What’s stopping you from taking on a big fish client? Not a decent size fish, but a massive, multi-national, Fortune 500-level file?
If you have those clients already, fantastic, but if you don’t, it’s likely been a lack of resources that’s limited your capacity. It’s either a lack of attorneys, or a lack of admin support, or a simple lack of time that’s put those clients out of reach.
What AI has done is change the game. With the birth of agentic AI, imagine being able to significantly increase the capacity of your existing team without necessarily adding headcount. You could suddenly have triple the capacity to research, draft memos and pleadings, help with correspondence, and do the jobs that can make a file crawl.
A huge amount of evidence would traditionally require significant time and resources to review. AI can help accelerate the process. AI implementations can speed up the most tedious parts of that process, whether by helping with privilege logs in document review or making predictive calls about relevance based on a sample set. Review that may have once taken months can potentially be completed in a fraction of the time.
Welcome to the world of legal AI.
There’s an Agent for That
There are common misconceptions about AI implementation, especially within the legal world. No, you shouldn’t be plugging sensitive data into a public AI tool without understanding its privacy, security, and data-handling safeguards, and you certainly shouldn’t be running to court with the first answer it provides. That’s not an effective use of AI, especially within the legal sphere.
What you’re likely to do instead is build an agent. Think of an AI agent as a computerized member of your team. If you’re able to provide them with a job description and a clear scope of work, they’re often able to work at a speed and rate of efficiency that humans never previously thought possible.
Think back to the days when you were a young lawyer and you were sent to the law library to do research. Unless you were a wunderkind, you probably spent hours combing through the stacks looking for the exact book that you needed. Now, you can have an agent that can quickly search and analyze the legal resources and information it has been given access to.
If you ask your AI agent a research question, it can search the resources it has access to and surface potentially relevant information within minutes. It’s built to use natural language, so it will come up with what it thinks is the most appropriate answer. You as the end user can review, and if it’s not quite right, you can send it back into the field. It may take a few tries, but the speed cannot be beat.
The New Addition to Document Review
We’re often asked how AI is going to change the game when it comes to eDiscovery. The truth is that we’re still in the earliest days of seeing what potential AI holds, and the technology will continue to improve the further it integrates. However, we’re already getting an early sense of what’s possible.
The first is the power of prediction. AI has the capacity to work with a sample set of documents where relevancy and privilege have been determined and then extrapolate that knowledge to a much larger set of documents. When thousands of documents may be identical or nearly identical to others, this can mean significant time savings for your human staff to continue working on litigation strategy.
AI can also be helpful in the administrative side of review. Privilege logs can be tedious, but a well-trained algorithm can help sort out some of the logistical clean-up. Again, this work may not be perfect from the first go-around, and inadvertently producing privileged documents can be detrimental to your case. Close human supervision is the best accompaniment to any AI process.
Final Thoughts
We’re still in the nascent days of AI, and at Everest we are still investigating its full range of capabilities. We have, however, worked with clients who have wanted to go all in, and we understand it does have significant potential.
Want to learn more about how AI can impact your review process? Watch our latest video series to hear from our in-house eDiscovery experts.
