This AI Tool for Lawyers Is All About Sorting Through Millions of ...
In the last year, multiple lawyers have learned the hard way that generative AI tools like OpenAI and Google Gemini can hallucinate, or make things up. But that's not to say there's no place for gen AI within legal circles.
For instance: electronic discovery, or e-discovery. That's the process of collecting and exchanging electronic evidence like emails, voicemails, chats and social media posts for civil lawsuits.
Data Company Hanzo's Role in E-Discovery
That's where data company Hanzo comes in. It helps legal departments sort through unstructured data from resources like Slack, Microsoft Teams and email to identify relevant documents and to make sense of those records in the e-discovery process.
"All this industry is based on billable hours," said Hanzo CEO Julien Masanès. "They are very expensive lawyers at the end of the day, so we're trying to reduce that bill."
Efficiency through AI in Various Industries
It's yet another example of AI being used to bring new efficiencies to a variety of industries, including agriculture, ecommerce, media and utilities. Now it's coming for civil law in what could be one of the clearest examples of using AI as a "superhero sidekick" yet.
The Importance of E-Discovery Automation
Let's say you work at a tech company and receive a complaint from a competitor about an IP breach. A judge orders you to provide records of internal communication between employees.
According to Masanès, a large company could easily have 5 to 10 million Slack messages to be sorted through for a request like this. That's a lot of messages to pore over to determine which are relevant. Plus, you don't want to share any more than you have to and risk exposing your own trade secrets.
If you were to embark upon the e-discovery process on your own, you'd have to use keywords or train an AI model with some sample documents. But in the latter case, you'd still have do a manual review to ensure the model picked out the right electronic evidence. That's tedious work for anyone.
Instead, Hanzo said, its platform can analyze these documents and identify what you need.
"People always think about chatbots when they think about AI," Masanès said. "But there's lots of other applications that are possible and really changing the game."
The Growth of E-Discovery Market
That includes automating e-discovery, a market projected to grow from $15.5 billion in 2023 to $39.9 billion by 2032, thanks in part to the proliferation of electronic records, as well as AI and automation.
