“The dirty secret,” a veteran eDiscovery consultant told me, “is that AI still can’t actually handle these massive document sets.” While the industry rushes toward AI adoption, embracing its demonstrated strengths and — for some insane and persistent reason — its well-documented weaknesses, one hurdle it can’t quite surmount is the ever-expanding size of discovery. AI is, rightly, lauded for its capacity to analyze and summarize large amounts of data, but crunching 100 deposition transcripts is one thing and getting on top of terabytes worth of discovery is quite another. Context windows just aren’t that big.
Which means legal tech vendors have to get creative within the limits of the technology. Today, at its SYNERGY Legal Professionals conference, Thomson Reuters announced a new beta feature that gets users closer.
CoCounsel Legal’s new bulk document review feature allows analysis of 10,000 documents at a clip, returning sortable, user-friendly results. The secret sauce is in taking these big batches and returning structured analysis that users can then — for lack of a better term — daisy chain to get on top of “hundreds or thousands of documents far more efficiently than traditional manual methods,” as the press release puts it.
This underscores, again, that AI isn’t replacing humans. Someone has to run the requisite 10K at a time searches and deal with the results. But it will reduce the number of humans necessary to get through these traditionally brute force searches and then put everything together. The general purpose AI companies will keep promising exponential growth, but it’s just not coming and the key differentiator for legal tech will be building the best workarounds to deal with AI’s baked in context window limitations.
Thomson Reuters also announced an agentic feature for “Independent Execution of Legal Tasks.” Sigh. The record will reflect my ongoing disdain for the term “agentic.” Independent research into these so-called “agentic” AI tools reveals a dismal track record, with failure rates upward of 70 percent according to a Carnegie Mellon study. On top of that, the term is employed by the industry to describe an AI tool that autonomously creates a multi-step workflow and then acts on it, which is just an invitation to multiple points of failure that — even if it worked better than the studies indicate — should terrify a lawyer. On top of that, compressing multiple steps in the lawyerly process invites a psychological reordering that can make lawyers, well… dumber.
But while the new Thomson Reuters beta tool will experiment with independent work, the planned end state of the feature is a very useful tool that shouldn’t worry lawyers at all:
With the second phase, legal professionals will have access to a customizable workflow builder that will allow them to create, save and share their own workflows within CoCounsel Legal capitalizing on the trusted content and solutions from Thomson Reuters as well as the firm’s knowledge. Additionally, this facilitates the development of repeatable, law firm-specific processes and supports reusability across teams – ensuring consistency while capturing institutional knowledge and best practices.
Building a workflow based on the lived experience of the lawyers is exactly the sort of tool a firm can use. It’s “autonomous” to the extent it checks and acts upon the work it’s trained by the firm to accomplish. As with the document review feature, the race here is to build something that allows AI to be better harnessed to match what lawyers actually do.
If the AI bubble doesn’t explode more epically than that infamous Subway sandwich, this is where the action will be for the next few years. Don’t watch the AI as much as what companies like Thomson Reuters are putting on top of AI. That’s the fun stuff and the real differentiator.
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.
The post The Elephant In The Room For Legal AI Remains Elephantine Document Sets appeared first on Above the Law.
“The dirty secret,” a veteran eDiscovery consultant told me, “is that AI still can’t actually handle these massive document sets.” While the industry rushes toward AI adoption, embracing its demonstrated strengths and — for some insane and persistent reason — its well-documented weaknesses, one hurdle it can’t quite surmount is the ever-expanding size of discovery. AI is, rightly, lauded for its capacity to analyze and summarize large amounts of data, but crunching 100 deposition transcripts is one thing and getting on top of terabytes worth of discovery is quite another. Context windows just aren’t that big.
Which means legal tech vendors have to get creative within the limits of the technology. Today, at its SYNERGY Legal Professionals conference, Thomson Reuters announced a new beta feature that gets users closer.
CoCounsel Legal’s new bulk document review feature allows analysis of 10,000 documents at a clip, returning sortable, user-friendly results. The secret sauce is in taking these big batches and returning structured analysis that users can then — for lack of a better term — daisy chain to get on top of “hundreds or thousands of documents far more efficiently than traditional manual methods,” as the press release puts it.
This underscores, again, that AI isn’t replacing humans. Someone has to run the requisite 10K at a time searches and deal with the results. But it will reduce the number of humans necessary to get through these traditionally brute force searches and then put everything together. The general purpose AI companies will keep promising exponential growth, but it’s just not coming and the key differentiator for legal tech will be building the best workarounds to deal with AI’s baked in context window limitations.
Thomson Reuters also announced an agentic feature for “Independent Execution of Legal Tasks.” Sigh. The record will reflect my ongoing disdain for the term “agentic.” Independent research into these so-called “agentic” AI tools reveals a dismal track record, with failure rates upward of 70 percent according to a Carnegie Mellon study. On top of that, the term is employed by the industry to describe an AI tool that autonomously creates a multi-step workflow and then acts on it, which is just an invitation to multiple points of failure that — even if it worked better than the studies indicate — should terrify a lawyer. On top of that, compressing multiple steps in the lawyerly process invites a psychological reordering that can make lawyers, well… dumber.
But while the new Thomson Reuters beta tool will experiment with independent work, the planned end state of the feature is a very useful tool that shouldn’t worry lawyers at all:
With the second phase, legal professionals will have access to a customizable workflow builder that will allow them to create, save and share their own workflows within CoCounsel Legal capitalizing on the trusted content and solutions from Thomson Reuters as well as the firm’s knowledge. Additionally, this facilitates the development of repeatable, law firm-specific processes and supports reusability across teams – ensuring consistency while capturing institutional knowledge and best practices.
Building a workflow based on the lived experience of the lawyers is exactly the sort of tool a firm can use. It’s “autonomous” to the extent it checks and acts upon the work it’s trained by the firm to accomplish. As with the document review feature, the race here is to build something that allows AI to be better harnessed to match what lawyers actually do.
If the AI bubble doesn’t explode more epically than that infamous Subway sandwich, this is where the action will be for the next few years. Don’t watch the AI as much as what companies like Thomson Reuters are putting on top of AI. That’s the fun stuff and the real differentiator.
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.
