Leveraging the Big 4 To Sell LegalTech – Deloitte + Relativity Deepen Alliance

In what is a good example of leveraging the Big Four to help a vendor sell their tech to a bigger market, Relativity has deepened its strategic alliance with Deloitte to now offer its Trace compliance product to the firm’s many financial services and regulated industry clients.

Relativity Trace is a compliance monitoring application, that helps banks and companies ‘proactively detect and mitigate violations of industry regulations and organisational electronic communication policies’.

In short, it’s an internal surveillance and early-warning system that helps legal and compliance groups to get an early tip off that, for example, staff might be plotting to subvert LIBOR market prices, or other anti-trust strategies.

It can scoop up internal data that is structured and unstructured from ‘more than 40 sources including email, audio, chat and other file types’, and it offers what Relativity claims is ‘near-real-time alerts’. And, as one would expect, it all works via the RelativityOne cloud-based platform.

But, back to the leverage point. Deloitte and the other Big Four firms are massive. Their client bases are global and diverse, including between them a large slice of the world’s largest businesses. Imagine having these guys marketing your technology to the wider world for you.

In return, the bonus for Deloitte is that it gains new investigations work. Or, as Chris May, Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory principal and discovery practice leader, puts it: ‘Using a fully customisable solution across enterprise data to identify activity requiring deeper investigation can help accelerate efforts to manage investigative, litigation and regulatory matters, as well as corporate e-communication policy concerns.’

Or in other words, a Big Four firm is seeing the promotion of legal tech software to its client base as a means of generating new professional services work for its own business, in this case investigations work.

The financial terms of the arrangement have not been revealed, but it looks like a win-win in any case. Deloitte will directly or indirectly help clients to use Trace, and Deloitte eventually gets a nice flow of billable work from those who use it when it leads to an investigation.

Jordan Domash, general manager of Relativity Trace for Relativity, added: ‘For such automation to work well, it needs to be customised and monitored by seasoned investigative professionals.’

And, it’s worth mentioning that Deloitte works with other legal tech companies, for example, it’s got a long standing relationship with legal AI review company, Kira Systems, which the Canadian company says now has lead to ‘more than 3,000 users’ across the Big Four firm.

Or, as Kira says: ‘Clients can benefit from Deloitte and Kira System’s combined capabilities through either a Deloitte engagement or by directly accessing the Kira platform with Deloitte providing services to enhance the value gained from the platform.’

Is getting the Big Four – or other very large professional services businesses – to market for you, perhaps one of the better sales strategies out there…? Could be.