For the legal profession, generative AI is here. And it’s here to stay. 

With the power of generative AI, lawyers handling today’s ever-growing volumes of litigation data can find better needles, faster, and use them to craft more compelling stories. To streamline processes, eliminate tedium, and enhance analysis. 

But generative AI will not replace practitioners. It will augment them. The intricacies of the law, the subtleties of client needs, and the nuances of the legal system make human judgment and experience indispensable. 

Supported by GenAI tools, uniquely human insights are enhanced. Where the ability to present a compelling narrative is often as crucial as the evidence itself, generative AI tools can aid practitioners in identifying the most important facts, connecting the dots between disparate pieces of information, and offering novel perspectives to develop a case.

To be valuable, these benefits can’t be isolated to a single feature. They must be integrated throughout the tools and workflows that lawyers are already using today. 

And, of course, generative AI is not infallible. It can get things wrong. Though incredibly powerful, to be effective, it needs to be used responsibly. 

To help turn the promise of GenAI from a possibility into reality, Everlaw is proud to announce the general availability of Everlaw^AI Assistant after a robust, year-long beta program involving nearly 125 organizations and 2,900 users. 

Meticulously developed for legal professionals, Everlaw^AI Assistant brings generative AI into core litigation and investigations workflows, helping today’s legal professionals tell better stories, for more impactful results. 

Full general availability of Everlaw^AI Assistant is planned for September.

With Everlaw^AI Assistant, legal professionals can reduce the time spent reviewing documents in discovery, surface important evidence quickly, and start building their most persuasive arguments with AI to get the best results for their clients.

Everlaw’s Approach to Developing Generative AI for the Legal Profession

Of course, simply moving faster is not enough. Legal professionals need to know that their tools are both secure and accurate, designed with a level of care and precision that matches the importance of their work. 

That’s why our development of generative AI tools is grounded in three core principles: privacy and security, control, and confidence. 

When creating GenAI tools like Everlaw^AI Assistant, that means ensuring that all our security commitments are met, including compliance with our SOC 2 Type 2 certification in security, availability, confidentiality, and privacy; our ISO 27001 and 27017 certifications; commitments to GDPR, CCPA, and CPRA compliance, Cyber Essentials Plus; and more. 

To make sure that your data remains protected, all our agreements with LLM providers include zero data retention provisions, ensuring that your data will not be stored or trained on by any LLM vendor. 

You remain in control of your GenAI usage, deciding when, how, and where Everlaw^AI Assistant is used. Clear visual cues mean that users always know when they’re interacting with generative AI tools. 

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To allow you to act with confidence when using Everlaw^AI Assistant, all outputs are easily verifiable – in the moment. Analysis is limited to the four corners of your documents, and results are supported by citations to relevant sections of a text or to the Bates numbers of supporting files. A single click can show you exactly what Everlaw^AI Assistant’s output is based on.

Key Features of Everlaw^AI Assistant

Everlaw^AI Assistant leverages generative AI directly in your fundamental ediscovery workflows. From the very beginning of a matter, Everlaw^AI Assistant can rapidly accelerate your understanding of your data, with document summarization and coding suggestions that operate on a massive scale, capable of analyzing thousands of documents at once. Then, dive deeper into your documents to understand their contents faster and with more nuance, with tools that extract key topics, entities, and sentiments. 

Paired with Everlaw Storybuilder, Everlaw^AI Assistant can power rapid synthesis of your evidence, allowing you to quickly generate a timeline of events, a draft of deposition questions, or an analysis of the facts. And you can use these outputs confidently, with supporting evidence right at your fingertips. 

No outputs need be final. As a virtual “thought partner,” Everlaw^AI Assistant can help you develop, revise, and refine your work, to build the most compelling story possible. 

Everlaw^AI Assistant’s abilities are deployed in two primary ways: review assistance and writing assistance. 

Everlaw^AI Assistant for Document Review

In almost all litigation, document review is where the heavy lifting happens. It’s where evidence is unearthed, initial insights are developed, and theories of a case come together. For those who are able to move quickly and effectively, it can also be where significant advantages are gained. 

Everlaw^AI Assistant joins a suite of Everlaw tools to make this document review process faster, easier, and more effective than ever before, so you and your teams can quickly find the most relevant details for your case. 

Document Descriptions and Summarization

Everlaw^AI Assistant helps you surface important information from large document sets in seconds. With the tool, you can quickly create summaries of a single or thousands of documents, at once. With long, dense documents, summarization can be divided into multiple outputs, summarizing section by section, to remain informative without becoming reductive.

Topic, Entity Extraction, and Sentiment Analysis

Quickly identify important topics in a document, align with the people and organizations referenced, and jump directly to where those references occur. Sentiment rating shows the negative and positive sentiments expressed for each topic in a document.

Customized Coding Suggestions

Everlaw^AI Assistant allows you to create customized coding criteria and analyzes your documents against those standards. Simply provide relevant context about your case, coding categories, and individual code descriptions, just as you would guide a human review team. Everlaw^AI Assistant will then suggest whether a document fits that criteria, with performance that is comparable to – and often exceeds – the accuracy of human review. In tests with real-world customer datasets, Everlaw^AI Assistant’s Coding Suggestions achieved a precision score of 0.77 and a recall score of 0.82, surpassing the rates of first-level human review metrics by 36%.

Open-Ended Document Queries

Use Everlaw^AI Assistant to receive on-demand answers to direct, open-ended questions. Answers can be verified with a click, to see exactly where the supporting text is found and begin diving deeper into a document. For example, in a dispute over liability for safety failures, Everlaw^AI Assistant can be asked whether a set of documents mentions safety inspection protocols. Not only will Everlaw^AI Assistant answer your question, but it can also take you directly to areas of the text where those protocols are discussed.

GenAI at Scale

Everlaw^AI Assistant works directly with batch actions, so you can summarize documents, extract information, or suggest codes across thousands of documents simultaneously. With Everlaw^AI Assistant, you can quickly generate document descriptions, topic extractions, and customized coding suggestions for your entire corpus of documents, allowing you to quickly narrow your review to the most pressing information.

Everlaw^AI Assistant for Writing Assistance

One of the great challenges of the discovery process is to combine disparate insights developed during document review into a clear and persuasive argument. For years, litigators have turned to Everlaw Storybuilder to overcome that challenge, allowing review and case teams to collaborate on building a shared understanding of their matter, crafting narratives, organizing arguments, and preparing for depositions and trials in one centralized platform.

With the general availability of Everlaw^AI Assistant, generative AI is now integrated deeply into this process. 

Evidence Analysis

Turn your blank page into a strong first draft with analysis of key evidence powered by Everlaw^AI Assistant. Everlaw users can leverage Everlaw^AI Assistant to create cohesive, fact-based analysis based on key evidence in the document corpus. 

You instruct Everlaw^AI Assistant to base the analysis on all evidence within your Story, evidence in a particular Draft, or all evidence with a specified label. 

Built-in guidelines help you craft the right inputs for your desired outputs. For example, you can choose between memos, outlines, or tables, between an argument or an analysis, or between several ready-made templates. And all analysis is based on the documents you provide, complete with in-text citations for easy verification. 

Narrative Building

Use AI as a thought partner to reshape and refine your analysis, to build and defend the most compelling argument. 

Brainstorm, shape, frame, and reframe your arguments against your selected evidence. You can have Everlaw^AI Assistant rewrite a full draft or section of a draft to add more detail or take it away. You can have it craft points of an argument, then argue the counterpoints. You can ask it to analyze potential gaps in evidence or inconsistencies in a deposition. 

Use cases are broad, but all outputs are verifiable, with built-in citations to supporting documents. 

Deposition Preparation and Analysis

Save time preparing for depositions using AI to support the creation of a first draft of deposition questions. Then, take those questions as a starting point for your own development, or continue to prompt Everlaw^AI Assistant to follow particular trains of thought, dive deeper into an area of importance, or revise a set of questions.

Similarly, when a deposition is complete, you can add the transcript to Storybuilder and have Everlaw^AI Assistant summarize and analyze the deposition. Use Everlaw^AI Assistant to create a summary of deponents’ backgrounds and the topics covered in depositions, to generate an exhibit and witness summary, to identify inconsistencies and discrepancies, or to complete any custom task based on your own instructions. 

Acting with Confidence with Everlaw^AI Assistant

Understanding and adapting to the capabilities and limitations of generative AI is crucial to its effective deployment. At Everlaw, we have meticulously crafted our features to align with the competencies in which generative AI is strongest – and avoid those where it is not.

Building for the long term is at the core of everything we do at Everlaw. As we continue to expand on the potential of generative AI, we remain committed to responsible, long-term innovation, with tools like Everlaw^AI Assistant that are designed to elevate your practice, streamline your workflows, and ultimately, transform your approach to litigation. Everlaw is more than a platform. It is your partner, enabling you to tackle the biggest challenges in litigation with confidence.

To see how Everlaw^AI Assistant can impact your litigation and investigations work, contact your account team or request a demo today.

Casey Sullivan is an attorney and writer based out of San Francisco, where he leads Everlaw’s content team. His writing on ediscovery and litigation has been read by thousands and cited by federal courts.