DISCO vs Relativity aiR: pricing, features and which to choose

DISCO is a cloud eDiscovery and litigation platform made by CS Disco, Inc., which launched its software in March 2013 after growing from the Camara & Sibley litigation practice. The company reported more than 1,400 customers in 2023. Its 2021 SEC filing reported $161.1 million raised by March 2021, while a 2019 company announcement reported $135 million in cumulative investment. CS Disco trades on the NYSE under LAW. The product serves law firms, corporations, legal service providers, and government organizations handling litigation, investigations, and regulatory matters. Its scope places it closer to a full matter platform than a standalone document-review application. The company remains active as of October 2026. Teams should therefore assess both discovery functionality and the vendor’s continuing public-company support model when evaluating it for long-running matters.

A typical DISCO matter begins with data transfer into a hosted database, followed by processing, search, filtering, early case assessment, review, and production. The platform also includes legal holds, custodian notices, preservation workflows, audit trails, high-speed upload, search visualization, collaborative review, timelines, deposition transcript management, and production tools. Cecilia can answer questions, summarize documents, define terms, summarize depositions, and create timelines from matter data. DISCO says its uploader can reach up to 180 GB per hour and 4 TB per day. The read-only API supports organization metrics and billing analysis. These components let litigation teams move from preservation through discovery and deposition preparation without exporting every matter to separate products. That consolidation can reduce handoffs, but teams should still map permissions, export needs, and review protocols before deployment.

DISCO's main limitation is commercial opacity: buyers must model data volume and storage before they know their contracted rate. Cloud hosting also rules out teams that require self-hosted discovery software, and AI output requires attorney review. RelativityOne offers a larger partner and deployment partner network, while Everlaw provides cloud review with Storybuilder and Deep Dive corpus questioning. Logikcull is aimed at simpler collection and review workflows. DISCO is more cohesive when a matter needs holds, review, depositions, timelines, and AI in one environment, but its broader feature set can exceed the needs of small cases. Smaller teams should test whether its matter-wide breadth offsets implementation effort and negotiated billing complexity. Law firms and legal departments managing complex, high-volume litigation should pick DISCO when integrated workflows matter more than public pricing or self-hosting.

Relativity aiR is Relativity's generative AI suite for legal data intelligence inside RelativityOne. It targets litigation, investigations, document review, privilege work, and case preparation. Relativity announced limited availability for aiR for Review at Legalweek 2024, followed by general availability for Review in September 2024 and Privilege in November 2024. The company reported more than 100 million aiR document decisions during the 20 months ending in October 2025. Relativity also reported $160 million in research and development investment for 2025, a company wide figure rather than an aiR budget. The suite is designed for legal teams that need review controls, auditability, and AI assistance within an existing case data system. Its positioning therefore emphasizes controlled deployment within established litigation workflows rather than replacement of attorneys or outside counsel.

Relativity aiR begins with extracted text and images in a RelativityOne workspace. In aiR for Review, a user writes natural language criteria, tests prompts on a smaller subset, and analyzes a collection. Results identify significant documents, explain their relevance, and cite supporting passages. Privilege analyzes documents and relevant personas, predicts privilege, and drafts privilege log descriptions. Case Strategy supports fact extraction, timelines, summaries, and work product. Assist provides conversational search over legal data. Outputs include rationales and considerations, while Review Center can calculate precision, recall, and elusion metrics for quality control. These controls make the system more suitable for defensible review than a general purpose chatbot operating outside the matter workspace. They also give review leaders a structured basis for sampling, escalation, and documenting decisions before production.

The main limitation is that aiR depends on RelativityOne, which makes it less suitable for teams choosing a standalone review system. Inference may occur outside the instance storage region when Azure model availability requires it, although Relativity says customer data is not used to train third party models. Everlaw offers a separate cloud discovery platform with comparable AI review workflows, while DISCO focuses on cloud discovery and case preparation without requiring RelativityOne. Clearbrief focuses on cited drafting and discovery-related writing, and Briefpoint supports automated legal drafting as an add-on product. Westlaw Precision is aimed at legal research rather than matter data. Choose aiR when review, privilege, validation, and case intelligence should remain in one RelativityOne workspace. Confirm regional processing, contract scope, and migration costs before standardizing on it.