AI Translation Speeds up Multi-Language Ediscovery for Legal Professionals
by Petra Pasternak
Ediscovery is hard enough in one language, with mountains of documents, myriad formats, and multilayered processes. Add documents in multiple languages and that difficult puzzle feels like being trapped in a sprawling maze.
Dealing with documents in a variety of languages dramatically escalates the time and cost of ediscovery. Hiring human translators with expertise in specific languages, contextual knowledge, and a deep understanding of legal issues can be prohibitively expensive. Securely sharing large volumes of highly sensitive documents and avoiding data breaches also creates formidable hurdles. And the entire translation process takes time.
This is exactly the kind of problem AI is supposed to solve. And it has. Everlaw has just released a new tool that handles translation challenges to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and enhance security.

What Are the Challenges of Cross-Border Ediscovery?
In today's global business environment, multilingual ediscovery has emerged as a major operational hurdle in litigation and investigations management. Legal professionals are called on to process mountains of electronically stored information, or ESI, across languages, formats, and jurisdictions.
Relying on external language services for legal translation carries with it a price tag and security risks that many are not willing to take on if the key aim is early review of data sets for relevance.
Manual translation slows down key steps in the ediscovery process, including the identification of potentially relevant records. And sending documents to third party translation services can violate cross-border privacy laws or internal protocols.
These challenges can consume precious legal resources and distract from what matters most: efficient resolution of the matter. With emerging AI translation tools, however, teams can substantially ease the burdens.
How Does Everlaw Translation Accelerate Multilingual Review?
AI-powered machine translation tools now offer legal professionals a faster, more scalable alternative. Rather than sending legal documents out for human translation, teams can use AI to speed up early review of foreign-language content to prioritize key documents.
Everlaw Translation is a new feature that uses AI to expedite initial ediscovery translation of high volumes of documents by creating translated text files that are stored alongside the original files. This feature integrates with Everlaw’s suite of advanced analytics and review tools, giving teams a powerful solution to tackle foreign language document review.
With Everlaw Translation, teams can:
Translate documents in bulk: Users translate large document sets quickly, enabling rapid identification of key documents for deeper analysis.
Leverage analytic and review tools: The platform’s advanced features help legal teams gain a clear understanding of translated content, allowing them to pinpoint critical information without delay.
Optimize human translation efforts: Once the most important documents are identified, translated text files can be exported in batches and sent to human translators for nuanced, contextually accurate translations.
This hybrid approach combines the speed of AI with the precision of human expertise, delivering the best of both worlds.
What Are the Key Benefits of AI Translation in Legal Workflows?
Handling large volumes of documents in different languages requires law firm and corporate in-house legal professionals to deploy the right mix of talent and technology.
Everlaw Translation enables legal professionals to see:
Reduced Costs: AI-powered translation eliminates the need for full-scale human translation of every document, slashing costs significantly.
Improved Efficiency: Teams can begin reviewing documents almost immediately, cutting down on delays and expediting case progress.
Enhanced Security: With built-in security protocols, Everlaw ensures sensitive documents remain protected throughout the translation and sharing process.
By empowering legal teams to work smarter and faster, Everlaw Translation helps them stay ahead in high-stakes international cases.
Multi-Language Ediscovery, Made Manageable with Everlaw
Traditional methods of document translation cost a fortune, demand robust security measures, and consume weeks or months. Legal teams are left spending more time managing the process than focusing on the core issues in the matter.
It doesn’t have to be that way – and with Everlaw Translation, it won’t be. With AI powering an accelerated and more thorough multilingual ediscovery process, legal teams will streamline workflows and quickly identify the information that matters to winning a case.
Ed. Note: This article was originally published on March 11, 2025. It was been updated and republished with additional insights on July 10, 2025.

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.