Relativity to open Singapore hub as Asia demand grows

Relativity plans to establish a Singapore entity as it expands its presence in Asia.

The legal data intelligence provider is targeting a fourth-quarter launch. The new entity will enable local hiring. The plan was disclosed alongside figures showing rising use of its software in Asia Pacific, where customers are managing larger volumes of data and heavier legal and compliance workloads.

Businesses and public bodies across the region are operating in a more demanding environment for investigations, disclosure and risk management. Whistleblower reports in Asia Pacific rose about 26% between 2021 and 2024, while data security incidents increased by more than 25% between 2024 and 2025. In Australia, freedom of information requests rose 25% in the 2024-25 financial year.

That backdrop has helped drive adoption of the company's cloud platform, RelativityOne, and its AI tools. In Australia and New Zealand, RelativityOne adoption increased 57% year on year, while Asia recorded a 46% rise over the same period. Across Australia and New Zealand, the number of documents reviewed using Relativity aiR for Review rose 2,200% year on year.

Phil Saunders, chief executive officer, linked the expansion plans to broader changes in legal work.

"At a time when data is exploding, AI is everywhere, and the conversation has shifted from 'should we do this?' to 'how do we do it right?' there's no shortage of complexity," Saunders said. "But the work doesn't slow down, and the pipeline never pauses. At Relativity, we've built the AI platform for legal data intelligence - not as a tagline, but as the foundation of our company's future. Every question our users ask, every challenge they tackle, shapes what we do and how we build - that's what will drive us forward."

Regional growth

Legal and compliance teams are under greater pressure in cross-border matters as regulation changes and disclosure obligations increase. Relativity is positioning its products around investigations, regulatory work and large document reviews, where clients often need to process data across multiple jurisdictions.

Chris Brown, Chief Product Officer, said the platform is being built to meet those demands in markets including Australia.

"Relativity is embedding AI into how legal work gets done - from data to insight to action - with the scale and defensibility required in markets like Australia and around the world," Brown said. "RelativityOne is both a system of record, preserving data and institutional knowledge, and a system of action, enabling that knowledge to compound and drive outcomes across the platform."

Relativity also outlined newer AI products in Advanced Access. One, aiR Assist, lets legal teams query document sets in natural language to identify themes, links and relevant information. More than 50 customers are using the tool at that stage.

Another feature, custom analyses, lets users create their own AI analyses through natural-language prompts without coding. The tool can extract structured data from unstructured files, identify visual patterns in images and analyse handwritten material across image- and text-based content.

Customer use

Relativity cited customer examples to show how the tools are being applied in legal matters. KordaMentha was asked to prepare seven chronologies across different parts of a case, a task that would previously have taken several weeks, according to the company.

Using aiR Assist and Relativity aiR for Case Strategy, the firm identified key individuals, mapped relationships and analysed financial instruments, completing the seven chronologies in about five to six hours.

"Combining aiR for Review, aiR for Case Strategy and aiR Assist gives us a comprehensive solution that enables deeper case understanding before review even begins," said Roman Barbera, partner at KordaMentha. "aiR helps us deliver clearer, more strategic insights aligned to our clients' objectives."

Adrian Agius, Director of Legal Informatics at Gilbert + Tobin, said generative AI is changing how firms handle growing data volumes and resource constraints.

"AI has been a core part of discovery work for a decade, from technology assisted review to conceptual analytics. But the generative AI movement has amplified this," Agius said. "It's allowed us to accelerate the way in which we generate our value. It means that we don't need as many physical resources, our cost base is reduced, but also that we can do a better job with the amount of time that we have. As data volumes increase, and we have no alternative way to work through that data, we need more powerful tools to do the job that we previously did."