Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the legal profession. Advances in AI-based eDiscovery analytics drastically increase the speed and improve the quality of the eDiscovery process.

Here are 4 benefits of using AI-based analytics:

1. Simplify Data into Workable Information
2. With analytics, you can simplify volumes of data into just the relevant documents you need. This saves time which provides a head start on all your cases. For example, eDiscovery tools are able to sift through gigabytes or even terabytes of information to find relevant documents pertinent to the matter at hand. One company we can suggest for litigation or family law is Evichat, which works with text message eDiscovery.
3. Provides Quantitative Data to Work With
4. By using analytics lawyers can make decisions and plan legal strategies based on facts rather than instinct or assumptions. For example, rangefindr is software that is able to take inputs about a criminal matter and calculate based on a database of cases the likely sentencing outcome. Lawyers can now be that much more sure of an outcome because it can be quantified rather than a qualitative estimate based on instinct.  
5. Be cost effective for client and firm
6. You can cover multiple eDiscovery use cases with one platform. This way you can handle more cases, more volume.
7. Transformation, not replacement
8. Many parts of a lawyer’s job are manual and tedious which can be outsourced to technology. This however won’t replace the job lawyers do. Lawyers still must make the final decision over how to proceed in a given case or transaction. AI is just helping attorneys manage data-intensive tasks more productively and efficiently and to make better and more well-informed decisions.

However, today, many small firms still reject using eDiscovery citing the costs of eDiscovery technology to be higher than they can afford or their clients want to pay.

Firms need to get on board with eDiscovery to help their clients’ cases and significantly lower litigation costs. All clients deal primarily with electronic documents. Each of them send out thousands of emails, store digital documents in different file formats on multiple computer locations and smartphones. The few paper documents that we still use are scanned to store electronically. Unless your firm only deals with standard or transactional forms such as wills, estates, or immigration and does not deal with the sifting and sorting of any documents, eDiscovery is a must have.

For years small to midsize law firms could not afford eDiscovery technology. Back then, the consequences of this were not so bad, however, these days, the tech has advanced so precipitously with the advent of AI and automation technology that it is becoming a must have given the hours of manual labour it saves. Luckily this new and better software is cheaper than it has ever been.  

Today’s affordable and easy-to-use software-as-a-service (SaaS) eDiscovery platforms have knocked down many of the barriers that once divided large and small firms..

• SaaS “cloud” technologies eliminate the need for large maintenance costs;
• Subscription pricing offers flexible and affordable rates;
• More sophisticated machine learning techniques is now more intuitive and do not require extensive training;  
• More powerful tools automate repetitive, low-value work and unearth more critical insights faster.

Lawyers perform higher value work the instant they start using SaaS eDiscovery platforms and every law firm, big or small, needs to start becoming familiar with it.

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