How to Integrate Generative AI into Litigation Workflows

Generative AI is changing how legal professionals engage with data, and accelerating time to insight across the full lifecycle of a matter. Where data-heavy matters once may have needed weeks, even months, before ingestion led to actionable intelligence, teams are now able to identify relevant, meaningful information in hours.

GenAI is becoming an essential tool, but every tool has a learning curve. Everlaw makes GenAI easier to adopt by embedding AI capabilities directly into the workflows attorneys already use. Insights carry seamlessly from one phase of a case to the next — no need to switch tools or rebuild context. 

From Deep Dive, which surfaces insights through natural language questions, to Coding Suggestions, which accelerates first-pass review, and Writing Assistant, which supports analysis and drafting, Everlaw^AI's GenAI features empower legal teams to reduce review burden and refocus attention on higher-value priorities: strategy, judgment, and outcomes.

Integrating Deep Dive Across the Litigation Lifecycle

The introduction of Deep Dive represents a shift in how legal teams approach document review. 

This generative AI tool lets anyone – from litigation support professionals to attorneys – engage directly with the data corpus, ask substantive, natural language questions, and then verify answers with cited source documents. Within minutes, Deep Dive can surface insights that might have taken days or weeks to uncover using traditional methods.

This fundamentally changes how discovery begins. Instead of reviewing documents to understand the case, teams can first understand the case, and then review with purpose.

When Julie K. Brown, Director of Practice Technology at Vorys introduces Deep Dive to new teams, she starts by asking: “Are you ready to see some magic?” She says that after they see the results, the attorneys are “just in awe.”

“The answers are spot on,” Brown says. “If attorneys like something, they’re going to go tell all their friends. Most of the time attorneys are coming to us saying, ‘Can you add my case to Deep Dive?’”

Deep Dive is especially valuable during early case assessment, where speed and clarity matter most. The tool helps identify key facts, themes, and parties before review has even begun. This helps teams filter down to just the documents most likely to contain relevant information and test hypotheses as they begin to frame their case strategy. 

They can then open specific documents and use GenAI-powered Review Assistant tools that provide summary, topic extraction, sentiment analysis, and custom extraction capabilities to explore those communications in detail and pull out repeat patterns of concern.

Later in the lifecycle, Deep Dive becomes a powerful tool for deposition preparation and trial support, allowing attorneys to quickly surface what a witness said about a specific topic without manually hunting through documents.

Accelerating Document Categorization with Coding Suggestions  

Using Coding Suggestions (part of the Everlaw^AI Review Assistant) to quickly find and prioritize relevant documents can transform litigation and investigation workflows. In real-world matters, Coding Suggestions has shown it can perform at accuracy levels that match or exceed those of human reviewers, significantly speeding up the manual review process. 

While tools like Deep Dive, Search, and Communication Visualizer are used to understand the case and pull out the most important documents and communication patterns early on, Coding Suggestions lets teams review and code those documents more efficiently than traditional methods allow. 

The tool flags relevant documents and explains its reasoning with links to citations, making verification by human reviewers built into the process. What’s more, Coding Suggestions can scale the logic from one document to hundreds or thousands – in effect automating the process with consistency and precision.

The litigation team at global law firm Bracewell has used Coding Suggestions for first-pass document review. Partner David Shargel says it frees up time for the work lawyers do best. 

“The first-level review of a huge tranche of documents that might’ve taken months three years ago now takes a few hours,” Shargel says. “What’s really cool is that, as lawyers, we can now take the time we would’ve otherwise spent reviewing hundreds of thousands or millions of documents to be creative in crafting arguments and presenting evidence.” 

After reviewing with Coding Suggestions, the case team can take the document set into Storybuilder and use Writing Assistant to build timelines, summaries, and arguments anchored in those documents.

Turning Evidence Into a Persuasive Story with Writing Assistant

Storybuilder is a collaborative space where multiple teams can work together in real time, organizing documents and tracking evidence. Storybuilder’s built-in Writing Assistant brings the brainstorming and drafting power of GenAI to a specific matter. Writing Assistant gives legal teams a head start on writing narratives and summaries, analyzing depositions, and helping to hone arguments. 

GenAI-powered Writing Assistant helps draft time-consuming analytical work such as timelines, factual backgrounds, deposition analysis, and other work quickly and with citations to documents that can quickly be verified. And when deposition transcripts come in, Writing Assistant can expedite time-consuming analysis by helping to identify inconsistencies in testimony.

Writing Assistant also lets teams shape and reframe arguments. And because it limits its output to case documents, its research and writing stay tied to the actual evidence, not generic model knowledge. Human reviewers provide their judgment and style to reach the final draft.

“Writing Assistant is not just a tool for quick output, but a primary thought partner as you craft your arguments, and an editing tool to refine your story,” says Everlaw Chief Legal Officer Gloria Lee. “Often the best learning comes from the initial hard work of pulling together an argument, something you can only do by engaging directly with the substance of a case.”

Discover the Power of Everlaw^AI

Everlaw^AI tools put the human legal professional front and center.  Lawyers and their case teams write the prompts and instructions, review outputs, and apply their expertise to steer the work. In keeping a human-in-the-loop, Everlaw^AI enables teams to work more effectively and in novel ways, while maintaining the judgement and decision making required by ethical practice. 

By combining GenAI and core Everlaw features, legal teams can speed up document review, avoid unnecessary work, and immediately focus on the substance of the case. This creates a more direct path to the insights needed for early, high‑stakes decisions — when strategy is being set — while dramatically reducing rote tasks.

If you haven’t used Everlaw^AI tools yet, you can pick a low-risk matter and start experimenting today, or reach out for a free walkthrough.  

Petra Pasternak is a writer and editor focused on the ways that technology makes the work of legal professionals better and more productive. Before Everlaw, Petra covered the business of law as a reporter for ALM and worked for two Am Law 100 firms. See more articles from this author.