Overrated: AI Gets Fast Results. Underrated: AI Gets Results Lawyers Can Use Faster.
NetDocuments ndMAX speeds up the workflow... but in ways we don't talk about enough.
The first bullet point in any conversation about generative AI is speed. Check out how fast it found that key document, look at how fast it put together that pitch deck, observe how quickly it got lawyers sanctioned. That’s not to say there isn’t a ton of conversation about reliability and confidentiality, but it boils down to speed. If AI wasn’t fast, we wouldn’t be talking about it at all.
But the talk about AI’s speed always focuses on the front-end of the workflow. AI can get that draft faster or summarize the documents faster, which may be true, but as a selling point overlooks how AI can speed up the back-end by providing work product that’s easier for lawyers to review, query, and edit.
This oft-neglected angle struck me during ILTACON 2024, as NetDocuments showed me its latest AI-driven tool, ndMAX Assist — the logical evolution from its PatternBuilder work. The ndMAX Assist tool gives users an intelligent agent that takes their natural queries to interact with the documents. Another reminder that generative AI’s most impactful use case right now might be in giving less tech savvy lawyers as smooth and comfortable user experience to entice them into working directly with existing tools. Why ask an associate to go into the system and find something when pinging the generative AI tool allows the senior lawyer to do it directly?
Josh Baxter, CEO of NetDocuments, emphasized that ndMAX Assist creates “an easy, accessible way for legal organizations to introduce AI-powered capabilities into their everyday workflows.” And it does this without lawyers needing to export content into a third-party platform, respecting the ethical walls law firms erect around client data. So unlike ChatGPT stealing the headlines and racking up sanctions, ndMAX Assist respects security protocols and operates in a familiar environment. Having Microsoft Copilot integration also allows users to securely tap into Copilot’s capabilities directly within the NetDocuments environment.
However, this is all still about speeding up the front-end of the lawyer workflow. But during the demonstration, NetDocs shared a client case that landed a little bit different. According to NetDocs, Boies Schiller recently hailed the company’s technology for helping get the firm up to speed on a major, discovery intensive matter with a tight deadline. Using generative AI to speed the summarization of 50-some odd deposition transcripts overnight is a classic example of getting work fast, but what stood out was an offhand remark about the NetDocs generated summaries sped up the review of the work product.
Traditionally, this project would require snagging 10 or 12 associates who thought they were about to go home for the weekend and telling them to start diving into dense transcripts about a case based on a 30,000-foot description with only the benefit of the slice of discovery that they’re assigned. The record in a long-running litigation can get more self-referential than the MCU and some poor associate assigned three late-stage transcripts can easily miss context and nuance buried in earlier depositions.
By extension, this leads to a jumble of inconsistent write-ups full of irrelevant details or ultimately abandoned theories. And that’s before considering that some associates just write better, more consumable summaries than others. This variability forces a partner to spend the weekend wading through all of it — just to figure out what’s actually relevant. It’s billable legal work, sure, but it also sucks.
Interrogating the discovery set through a tool like ndMAX Assist will produce consistent memos, produced in the same voice, informed by the entire universe of material. Now there’s no rogue insights or unnecessary tangents and senior lawyers trying to get a handle on what’s in each of these transcripts and what needs to be revisited for further focus can swiftly push through the process with a set of memos in the same voice with the same level of detail.
BSF partner David Simons confirmed the story, explaining that the team was impressed with the back-end accuracy of the NetDocs generated summaries and “having these in a consistent voice… allowing apple to apple comparisons without worrying about different writing styles or technical abilities.”
AI skeptics worried about asking an AI to produce these summaries miss the whole point. This isn’t turning over legal work to a machine because no one is going to take these summaries, crack their knuckles, and head into court. But you also wouldn’t trust a team of first-year memos for that either. This is about getting to the next stage where you understand who the players are and their relationships to each other and how the timeline went down and it’s all not-very-intellectually demanding stuff that AI can deliver faster and in a form that lawyers can work with faster. They’re on to the stage of tasking associates to dig deeper into specific transcripts or begin researching key concepts within hours instead of days.
“At the end of the day, in a situation like that where you want to do the same thing 50 times, asking the same thing, getting the same meticulously approved prompt, or series of prompts that are strung together to get you an outcome that you feel good about, that’s important. And that’s something that you have to have a tool like ndMAX to do,” Chief Product Officer Dan Hauck said.
No one expects front-end speed to disappear from AI sales pitches. Turning a 100-hour project into a couple hours will always be the sexier headline for firms and (more so) clients. But don’t blow off the downstream workflow advantages either. Legal work, in particular litigation, is an iterative process meaning the faster lawyers can move from absorbing new information to formulating the next research task is just as important as turbocharging the process of accumulating the information.
Time — especially billable time — is fungible after all.
Joe Patrice is a senior 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 or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
