AI-Powered Document Review: How Ask Will Transform Discovery Workflows Forever

Globally, the legal industry amounts to about $1 trillion per year, with roughly a third of that spent on discovery. In recent years, the eDiscovery segment has seen an influx of companies and tools promising to make eDiscovery cheaper and faster. But to date, we haven’t seen much on AI document review, even though AI has been on the tip of everyone’s tongues since OpenAI released ChatGPT 3 in 2022. That is, until now. 

A few years ago, Reveal announced the upcoming release of an AI-powered legal document review tool that may forever change the legal industry. Ask is the world’s first eDiscovery product to integrate generative AI. The enhanced-search represents a whole new way of conducting eDiscovery.

The Potential Impact of AI on the Legal Industry

Once you wade through the attention-grabbing headlines of AI passing the bar exam or the AI company willing to pay $1 million to the lawyer who uses it while arguing a U.S. Supreme Court case, it's easy to see how AI could not only impact the legal industry, but how it could turn it upside down.

As risk averse as lawyers are, the efficiency from being able to use AI to review documents, draft “nastygrams,” distill and summarize deposition transcripts, outline and draft motions and briefs, and do other common client-related tasks will prove irresistible — especially when their clients are demanding they use the technology to improve outcomes and lower costs.

Ten years from now, people will laugh at the notion that lawyers used to charge clients $500/hour or more for these tasks. Relying on humans to do this work will seem as quaint as those boxy computer monitors in every 90s television show. The rise of AI could affect law firms and their clients in countless ways. For example, AI can help Davids fight Goliaths because small law firms could use AI to do what a dozen junior associates at a large corporate law firm could do, but in a fraction of the time. Likewise, in-house counsel at companies of all sizes might handle internally work they used to send to outside law firms because AI can help them do that work faster and cheaper than outside counsel can.

The Future is Today: Meet Ask

Imagine you’re conducting a legal document review. You type a prompt: “Review this email and find any potential violations of 18 United States Code Section 1343.”

Seconds later — before you’ve finished checking the notifications on your phone — Ask has identified three spots where the authors talk about actions that may violate the statute.

Imagine typing “Summarize this document,” “Redact all proper names and account numbers,” or “Translate this report into English,” and getting results near-instantaneously.

Or, imagine using Ask to help you find the needles in your document haystack, the smoking guns: “Review this email thread and find where Jane Smith’s internal statements show her public statements were false.”

That is exactly what Ask allows you to do. Get a sneak peek below:

But Ask is far from the only AI-powered feature we're incorporating into Reveal.

We have also added a new feature called “Suggested Tags” which uses predictive coding called Continuous Active Learning to suggest what tags a user should apply to a document based on other similar documents which may be similarly tagged. 

Take a look:

And, we’ve added “Automations,” an automation engine that allows users to program Reveal to do routine tasks such as tagging, redacting, and culling.

Why Reveal's Ask feature is a Game-Changer for Document Review

AI technology is one step closer to fully automated eDiscovery. Reveal will help eDiscovery teams save time, increase efficiency, and reduce errors. Like coming home from college winter break freshman year 15 pounds heavier than when you left, it is a rite of passage for junior associates to slog through document reviews and all the filtering, de-duping, tagging, privilege analyzing, redacting, and bundling that doc reviews entail.

While time-consuming and costly, in the absence of any alternative clients had little leverage to demand a faster, more efficient, and cheaper process other than conducting the review internally or pushing their law firms to use their own tools. And of course, all those billable hours didn’t mean reviewers tagged every document correctly, redacted every piece of PII, or identified every potentially privileged document. But the tide will turn with AI.

With prompts as simple as “Spot all instances where Joe Smith used phrase ‘Project Nemo’”  or “Suggest redactions for names and account numbers,” Reveal will reshape what modern document review looks like. AI legal document review will be quicker and more precise than traditional document review. And thanks to once-time-consuming document review being done by AI in a fraction of the time, AI document review may even reshape the business of law. 

Law firms may need to move away from an hourly billing model and toward a flat fee or subscription model to ensure they’re being paid for the value they bring and not being penalized for using technology that makes them more efficient.

Conclusion

Better. Faster. Cheaper. Those words are music to the ears of chief legal officers and general counsel who want to keep discovery costs down even as the amount of data and the number of documents in discovery seems to increase with each new matter.

While Reveal is already an eDiscovery industry leader committed to fast, simple, and defensible discovery, our Ask feature will further drive the cost of eDiscovery down, and the efficiency and effectiveness of it up, powering a transformation of eDiscovery that propels it into the new era of AI. 

And, in the process, we just might change the practice of law forever.

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Want to learn more about Ask and all the exciting new features coming down the pike? Book some time with one of our product specialists today.