Everlaw Manages To Wow Even Within A Strong ILTACON Exhibit Hall
Clean, intuitive, and powerful. What more could you ask for from a platform?
By the end of a long conference, it’s hard to find a product demonstration that will really impress you. It’s not that there’s a shortage of impressive products out there, especially at a show like the International Legal Technology Association’s annual convention. It’s just that so many products offer similar functionality and distinguishing one from another gets difficult after a while. Was that the cloud-based one? Is this the one with the AI? Why is everyone handing out fidget spinners?
That’s not really a bad thing (except for the fidget spinners). If technology vendors are truly doing their job, then their products should all gravitate toward offering lawyers the same functionality. The point is, distinguishing one product against the field is more of a challenge these days than it once was.
That’s why Everlaw impressed me so much in the waning days of ILTACON this year. When I stepped into their booth to watch the demo, I could tell right away that this was a product I’d remember, if only because it actually looks nice.
Without context, that may look confusing, but trust me, it’s very clean and intuitive. Each category of tasks representing another stage of the discovery process gets its own column and the whole page is entirely customizable. Raving about the look of a platform may sound superficial, but consider that some army of reviewers is going to be staring at this screen for days on end. Think about the revolving door of contract attorneys who have to immediately pick up a new platform and perform. Every bit of unpleasant complexity is just inviting a mistake at every stage of the game. This isn’t just a matter of aesthetics — this is a key part of discovery success.
But no matter how important the look and feel might be, it’s nothing if the review process doesn’t excel. Well, when it comes to the actual work of reviewing documents, Everlaw doesn’t disappoint. The system allows a review manager to easily divvy up assignments to reviewers and change those assignments in real-time — in case someone’s really lagging. The act of reviewing is pretty straightforward: document families are clearly displayed, tags are easy to grab and apply, and the user can set up macros to assign multiple tags at once. The ability to review documents in their native format without any plugins is a real boon. And wow, that search function is fast, pumping out results faster than you can complete your search query. Personally I love an old school Boolean search, but the visual Boolean system Everlaw sports is snazzy and intuitive.
It’s around this point where we have to talk about the robots. Everlaw’s predictive coding system learns with every click, learning from the text of the reviewed documents. Everlaw also allows the user to exclude documents from the predictive coding set, a useful feature for keeping tricky documents from leading the predictive coding system down the wrong path (which is a serious concern).
For the really obsessive review manager out there, Everlaw also gives the user a lot of power to dig into the prediction system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KfISIQClfg
The power to visually identify documents that need more manual review to improve the predictive engine’s confidence is an incredibly helpful tool. Not just for improving the overall review, but if you’re up against the wall and need to get something back to the client fast, grab one of those outliers that the model feels should be relevant and make it the top priority of a great reviewer.
But the StoryBuilder functions really got me. It’s one thing to efficiently work through a massive data set and create a bunch of binders of relevant documents, and another to have a system that allows the team to insert documents right into your chronology, deposition outlines, and case memos. And every user can work on the same documents simultaneously, with edits appearing in real-time for maximum collaboration.
Documents can be dragged and dropped right into outlines. Honestly, how easy can this be?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAgGSM5sxsk&t=2s
That’s certainly better than the Word document outline with notations to tab numbers in a separate physical binder that some poor paralegal put together. It’s also, obviously, more secure to keep everything under one roof.
Let’s be honest, I don’t have to manage document reviews or draft deposition outlines anymore, something that provides me true joy on a daily basis. But watching Everlaw’s platform do its thing, it struck me how much more pleasant it would’ve been to litigate several of my old matters with a system like this.
That’s what really stands out when a lawyer walks through ILTACON — which doesn’t happen enough — every product evokes a memory of some matter long put to bed and the scars it left. Tech staff can find products that get the job done, but there’s no substitute for a lawyer drawing parallels as a product is put through its paces before them.
Now pardon me while I mourn the hours of my life lost on a private 10b-5 action that this product could have spared me.
Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
