Relativity names Chris Brown President to expand remit

Relativity has appointed Chris Brown as President, expanding the remit of its Chief Product Officer.

Brown, who joined the legal technology group in 2018, will continue to lead product while also taking responsibility for marketing and technology partnerships. The role places him at the centre of Relativity's effort to extend its software across a broader range of legal tasks.

His appointment comes as the Chicago-based company pushes further into artificial intelligence for legal work. Brown's immediate priorities include integrating Gavel, a business Relativity acquired in June to bring its tools into Microsoft Word; broadening managed integrations that allow AI assistants such as Claude to work inside RelativityOne; and expanding the use of Relativity aiR across the platform.

Brown succeeds to the presidency as Relativity works to tie together product development, go-to-market activity and external partnerships. He will oversee the alignment of those functions as legal teams increasingly seek AI tools that fit within familiar workflows.

Phil Saunders, Chief Executive Officer of Relativity, linked the appointment to a wider shift in the market.

"Chris brings the agility and grit to meet this moment of AI transformation," Saunders said. "We've spent years building the data foundation, the governance and the agentic capabilities behind our platform, and I believe Chris is the right leader to shift us into high gear, to elevate Relativity's system of action, reach further into the surfaces where legal work happens and make it easier for legal teams to engage directly with their data."

Brown has spent more than 25 years working on digital platforms across consumer and business software markets. Before joining Relativity, he was Chief Executive Officer of Kapow Events and led the business through its sale to Cvent. Earlier in his career, he spent nearly a decade at Orbitz Worldwide as Chief Product Officer, where he worked on the travel group's platform and mobile applications.

At Relativity, Brown has been part of the company's product leadership during a period when legal practices and corporate legal departments have faced growing volumes of digital evidence and regulatory data. The platform is used for litigation, investigations, regulatory inquiries, information requests and data breach responses, with 93 petabytes of legal data under management as of April 2026.

Broader remit

Under the new structure, Brown's responsibilities extend beyond product strategy to the company's market positioning and partner relationships. That matters for Relativity because many of the latest changes in legal software are happening through integrations with workplace and AI systems rather than through standalone tools.

The reference to Gavel points to one of those changes. By adding software inside Microsoft Word, Relativity aims to place legal data and drafting tools closer to where lawyers already review material and prepare documents. Its work on managed MCP integrations, meanwhile, reflects a push to let third-party AI assistants initiate and manage tasks inside RelativityOne while maintaining oversight of access to legal data.

Brown said combining product, marketing and partnerships would help shape the next phase of the business.

"I could not be more excited to step into this role," Brown said. "Bringing product, marketing and technology partnerships together lets us move faster and think as one about where legal work is going. I believe what we've built has already changed how legal work gets done, and the fullest version of that vision is still ahead: legal practitioners asking questions, exploring evidence and drafting work product, all in one simple and intuitive flow, with AI they can trust."

Leadership change

The appointment also comes with another senior management change. Chief Marketing Officer Cristina Rossman is leaving the company after more than six years and will remain in an advisory role through the end of the year to support the handover.

Rossman led the company's marketing organisation during a period of expansion in legal AI and helped raise Relativity's profile in the sector. Her departure puts marketing under Brown's remit at a time when vendors are competing to define how AI should be applied to legal review, investigations and drafting.

Relativity has become one of the more established names in software for handling large volumes of legal and compliance data, with customers including law firms, companies and government agencies. Brown's promotion signals that the company wants its next phase of growth to be led by a product executive with direct oversight of how its tools are built, presented to the market and connected to other technology platforms.

Relativity says hundreds of thousands of users around the world rely on its software for legal matters, with 93 petabytes of legal data under management as of April 2026.