In many plaintiff matters, the case does not turn only on whether something bad happened. It turns on what people inside an organization knew, when they knew it, who they told, and what happened next. That is often where liability themes begin to sharpen. In employment matters, product liability cases, whistleblower disputes, and mass tort litigation, internal awareness can be just as important as the event itself.
The challenge, of course, is that internal awareness is rarely laid out neatly. It is spread across emails, attachments, fragmented conversations, copied recipients, side discussions, and patterns that are easy to miss if teams are forced into a purely linear review. Plaintiff firms do not just need documents. They need visibility into communication behavior.
That is where RelativityOne’s Communication Analysis can provide meaningful value. The Communication Analysis widget lets review teams visualize communication frequencies, patterns, and networks between entities linked to documents in a view, helping attorneys see who is talking to whom rather than only reading one message at a time. Relativity also notes that this tool can help identify new individuals and information relevant to a case, which is especially important when the key actors are not fully known at the beginning of a matter.
For plaintiff firms, that matters immediately. Many cases begin with only a partial cast of characters. You may know the plaintiff, a direct supervisor, a few business leaders, or the individuals named in initial disclosures. But once the data begins to come in, the real story may involve people who were not on anyone’s radar at the outset. A compliance employee who received repeated warnings. A manager copied on key complaints but never mentioned in testimony. A technical employee quietly included in a chain around product concerns. A human resources representative who suddenly appears at a critical point in the timeline.
Communication Analysis helps surface those individuals visually. In RelativityOne, each node represents an entity, and node size reflects the amount of communication that entity was involved in based on sender and recipient data. Frequent communicators begin to stand out quickly, and clusters of communication can show likely working groups or departments that may have been involved in an issue.
That creates a strategic advantage for plaintiff counsel. Instead of asking only, “What did this custodian say?” attorneys can ask more revealing questions: Who was central to the conversation? Who was receiving more than they were sending? Who became active only after a complaint was raised? Which group appears tightly connected around the event at issue? Which person sits at the edge of multiple clusters and may have served as a bridge between teams?
RelativityOne also gives users practical ways to narrow and explore the communication map. Teams can hover over nodes to see total, sent, and received counts, select neighbors to identify direct communication partners, isolate communications between two nodes, and apply those selections back into the document list to drive further review. Filters can refine the visualization by connection count, recipient type such as To/Cc/Bcc, grouping, and communication volume.
That kind of visibility can be especially powerful in plaintiff-side matters where escalation paths are central. In an employment case, communication analysis may show that concerns were not isolated to one supervisor but moved through HR and leadership. In a product case, it may show that engineering, compliance, and management were all connected around warnings or incident reports. In a mass tort context, it may reveal recurring internal groups involved in complaint handling, risk discussions, or remediation decisions. Communication patterns do not prove intent by themselves, but they help plaintiff teams focus on the relationships and pathways that deserve deeper scrutiny.
Another strong layer is sentiment analysis. Relativity describes sentiment analysis as a tool that scores documents for negativity, anger, desire, or other emotions, allowing teams to locate unusual or highly charged interactions between participants and build deeper context around conversations central to a matter. In Communication Analysis, sentiment can also be used as a filtering option when the Sentiment Analysis application is installed in the workspace.
For plaintiff firms, that combination can be highly useful. A communication map may show who was involved, but sentiment can help identify where the tone shifts. That may mean messages reflecting pressure, frustration, defensiveness, hostility, urgency, or concern. In the right matter, those emotionally charged communications can point attorneys toward the documents that deserve immediate attention, whether for witness preparation, deposition strategy, mediation leverage, or motion practice. It is not about replacing legal judgment. It is about helping teams find the hotter conversations sooner.
And yes, dark mode deserves a mention. If you read this far, it’s only in the Communication Analysis, one day it will be a built in feature… maybe… if you work at Relativity and reading this, let’s make it happen.
Plaintiff firms need more than a place to store email. They need tools that help expose internal awareness, uncover hidden players, and make communication behavior easier to understand. RelativityOne’s Communication Analysis helps transform scattered messages into something more strategic: a visual path to who knew what, when they knew it, and how that information moved. For plaintiff counsel, that can be the difference between reviewing data and actually understanding the case.