Relativity automates risk controls to deliver safer software releases

Relativity’s mission is to help customers organize data, discover the truth, and act on it. The company provides innovative solutions that improve how the legal industry operates, making it easier for teams to solve problems, save time, and achieve better outcomes in their cases. Relativity empowers legal teams with an end-to-end platform designed to tackle any legal data challenge across litigation, investigations, regulatory requests and data breach response. Their platform makes it easier and faster to work through complex legal issues and find more reliable evidence. With a global presence, Relativity is committed to improving how legal professionals handle information, making the process smoother and more efficient while helping teams find answers quickly.

As Relativity underwent a major technology migration to replace their front-end UI, they realized their existing homegrown feature flagging tool could benefit from advanced capabilities to safeguard releases effectively.

However, the journey didn’t stop with the switch to LaunchDarkly. Relativity is currently in another migration phase, with more engineers using the platform directly for more advanced features like progressive rollouts and targeted releases. 

The main problems they needed to address included: 

• The urgency of managing risk in a fast-paced deployment environment 
• Significant engineering time spent on release monitoring 
• A continual need for manual intervention to maintain control over releases 
• Need for a more efficient risk mitigation and rollback strategy to prevent unexpected downtime for customers

Relativity implemented LaunchDarkly as their feature management platform to standardize their release pipeline. The engineering team saw improvements across several areas. First and foremost, targeting and progressive rollouts improved release safety, reducing unplanned downtime for customers that could be costly and disruptive.

The engineering team also saw a dramatic boost in efficiency.

Most importantly, by eliminating the need to manage their in-house feature system, Relativity was able to refocus their efforts on what matters most: accelerating innovation. They no longer had to divert energy into maintaining a feature management solution, so their team could concentrate on developing core product features that directly support their mission. 

“Building feature management capabilities isn't part of our core business model. Having LaunchDarkly take care of that for us saves us time and lets us focus on what matters most,” Adam noted.

The engineering team at Relativity is taking safe deployments to the next level with Guarded Releases, a new solution that automatically halts problematic deployments, removing much of the uncertainty from their release process. This adds an additional layer of confidence for the team, enabling them to work on new features without concerns of something going wrong. 

“The impact is that I can click a button and I can leave for the day with some confidence that my stuff’s not going to break,” said Jake Robinson-Lieberman, Lead Software Engineer, Relativity. “I think this is sick [and] I don’t understand why I would release anything in any other way.” 

As Kadzban puts it: 

“I really love Guarded Releases because it takes the guesswork and a lot of the risk out of those releases. We can measure the rollout as it's happening, and if something goes wrong, it automatically stops. It gives me peace of mind, and I can get back to other things in my life without worrying.”

With LaunchDarkly, Relativity was able to both streamline internal processes and better serve the legal industry, enabling faster, more efficient results for legal teams that ultimately help them realize the same faster, more efficient results for their clients. 

Kadzban reflected, “When we focus on solving these problems, the entire legal industry benefits. We get to the truth quicker, with fewer hurdles.”