, where tech workers are transforming entire professions, and helping to change Chicago’s image from the “City of Big Shoulders” to the “City of Big Tech.”

“Chicago isn’t the first place you think of as an invigorating, innovative software company but right here, right in Chicago, we have some of the very best talent I’ve ever come across,” said Phil Saunders, the CEO of Relativity, a cutting-edge software firm harnessing the immense power of artificial intelligence. “I’m super proud to be part of this company, super proud to be part of this city.”

In October, city and state leaders were on hand as Saunders officially opened a 100,00-square-foot headquarters in the old Continental Bank building.

Inside of the classical revival landmark, there is a new-age space, complete with a golf simulator, arcade video games, a ping pong table, and a pool table.  There’s a purpose to the playful atmosphere: enticing workers back to the office in a post-Covid climate, sparking creativity, and encouraging teamwork.

“The technology that we have is incredible,” said Andrew Sieja, the founder of Relativity. “It’s incredible in terms of how it works, its accuracy.”

Saunders said AI technology is ushering in a momentous shift for society.

“We are entering a phase of accelerated change accelerated compute,” he said. “Industrial sized massive AI workloads that are going to drive transformative outcomes in our work and in our lives. It’s a new era we’re entering, and those that embrace it, we can literally change how we work, and we live.”

Inside Relativity’s meeting rooms, engineers and designers are developing software that will shake one of society’s foundations: the entire legal profession, turning a lawyer’s most time consuming and tedious work into easy and efficient automated assignments.

“It’s sort of like the holy grail that the industry’s been chasing for a number of years, that probably looked too distant on a horizon to realize you could get to,” said Chris Brown, the chief product officer for Relativity.

Brown announced the launch of the groundbreaking “air for review” product in September. Based on instructions or prompts provided by a lawyer, the product uses generative AI to find the most impactful content across thousands of documents, with rationale on why those documents are relevant to a case or investigation. The human lawyer then reviews the analysis. Essentially it uses generative AI to simulate the actions of a human doing a first pass at review – except the product can review up to 300,000 documents per day, 750 times more than the average human reviewer.

“It’s now visible, and why everybody’s buzzing at the conference, is now we can think about what’s coming next,” Brown said.

it was the talk of the company’s convention “Relativity Fest” – which attracts law firms, and global tech companies to Chicago each year.

In a high-rise just a few blocks away, attorney Steven Mandell is moving mountains of information, the old-fashioned way, in boxes on a cart. “In the olden days people always did document review this way,” Mandell said as he sifted through sheets of paper. “Reviewing large boxes of papers. I’d say there’s about 5,000 documents in this banker’s box.”

In those days the boxes meant billable hours for lawyers because of the amount of time and careful reading each page required. 

“Some of your more complex litigation actually would have in the hundreds of thousands of documents,” he said.

But Relativity’s software – and the power of artificial intelligence — has changed everything.

The way the software works is a human lawyer gives instructions so the technology can search and analyze electronic data for a legal proceeding or investigation, for example telling it to search for specific names, dates, e-mails and schedules (it can even tell if a thumbs up emoji was used to approve a transaction).

“We have a whole series of technology that will collect all this information that is effectively what you generate in business as evidence. then we organize it and make it searchable,” Sieja said.

The human lawyers will re-write instructions or prompts to zero in on areas of concern slowly training the software to replicate the reasoning of an attorney.

“Artificial intelligence is in some ways trying to replicate the amazing experience of human intelligence, but it’s doing that in very different ways,” Brown said.  

Mandell, who has done legal work for WGN’s parent company, Nexstar Media Group, is a Relativity customer.

“What it does is it allows us to ingest huge amounts of information – documents in the hundreds of thousands – and review them and analyze them much quicker than used to be the case,” he said.

AI’s astonishing efficiency is raising concerns that technology could lead to the elimination of jobs. Last year, a research report by economists at Goldman Sachs estimated that 44 percent of legal work could be automated – that’s almost half the jobs in the legal profession.

“It will be quite disruptive,” Sieja said. “But the buyers of legal services are asking for it. When that Goldman Sachs report came out, it seemed like general counsels picked up their phones, called their law firms, ‘Hey I just read this Goldman Sachs report. What are you doing to make your lawyers more efficient, so you save me money?’”

Mandell says the efficiencies will allow boutique law firms to compete with larger ones, but he cautions there will always be a need for humans to check the machines.

“The cautions? I think you still need the human element involved,” Mandell said. “You can’t let the software platform, or the technology take over human functions entirely. You still need someone doing the analysis at the end of the day.”

Right now, there are 300,000 relativity users in 48 counties around the globe – including 199 of the 200 largest law firms in the world. Relativity now has 1,600 employees worldwide; 650 of them are based on LaSalle Street, the intersection of Chicago’s past and its future. 

“I think we’re building a hundred-year company here in Chicago, and I’m very proud of it,” Brown said.

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Mike Lowe

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