Top Takeaways from Everlaw Summit ‘25

The legal technology community traveled to San Francisco for Everlaw Summit '25 this past month for three days of education, connection, and inspiration with their peers.

Sessions offered candid looks into how legal teams are moving beyond pilot programs to integrate AI into their core workflows. Organizations are using AI to augment their legal expertise, with the human lawyer acting as the expert editor, quality controller, and strategic thinker.

The pervasive theme of Summit ‘25 was clear: AI is a force multiplier, not a replacement. Mastering AI is the key differentiator for legal success in the next decade, and those who attended left with a clear roadmap for advancing their career and their firm's capabilities in the age of intelligent discovery.

AI Redefines Existing Workflows

For his annual Summit keynote, Everlaw CEO AJ Shankar highlighted how generative AI is continuing to be integrated into the platform, and the impact it’s having on the work of customers.

“Everlaw integrates AI experiences into existing workflows,” AJ said. “By defining precise use cases, we can construct prompts for you, which means that using our AI is often as simple as clicking a button. We make it easy for you to validate the AI’s output, whether by providing Bates numbered citations or direct quotations from the source material.”

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He also invited customers onstage to share their journey with Everlaw’s AI tools. Steve Delaney, who serves as Director of Litigation Support at Benesch, detailed how his team has used Everlaw^AI Assistant's Coding Suggestions to save time and resources on first-pass document  review and other workflows. Julie Brown, Director of Practice Technology at Vorys, also joined AJ to discuss Everlaw^AI Deep Dive, which has been deployed at various points in the case lifecycle to help attorneys quickly get up to speed in their case by being able to engage with large data sets by asking natural language questions.

Ed Valio, who serves as Director of Ediscovery & Records Management at GEICO, was the third customer to join AJ onstage. Valio told AJ about an instance where his team had to evaluate tens of thousands of contracts in a short amount of time, with no appropriate solution to do the work.

Valio detailed how he and his team created a process in which they collected all the contracts they needed to search through, uploaded them to Everlaw, and used custom extractions to identify key parties and information that would be important to hit on in the search. They then used Review Assistant to evaluate the contracts that hit on the specified terms, and using that output created a Predictive Coding model to find those contracts. Valio and his team turned around the project in just 48 hours, finding just one single contract out of 50,000 that had characteristics they were looking for.

When asked by AJ what his advice was for teams that were looking to get started applying generative AI in different ways, Valio said to not keep yourself in a silo.

“The tools we as ediscovery professionals use every day aren’t just valuable for litigation and investigations,” he said. “They can also solve high-value business problems across an organization. When you have colleagues who are facing a problem that’s document-heavy, it’s an opportunity to help. 50,000 documents might feel overwhelming for some people, but it’s routine for us. We can help accelerate projects, reduce risk, and improve decision making. Look for moments where you can help and don’t be afraid to offer your expertise.”

Access to Justice Can Be Transformed Through AI

As an afternoon counterpart to AJ’s morning keynote, Casey Newton, founder of Platformer and co-host of The New York Times’ podcast Hard Fork and Nilay Patel, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Verge, were joined by Bridget McCormack, president of the American Arbitration Association (AAA), and Rebecca Delfino, Associate Professor of Law at LMU Loyola Law to discuss generative AI’s role both in and out of the courtroom.

McCormack’s take on this was particularly noteworthy in that she spent nine years on the Michigan Supreme Court, including three as its chief justice. She’s used that experience in her current role with the AAA to leverage AI tools that help resolve disputes faster.

“The American civil justice system is broken,” she said. “92% of Americans can't afford legal help for their civil justice problems. Almost every small and medium business can't afford legal help for their civil justice problems. To me, generative AI is a potential scalable solution for that broken system.”

Professor Delfino agreed with this perspective, while also reiterating the need for guardrails, especially when it comes to attorneys using generative AI in the courtroom.

“I think the most important guardrail is using generative AI just as a tool, and not as a substitute for human evaluation,” she said. “It’s easy to see how beautiful the output is from these tools, and think that because it’s well written, it must be accurate. But you have to check your work just as you did before this technology existed, and ensure things are cited appropriately.”

Effective Communication Continues to Define Success

Day three’s keynote from Jad Abumrad, creator and former host of the podcast Radiolab, who led an interactive discussion on how to have better conversations.

Abumrad’s talk touched on the different situations he’s been in over the years as a journalist and podcaster, and what he’s learned that’s influenced his work today.

For example, when interviewing country music star Dolly Parton for his podcast Dolly Parton’s America, Abumrad recalled how, sitting across the table from her for their first interview, Parton talked so much he could hardly ask a question.

“For the first interview we did, we sat directly across from one another, and she steamrolled me,” Abumrad said. “I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean that she was so unbelievably charismatic, she told one story after the next, after the next, and I literally could not get a question in. The feeling I had at the time was that I needed more space.”

To achieve that space, Abumrad tried a different technique. In the next interviews with Parton, he positioned himself differently to see how it would affect the conversation.

“I would sit shoulder to shoulder with her so we could swivel toward one another, but then away from one another, and it made for a better conversation,” Abumrad said. “I really began to lean into this geometry because I also figured out that if I were to bring a third object for us to stare at, such as my laptop, which I used to show pictures from her past, it created these kinds of triangles. It made a huge difference not having a person right in front of her to perform to, but instead simply having an object. She went from a performer's brain to a much more reflective state of mind.”

These insights were particularly relevant to the legal professionals in the audience, who rely on communication and conversation to find breakthroughs in their case.

Judges Reiterate the Need for Human-Centered Technology

This mainstage session, moderated by Everlaw CLO Gloria Lee, featured five sitting judges speaking about pressing topics facing the legal profession, including generative AI, deepfakes, and more.

While each of the judges had varying degrees of experience with actually using generative AI or seeing it in their courtroom, they all agreed that it’s a tool to help legal professionals work smarter and provide better services to their clients. It’s there as a resource, but not a replacement. This was a point initially raised by Judge Joy Flowers Conti (W.D. Pa.) at the very beginning of the panel, and echoed throughout.

“The lawyers I talk to say generative AI is a very useful tool,” Judge Conti said. “It can help you validate your work, and get you thinking in different ways, but it doesn't substitute for the lawyer's own work. The lawyer has to do the thinking, and the lawyer has to do the work.”

Judge David Cunningham (Los Angeles County Superior Court) agreed on the importance of keeping the human in the loop, and emphasized that generative AI as a tool to enhance the work of lawyers, not replace them.

“I don't think you can get rid of the human element no matter how effective generative AI can be,” Judge Cunningham said. “It's really a tool for organization, but I don't think it replaces the human component.”

The judges also broached the topic of deepfakes, which are becoming an increasing concern in the legal profession, raising questions over evidence authentication, equal access, and more.

Judge Victoria Kolakowski (Alameda County Superior Court) recently encountered this very issue in her own courtroom, with a pro se litigant submitting deepfake videos and photographs to the court.

“It raises a lot of questions about where the line is between what's a deepfake, and what's an enhancement, and what's an original video,” Judge Kolakowski said. “We tend to believe what our eyes show us, but how do we get past that? How can we address a world where we can't believe what we can't believe? There are all these kinds of questions that we're going to be facing over the next couple of years about what's real and what's not.”

Technology Adoption Remains a Hurdle for Legal Teams

Apart from the mainstage sessions, Summit ‘25 had plenty of breakout panels offering practical insights and thought-provoking discussions from a number of speakers, many of whom are Everlaw customers.

Sessions on topics like novel data types, de-weaponizing ediscovery in complex litigation, change management, generative AI, and more offered attendees a range of content and learning opportunities featuring strategic ideas they could take back to their teams.

Speaking on a panel highlighting how organizations can get internal buy-in and build trust with generative AI, Julie Brown, who serves as Director of Practice Technology at Vorys, touched on how showing attorneys where they can benefit from new technology often leads to better adoption.

“The biggest stumbling block for technology adoption is typically desire,” Brown said. “You have to make sure your users have a desire to change how they do things, and you can show them what’s in it for them.”

A key focus of Summit ‘25 was empowering attendees to translate the concepts introduced during these sessions into actionable strategies within their own organizations.

Legal Professionals Appreciate Opportunities to Up-Level Skills

Another highlight of Summit is the education and certification opportunities that are offered to all attendees.

Single-day product certification is an experience exclusive to Everlaw Summit, offering users the chance to get certified in different areas of the Everlaw platform in just one day. Summit ‘25 offered live certification across four tracks, including Reviewer Certification, Data Operations Certification, Storybuilder Certification, and Everlaw AI Certification. These were incredibly popular, and 125 people were able to get certified at Summit.

User education sessions were offered during all three days of Summit ‘25, at no extra cost to attendees. Session topics focused on practical workflows and building expertise in different Everlaw features, including Difference Viewer, Storybuilder, and more.

Join Us for Everlaw Summit ‘26

Even though Summit ‘25 just wrapped up, we’re already looking forward to Summit ‘26!

Check back soon for a save the date, and we’ll hope to see you next year in San Francisco!