Problem: Your eDiscovery Stack Has a January 2028 Deadline

Some operational headaches arrive suddenly. This one has had a date on it since early 2025, and that date is now about 15 months away.

On October 2, LawSites reported that Relativity CEO Phil Saunders confirmed the company's 2028 deadline for its on-premises product still stands. Starting January 1, 2028, new matters must go on Relativity's cloud platform instead of the legacy Relativity Server. Existing matters on Server aren't being switched off. The change is that new cases can't be added there. LawSites also reported that as of June 2026, nearly 84% of Relativity's annual recurring revenue came from its cloud product. Most of the market has already moved. The question is whether your matters have.

The problem

Many corporate legal departments don't know which eDiscovery platform their data actually sits on. The work goes through outside counsel and litigation support providers. Some of those providers run workspaces on servers they manage themselves. When the platform underneath changes, the in-house team often finds out last, usually from an invoice line or a migration fee.

The diagnosis

You likely have this problem if any of these are true:

• You can't name the hosting environment for your five largest active matters.
• You have long-running matters, such as multi-year litigation, regulatory investigations, or repeat-player product cases, that will still be generating new related matters after 2027.
• Your provider contracts are silent on migration: who pays to move data, who validates it, and what happens to work product like coding, tags, and privilege logs.
• Your legal hold data and your review data live in different places, and nobody has mapped how they connect.
• Your eDiscovery spend is a single line in a matter budget, so hosting costs and migration costs can't be told apart.

The deeper issue isn't one vendor's roadmap. Every platform you depend on will eventually change how it's delivered, priced, or supported. Departments that know where their data lives handle that calmly. Everyone else finds out the hard way.

The solution

Step 1: Inventory where your data lives

Send every eDiscovery provider and outside firm handling active litigation a three-line request: platform, hosting environment (cloud or provider-managed server), and data volume per matter. Put the answers in your matter management system, not in someone's inbox. Tools in the matter management category can hold this as structured matter data.

Step 2: Sort matters by what happens next

• Closing before 2028: leave them where they are and plan for defensible disposition.
• Staying open, no new related matters expected: confirm continued support terms in writing.
• Likely to spawn new matters after January 1, 2028: these are the migration candidates. Plan them now while you control the schedule.

Step 3: Put migration terms in the contract

Before your next provider renewal, add language that covers who pays for migration, the format and completeness of exported work product, a validation sign-off step, and pricing protection on cloud hosting rates. Asking for this 15 months ahead gets you better terms than asking 15 days ahead.

Step 4: Treat it as a chance to rethink the stack

A forced move is a good time to ask bigger questions. Should early case assessment happen in-house? Does your legal hold process connect to collections? Are you paying for hosting on data you could have deleted? Compare options in eDiscovery and early case assessment and legal hold management.

The bottom line

The deadline isn't the problem. Not knowing where your data sits is. Fix that now, and January 2028 becomes an ordinary contract renewal.

Dates and figures are as reported by LawSites on October 2, 2026. Confirm specifics for your matters with your providers.