Finding the Unfindable with Everlaw
How engineering has helped transform the field of law by making the impossible seem easy
Imagine this: you’re working on a jigsaw puzzle. It’s 1,000 pieces and you’re methodically going through them all, connecting what goes together, maybe categorizing the different types, colors, and patterns. And, while you’re doing this, all of a sudden that 1,000-piece puzzle becomes a 1,500-piece puzzle. And, oh yeah, the picture has changed. And this keeps happening over, and over, and over again. It would drive you crazy. But unfortunately, for business owners and business professionals, this story is one that’s all too familiar.
A J Shankar is the Founder and CEO of Everlaw, a legal tech company that is taking the impossible task of finding missing pieces of a puzzle out of the hands of lawyers and is using technology to make practicing law easier.
“They’re going to get a huge pile of evidence, a huge Corpus of evidence, whether they’re a law firm from their own client or from opposing counsel, that’s a separate pile of evidence,” he said. “Then the other client next door, they all get their own huge haystacks. And somewhere in that haystack are the smoking guns and the incriminating emails or whatever that are going to make their case or exonerate their client.”
What makes it even more difficult is that lawyers don’t know what they are searching for.
“They don’t know what it looks like until they begin, because it’s a different haystack every time,” Shankar said. “And the needles are different every time.”
So why does Shankar, who has no legal background, think that a mathematician and a tech guy is better equipped to find that crucial needle in a haystack for the legal sector?
“I think the emphasis in legal tech should be on the tech,” Shankar said. “Software is really, really hard. Things like big data at scale, artificial intelligence, real-time collaboration, these are the problems…You don’t want your software designed by lawyers. If you are a doctor and you have an idea for an MRI machine you don’t go to another doctor and say, ‘Hey, build me this MRI machine.’ You go to an engineer who’s really good at building these machines. And that’s a very fruitful partnership.”
What Everlaw brings to the table is deep product and engineering competency that was well suited to solve the actual problems that needed to be solved. And the solution starts with artificial intelligence.
Everlaw tech makes it possible for lawyers to find things they didn’t know they were looking for and securely collaborate with colleagues anywhere and everywhere thanks to A.I. And that not only means more cases won, but productivity also increases which can play a role in a company’s bottom line.
“Your clients are going to pay you for some maximum amount of hours,” Shankar said. “Your job is to find the important stuff. So, we actually drive a lot of efficiency improvement for clients in a whole variety of ways. We can reduce the time to review a document…and the total budget you can spend by 30%, 40% by actually helping you get through documents faster, annotate them and code them as it’s known more efficiently and more accurately.”
Shankar is optimistic that lawyers, who are perceived to be stodgy, old-fashioned and slow to change, will adopt legal tech because it will make their lives easier.
“If you give them great tech, they will use it,” he said. “Of course, as with any industry, there’s going to be folks who are still insisting on writing their arguments by etching them in stone tablets. Like there’s going to be that person and you’re not going to convince them. But the industry as a whole, especially some of the less tenured folks driving a lot of this discovery stuff means that they’re more up on tech stuff and more willing to change,” Shankar said.
Everlaw is not only making the lives of lawyers easier, the company has created the ability to find that proverbial needle in a haystack or the last missing pieces of a puzzle that are needed to settle or solve a case. To find out how they applied knowledge from one industry and applied it to law and how they discovered a way to find the needles that no one else could, tune into Business X factors.
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