Many of us learned a lot from The Karate Kid. Commitment. Discipline. Patience. The value of doing the fundamentals well before expecting results. For organisations considering a Relativity aiR migration, though, the most useful lesson may have come from Mr Miyagi's bonsai trees.
The term nemawashi literally refers to preparing a tree's roots before it is transplanted. In business, it describes the work of building consensus, engaging stakeholders and laying the groundwork before significant change takes place.
It is often translated loosely as “change management”, yet this description misses an important nuance. The goal is not simply to build support for a decision. It is also to improve the quality of the decision itself through early inputs – preparing the roots to ensure stronger growth. Relativity aiR migrations provide a perfect example.
Planning ahead is the only way to create value
Migration plans can be written, data flows can be tested, workspaces can be validated and cutover windows can be scheduled. But leaders who realise the greatest value from migration understand that moving the data is often the easy part. Preparing for what comes next is where success is won or lost.
Making a move to Relativity aiR, like most big decisions, isn’t just a cosmetic upgrade. It’s often the first meaningful opportunity in years to rethink workflows, challenge long-standing processes, simplify your tech stack, revisit commercial models and explore what becomes possible when new capabilities become part of everyday ways of working. A migration delivers a shiny new platform, but the true return on investment comes from the decisions made before, during and after the move. Without stakeholder engagement and organisational alignment, many of the opportunities created by the transition can be diluted or missed altogether.
Many different factors drive an unwillingness to plan ahead, and stakeholders can find themselves reluctant in different ways. Leadership naturally seeks to reduce disruption and risk. Partners don’t want active matters put at risk. Review teams don’t want to change their processes mid-flight, and technologists can struggle to move away from workflows they understand or expertise they have built over years. The last thing your Database Admin wants after “go live” is to discover that a report, integration or script everyone relies upon no longer works. These concerns are legitimate. The mistake is addressing them late, rather than surfacing them early or treating them as a rationale for sticking the course.
This is where preparing the roots (nemawashi) becomes important. Before the move, stakeholders need to understand why the change is happening, what will be different, what will stay the same and what the organisation hopes to achieve. Legal, technology, security, procurement, finance and operational teams all need the opportunity to test assumptions, challenge plans and contribute to the direction of travel.
This is more than simply preparing people to use a template or Relativity aiR. It is about preparing the company as a whole to take advantage of the opportunities that a change like this creates.
Organisations that invest in this process early always see stronger adoption, faster realisation of benefits and fewer attempts to recreate legacy processes in a new environment. Those that aren’t prepared can find themselves having successfully completed a migration while leaving much of the potential value behind. They can even experience buyer’s remorse.
Preparing the roots: the questions that matter most
Preparing the roots is ultimately about improving the quality of decisions before the migration begins.
In our experience, organisations that realise the greatest value from RelativityOne tend to ask a series of important questions early in the process, while there is still time to influence the outcome.
Is the commercial model aligned with how the organisation consumes technology?
Per-unit pricing, committed-spend arrangements and bundled service models can produce very different outcomes depending on data volumes, matter cadence and workload predictability.
The right model is the one that best aligns with actual usage patterns, aggregation of size/scale over time, anticipated future demand, and consideration of financial objectives and profitability. Modelling multiple scenarios before migration can often create more value than technical optimisation undertaken later.
Are we migrating cost, or leaving it behind?
Every gigabyte that enters a new environment potentially carries a recurring cost.
Defensible disposal, deduplication and retention decisions made before migration can therefore compound month after month. And the same applies to storage strategy. Not all data requires the same level of accessibility, functionality or cost profile.
So, migration provides an opportunity to challenge whether every piece of data still needs to travel to the new environment. Inversely, leaving too much data in legacy systems creates adoption challenges and impacts ROI.
Are we using AI to reduce costs, or create value?
For many organisations, capabilities such as the aiR suite of products are among the most compelling benefits of moving to RelativityOne. The conversation often starts with cost reduction, and that's understandable. Faster review, reduced resourcing requirements and shorter timelines can all contribute to a strong business case. But focusing solely on efficiency understates the bigger opportunity.
The organisations deriving the greatest value from AI are not asking how to do the same work more cheaply. They are asking how to make better decisions faster, uncover insights earlier and allow highly skilled professionals to spend more time applying judgment and expertise, rather than simply locating information.
Applying that extra scrutiny can bring multiple advantages. Investigations can surface key facts earlier. Review teams can prioritise effort more effectively. Legal and compliance teams can spend less time searching and more time analysing. Matters that may previously have been too difficult to take on due to cost, resource or time constraints (logistics) become addressable.
The most important question about AI is therefore not simply what it costs. It is what becomes possible once those capabilities are available and well understood. Raise the level of ambition and think on a different scale.
How quickly can we start getting the benefits we moved for? (Or put another way, how do we avoid paying two mortgages for too long?)
Many organisations focus on the mechanics of migration without thinking about when they'll start seeing the benefits. It’s worth remembering that the objective is not simply to move data into RelativityOne. It is to take advantage of the workflows, capabilities and ways of working that justified the move in the first place.
Every migration creates a period where legacy and destination environments coexist. While this has obvious cost implications, the larger risk is organisational. The longer teams continue operating across two platforms, the longer old processes, duplicated effort and legacy ways of working persist. Adoption slows, new capabilities go underutilised and much of the value behind migration remains unrealised. The most successful migrations are not necessarily those that move data the fastest. They are the ones that help the organisation start benefiting from the change as quickly and safely as possible. Adoption accelerates deprecation.
How will we measure success?
ROI cannot be demonstrated if it is not measured. Before migration, leaders should be clear about the outcomes they are seeking to achieve and how these can be measured. Reduced cost may be one measure, but it is rarely the only one. Faster investigations, quicker access to insight, improved user adoption, simplified administration and more effective use of AI can be equally important indicators of success. And these data points can help sell benefits to clients while empowering stakeholders.
Migration creates permission to rethink everything
Migration offers an opportunity to challenge assumptions that may not have been revisited for years. Some legacy workflows should be preserved because they remain efficient, defensible and valuable. Others survive simply because nobody has challenged them. Migration creates a rare chance to ask difficult questions.
Why does this process exist? Does it still solve a real problem? Would we design it this way today? Can it be simplified? Can it be automated? Can native RelativityOne capabilities replace custom solutions that were originally built to overcome limitations in older environments? These conversations can be uncomfortable – but they can also be the source of the greatest value.
Control Risks has seen this pattern emerge repeatedly across legal technology, investigations and managed services programmes. Across our experience migrating over 250TB of data, the most successful outcomes have consistently combined strong technical delivery with stakeholder engagement, clear communication and a shared understanding of what success looks like.
Seeing the whole picture is key to your success
The organisations that gain the most from RelativityOne are rarely those focused solely on the migration itself. They are focused on the benefits they are trying to achieve and the decisions required to realise them. The migration may be a technical exercise but realising the value is not.
That's the lesson hidden among Mr. Miyagi's bonsai trees. Because the principle of nemawashi isn't really about trees. It's about recognising that the success of any migration or meaningful organisational change is often determined long before the change itself takes place.
Prepare the roots well. Be clear about the value you want to create, the return you're trying to achieve, and what you want your organisation to look like on the other side of the migration. You’ll find that everything that follows becomes easier.
If you want to explore how Control Risks can help your organisation model and maximise ROI on a RelativityOne migration, please get in touch.