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AI-Powered Document Review is Here
Document review is one of the most tedious yet important aspects of eDiscovery. Without an eDiscovery solution, even the most experienced lawyers are prone to making a mistake. And there is a good reason for it. In the context of eDiscovery, document review is an expensive and incredibly risky process. Thankfully, due to the advancement of technology such as AI for law firms, this process of sorting and reviewing documents has become much easier. The arduous task of document review has become much less painful.
Let’s take a look into how law firms are tackling document review using AI.
What AI Means for Lawyers
In simple terms, AI for legal professionals means automating tasks that are usually done by lawyers. This can include document review, legal research, discovery, etc. With AI, you can even complete other administrative tasks and create documents.
How Lawyers Use Artificial Intelligence at Law Firms
Here are a few examples of the different ways lawyers use AI for legal document review at law firms:
The eDiscovery process involves finding and reviewing electronically stored information (ESI). With the help of AI, the task of identifying relevant documents and finding evidence pertaining to the case can be automated. It can save you a lot of time and money.
eDiscovery
By automating the repetitive tasks, lawyers have enough time to focus on human-centric tasks such as preparing for trials, meeting clients, and more.
Repetitive Tasks
Using an AI solution will enable you to streamline your document analysis and contract review process. Identifying potential outliers and common clauses will become a lot easier.
Contract Review
There are certain administrative tasks that can be handled by AI, including managing the firm’s finances, scheduling appointments, etc. These tasks are usually time-consuming and tedious. By automating these tasks through decision tree applications and AI chatbots, lawyers can focus on other important tasks.
Administrative Tasks
With AI, you can even create such pleadings and contracts. This is especially beneficial for deals that involve a lot of paperwork.
Creating Documents
AI for legal document review can also help you in legal search. It can search through hundreds and thousands of documents within seconds and find you the relevant information. It makes legal research more accurate and efficient.
Legal Research
Taking Control of Litigation
Today, state-of-the-art legal technology is not only for Fortune 500 companies. Even small businesses can access this incredible advancement. And the reason is cloud technology. Thanks to cloud-based eDiscovery solutions, even smaller law firms can experience a multitude of benefits. One of the most important ones is reduced litigation costs.
Law firms deal with litigations and disputes throughout the year. The cases can range from big class action lawsuits to small claims. The story of corporate legal departments is the same. However, what they don’t have are the resources of law firms. The staffing strategy of organizations is to be blamed for that. American companies spend the majority of their legal budget on third-party vendors and firms. Only a small percentage of this is allocated for in-house work.
Up until a decade ago, creating an in-house discovery process was very expensive. So, outsourcing this to a third-party vendor made fiscal sense. Even though vendor rates were high, they were nothing compared to the cost of installing your own servers and maintaining them. Companies were willing to pay higher rates to ensure the safety of their information. There were a few challenges and nuances to this, such as cost overruns, missed deadlines, data breaches, etc. However, most companies weren’t in a position to afford anything else.
Over the past few years, this has changed. With eDiscovery solutions that lawyers can use for uploading, processing, and reviewing documents, the cost has been significantly reduced. Law firms are also more vulnerable to cyberattacks, which has made them cautious of handing over their data to strangers. The recent amendments made to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 37(e) have decreased the pressure on in-house departments as well. As per the rule, the likelihood of legal teams getting punished for unavoidable and honest mistakes committed during discovery has been reduced.
Today, companies want to keep the eDiscovery process inside their walls. With cloud-based technologies, companies are able to handle their AI legal document review for an early case assessment. They can collect the documents and upload them to an eDiscovery solution such as Casepoint, and their in-house team can start reviewing the documents within minutes. The AI-based eDiscovery solution can even reduce their workload significantly by culling out irrelevant files and providing search features. By reducing the data size, the eDiscovery solution has helped corporate legal departments rely less and less on outside counsel. This also means that companies are able to save tens of thousands of dollars.
When it comes to using AI-based eDiscovery solutions, there is another benefit that cannot be ignored — simplicity. The solutions of today aren’t like what you might have seen a few decades ago, where you didn’t know what was going on behind the curtains or how to use the complex features. eDiscovery solutions, such as Casepoint, are very sophisticated and can provide you insights into your documents. They are easy to use, and even professionals with little to no technical acumen can learn how to use them. The search feature is similar to Google, and with just a few clicks, you can get rid of irrelevant documents.
Also, since most of these are cloud-based solutions, they can easily integrate into your existing workflows. This can help law firms, as well as corporate legal departments, optimize their processes and spending. In-house legal departments can initiate the culling and review process. Outside counsel law firms can then provide their expertise instead of wasting their time with document review.
How AI Drastically Reduces Document Counts and Finds The Needle in a Haystack
Document review is associated with litigation. However, it also plays an important role in internal investigations. This is why many organizations have started to use eDiscovery software.
Internal investigations require a lot of time and resources. Between time costs, document review, and fees of outside counsel, these investigations can cost thousands of dollars during the investigation itself. With the right solutions, however, you have multiple opportunities to reduce costs.
AI for legal document review has the ability to connect multiple data points and find hidden correlations. It’s similar to finding the needle in a haystack. In fact, when looking in a haystack, you at least know that you are trying to find a needle. With AI for lawyers, you can find something you weren’t even looking for and might have gone unnoticed in other circumstances. For instance, there have been cases where AI-based solutions were able to find evidence for fake deals and potential tax evasions by simply stumbling across them. AI combed through thousands of documents and was able to find a pattern of transactions where money was distributed from an account. There were also a few similarities between the parties to whom the money was sent to. These odd-looking events formed a cluster and helped the company find something they weren’t even looking for.
The AI-powered systems for law firms of today are nothing like the black boxes of old times, where there was no transparency. This is also the reason behind the increased adoption rate of AI for document review. More and more law firms are able to put their trust in AI and incorporate it into their workflow for document review. They will know how the AI was able to reach a conclusion, what model was used, and what data was used to train the system.
The Power of Active Learning and Machine Learning
Technology Assisted Review (TAR) usually involves three forms of learning:
- Simple Active Learning (SAL)
- Simple Passive Learning (SPL)
- Continuous Active Learning (CAL)
CAL is considered to be simpler than the others because it doesn’t require selecting and reviewing large control sets, validation sets, or training sets. You don’t have to create the seed sets carefully nor determine when to stop training.
Once CAL has been exposed to the training set, it will select the next documents that are more likely to be relevant for review for training and coding. The process repeats until there are no more relevant documents available. You can consider CAL to be like a search engine. It presents the documents to the user by ranking them from most likely to be relevant to least likely. Based on the feedback from the user, CAL continues to refine its decision-making process and find the documents that are more likely to be relevant.
With an eDiscovery solution like Casepoint, you will have a tool that can effectively and quickly make judgments about a document’s relevance. It increases the efficiency of the entire document review process. By automating the processes that traditionally required human intervention, eDiscovery solutions are helping law firms run their business efficiently. They can find patterns in the documents so that the lawyers can get the evidence they need for the case.
Conclusion
Technology has changed the legal profession. And one of the biggest advancements that the legal industry has seen over the past decade is the incorporation of AI for attorneys through eDiscovery solutions. Needless to say, the continued impact of AI legal services on document review and the overall eDiscovery process is only going to grow. It is important for law firms to stay updated on the latest AI developments. This way, they can learn the different ways artificial intelligence can help them in their practice and be ready to adapt to the continuously evolving legal landscape.
