Beyond the Data: Your Action Plan for AI-Powered Ediscovery
The 2025 Ediscovery Innovation Report confirms that generative AI is no longer a future trend, but a present force transforming how legal work is done, billed, and valued. The report’s insights offer a glimpse into how legal professionals are thinking about this technology, where they’re finding the most benefits, and where there’s still room for improvement.
But once your organization has started planning how it wants to use generative AI, how do you then begin to innovate and incorporate it into your regular workflows? How can you achieve the time savings and efficiencies outlined in the report? This list of action items, outlined below, aim to help kickstart your team’s gameplan for the generative AI era.
Reclaim Time for Higher-Value Work
Legal professionals are already using generative AI to handle tasks like research and document review at a pace previously unheard of. The report reveals that nearly half of all respondents use generative AI to save between one to five hours per week, which can amount to 260 hours saved annually. For an average Am Law 200 firm, these savings equal more than 196,820 hours per year reclaimed across the organization.
Action Item
The time savings gained through generative AI are no longer anecdotal—they’re quickly becoming a valuable part of how practically every organization works.
To start incorporating generative AI into your own work, you can conduct a workflow audit to identify repetitive, low-value tasks like initial document review or basic research that are ripe for automation.
For example, coding suggestions can be used to conduct first pass privilege and relevance review, or batch summarization can quickly narrow down document sets to surface those that need human review.
Additionally, generative AI can also help with automatic detection and redaction of personally identifiable information, which can significantly reduce the manual effort and time spent on a first-level review. This capability frees up legal professionals from having to manually find and redact this information across thousands or even millions of documents.
The ultimate goal of using a generative AI tool in this way is to free up lawyers and paralegals from "scutwork" so they can focus on more nuanced tasks that require human creativity and judgment, thereby helping clients receive a faster, and likely better, work product.
Create AI Champions
The report makes it clear that generative AI represents a far more rapid technological shift than the legal industry has previously seen. In just three years since the release of ChatGPT, generative AI adoption has already far exceeded that of cloud-based ediscovery software.
Those who can get ahead of this shift and create a generative AI roadmap now will be better equipped to help their clients and organizations navigate the comprehensive change this technology promises.
Action Item
Creating a dedicated internal task force or "AI champion" to stay current on new tools and best practices can help educate your entire organization and keep you on the front lines of the latest developments and trends. This proactive approach will allow your firm to not only react to but also capitalize on the changes brought by generative AI, ensuring you stay ahead of the competition.
Start by identifying roles and departments within your organization that have the greatest potential to be influenced by generative AI and those who have demonstrated knowledge or experience with it. Then, you can implement a pilot program, using generative AI on small, low-stakes tasks.
For example, foreign language translation, document review, and creating deposition summaries are typically time-consuming processes that legal professionals feel increasingly comfortable using generative AI to perform.
Ultimately, these champions will play a vital role in making AI a natural part of the organizational culture, ensuring that this major shift is managed effectively through clear communication, training, and support.
Discuss a Generative AI Policy
Despite tangible benefits and increasing adoption, a feeling of unpreparedness lingers. For the third year in a row, the majority of respondents feel that the legal profession is unprepared for the impacts of generative AI. While this percentage is decreasing, the fact that nearly two-thirds of respondents still feel this way shows a continuing need for consistent education and guidance.
Action Item
Similar to the creation of “AI Champions”, it’s also imperative your organization create a formal generative AI policy that governs all aspects of this technology for all employees.
An effective generative AI policy can outline liability concerns and provide clear guidelines on the technology’s use, as well as establish best practices for data privacy and security. By proactively addressing these issues, you can bridge the readiness gap and empower your team to use AI confidently and effectively.
Educate Your Team on All Available Features
The report also highlights a clear and continuing divide that has now been consistent in its findings for two years running: legal professionals with their ediscovery software on the cloud are leading the charge in generative AI adoption.
According to this year’s results, they are three times more likely to be actively using generative AI in their legal work than those using on-premise software. This trend extends to attitudes as well, with cloud adopters being four times more likely to have a positive outlook on generative AI.
Action Item
If you're still using on-premise ediscovery software, a transition to a cloud-based solution is a crucial first step for staying competitive and integrating generative AI into your practice. Organizations with their ediscovery software hosted on-prem will be unable to use generative AI to its fullest capacity.
For those already on the cloud, it’s important that your team is aware of and has access to the AI features within your ediscovery platform to maximize its benefits. You can work with your ediscovery vendor to set up access to the generative AI tools, and ensure you’re in a secure environment when beginning to try them out.
For example, within the Everlaw platform, users can toggle the AI on and off as they choose, and none of their data is ever retained or used to train the AI. It was created on a set of principles including control, confidence, and transparency, privacy, and security.
Additionally, Everlaw offers comprehensive training for all of its EverlawAI Assistant features. There are regular live training sessions where you can ask questions of Everlaw’s product team, as well as webinars and community roundtables covering AI-related topics that are relevant to legal professionals. Everlaw also offers specific training on an on-demand basis to all of its customers free of charge.
Assess New Billing Models
The billable hour, long a bedrock of the modern legal practice, is in for a change. An incredible 90% of respondents believe that the proliferation of generative AI either already has or will significantly alter conventional billing practices within the next two years. This marks a monumental shift that will require practically every organization to restructure how they charge for their services.
Action Item
With generative AI now able to perform legal tasks much faster than was previously thought possible, work that once took hours might now take minutes, raising questions about how firms should price their work.
Although there might not be so many changes in the short term, as this technology continues to become embedded in organizational workflows, it will eventually have a monumental impact on how attorneys’ time is billed.
Beginning to have conversations with clients about options like alternative fee agreements, such as flat fees or results-based pricing for certain tasks, might be worthwhile depending on how often your organization uses generative AI, and how you’re passing those costs on.
As noted in the report, offering innovative pricing and alternative fee agreements could generate goodwill with clients who may wonder why they are still being charged by the hour when AI is driving so much efficiency internally.
The Importance of Staying Ahead
The findings in the 2025 Ediscovery Innovation Report are a powerful call to action for the legal profession. The report shows that while hesitancy remains, legal professionals are leveraging generative AI to reclaim time, drive efficiency, and automate tasks.
Embracing these changes and strategically implementing generative AI in your organization means you can get ahead of this shift and capitalize on the comprehensive change this technology promises.
The most successful legal professionals will be those who move from understanding AI's potential to actively implementing it, securing a tangible advantage for their firms.
