US cloud e-discovery provider Everlaw today (25 July) announces its Everlaw AI portfolio with newly released generative AI features available in a beta. The three new features are:
- Review assistance to extract and summarise key information for a specific document that you’ll find in a review pane;
- Writing assistance to help legal teams build evidence-based texts in Everlaw Storybuilder once a review is done. Using document information, such as Bates number, title, date, description and relevance, legal teams can generate a first draft from key evidence that includes supporting citations;
- Legal teams can ask questions when reviewing a single document to explore areas of interest and receive an on-demand response, as well as click into the pages where answers were generated.
Everlaw has had AI built into its platform for years, but its clustering and predictive coding technology are about patterns of data, whereas gen AI can produce insights from a single document.
The answers returned are from a restricted dataset and so free from the hallucinations that we have seen with the likes of public ChatGPT. Critically, Everlaw says that the generative-AI-created output is easily identifiable and designed for legal experts to verify and cross-check for correctness. Supporting sources are cited along with generated answers to make it easy to verify correctness. Users will nonetheless need to learn to use the write prompts to return the most valuable material.
“The real value of generative AI is when it evolves beyond a ‘tech demo’ and into the embedded workflows where legal teams live – drafting and reviewing materials, and connecting insights across a corpus to chart a straighter path to the truth,” said AJ Shankar, founder and CEO, Everlaw. “Our strategic approach is delivering all the transformative benefits of AI within our trusted platform built upon the enterprise capabilities that the legal industry deserves.”
Gordon Calhoun, partner and chair of the Electronic Discovery, Information Management & Compliance Practice at Lewis Brisbois, said: “Inserting generative AI into the Everlaw platform creates a breakthrough for legal teams. Getting a quick summary of complex, voluminous or important documents as part of the initial review will trigger a sea change when preparing your case. The AI holds the promise of allowing the merits team to move directly from first tier review to assembling information for use in depositions, motions mediation or trial.”
caroline@legaltechnology.com