This week, I’m at the Filevine User LEX Summit in Salt Lake City. Two announcements were particularly significant for the legal tech landscape. These announcements reflect the desire of customers to have seamless AI tools for a number of uses within a single platform, and separately, address some key pain points.

(I’ll provide my overall impressions of the conference and cover other announcements in a separate piece.)

I had a chance to talk to Alex McLaughlin, Filevine’s VP of Product, and Keegan Chapman, Filevine’s Chief Marketing Officer, at some length about both of these tools.

Legal Research

Yes, you read that subheading correctly: Filevine is entering the highly competitive legal research provider field along with Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, and vLex. The new tool is housed within Filevine’s Chat with My Case platform. This platform generally enables users to ask questions of all the internal materials and documents housed in a law firm’s Filevine system.

But the legal research end of this goes further. According to McLaughlin, the platform bundles the information contained in the internal case files of a firm with the legal research inquiry. This enables the prompt response to be better tailored to the actual facts of the case, according to McLaughlin. That sounds pretty interesting and reflects the needs of law firms to be able to effectively use the mass of information contained in their files with publicly available materials. I have written about this need before. Those bundled inquiries then go to public LLMs and data sources to obtain final responses.

According to McLaughlin, the tools will be able to search though statutes, regulations, and federal and state case law to come up with an answer. It will also handle things like social media searches without leaving the platform.

Filevine hopes to make this tool available later this year.

Some Questions

Of course, a couple of issues immediately come to mind. First is the data source. McLaughlin told me that Filevine is working on partnering with a combination of sources for the data base. This ability to leverage multiple data sources, McLaughlin argues, will make for more effective answers, which also makes sense. The deal (or deals) are not yet done, however. Filevine hopes to announce the agreements in the near future.

Secondly, because the queries are bundling internal data which could very well include client confidences and work product, there are confidentiality concerns. But McLaughlin counters that by saying Filevine’s scale has enabled it to negotiate agreements with leading LLM providers to ensure that the inquiries are not used for training and will not be retained or stored. Any confidential data, says McLaughlin, will only be used in processing, so no worries. I hope that’s the case although I haven’t reviewed the actual contracts, of course.

I asked about hallucinations and inaccuracies. McLaughlin told me that the tool will cross check the LLM responses against the data bases of legal materials to catch any variance from the actual data. Conceptually that sounds good, but time will tell how robust the tool will really be.

This is a significant development since it enables firms to marry their internal case data with publicly available AI processing to get results. It will eliminate the need to recreate internal information for use with the sophisticated LLM tools. It will eliminate the need to purchase one AI system for internal data and one system for legal research needs. And it will enable access to that important internal data.

That’s big. It should make other legal research companies that don’t have the capacity to access and mine that internal data take note.

Depositions by Filevine

The second set of announcements centers around Filevine’s deposition tool. Last year when I attended this conference, Filevine announced CoPilot, a tool that sits on an attorney’s laptop and could suggest questions based on predetermined goals. It also identifies inconsistencies in testimony, flags vague or unresponsive answers, suggests follow-up questions and even lets you know if your questions need clarifying. All in real time while the deposition is being taken.

In many respects, it’s like having a very capable second-chair person in the deposition that can listen and help the questioner out. (Without getting tired or being inattentive.) I wrote about it at the time and felt it was a significant advance in the use of AI in litigation. I also interviewed McLaughlin on my podcast late last year.

Filevine has renamed this tool as Depositions by Filevine and added some additional features. At first glance, these features don’t seem all that significant. But their significance lies in the fact that Filevine took a hard look at individually minor pain points and addressed them in what appear to be good ways.

The first is a deposition scheduling tool. This tool automates noticing the deposition, getting the court reporter, and calendaring the deposition for all involved. You merely input the time, date, and involved parties, and the tool automatically does the rest.

It even contacts the other side and automates the process of agreeing on a date. I know from experience that all these things if done manually take time for someone, either a lawyer or legal professional, to do. It’s irritating and frustrating work to have to call a court reporter, then the other side, then wait for the return calls, etc.

McLaughlin told me another new feature is the ability to create a live transcript within approximately 90 minutes of the deposition that can be immediately searched and analyzed. It beats waiting two weeks to get a transcript that you then often have to convert to a different format to use. It also automates the ability to request a certified transcript that can be obtained within a week or so. Certified transcripts can be expensive and are often not needed unless a case goes to trial. Automating the request for one means you can wait until you are sure a matter is going to trial before you spend the money.

The tool automatically places all the depositions in a matter in a central library that can be accessed with natural language inquires. Filevine also announced a video clipping tool that makes that process so much easier.

And one final and not insignificant point: Law firms can purchase the Depositions by Filevine tool as a stand-alone product. They don’t have to buy the whole Filevine suite of products. It allows firms to use a Filevine product without a full commitment. That shows confidence.

These deposition tools target genuine friction points in litigation practice. None of them involve skills for which these folks have been trained. Many of these involve activities and time for which clients are increasingly unwilling to pay.

Why These Particular Announcements Are Significant

I can’t speak to how well both the legal research and deposition tools will actually work. But they reflect a recognition by Filevine of some important marketing opportunities that are often overlooked by other vendors.

First, lawyers and law firms want tools that work entirely within one vendor’s platform. No one likes moving from one vendor to another to get work done. Secondly, it’s a classic example of looking for and addressing pain points even when those pain points don’t initially appear to look significant. By doing so, it builds trust.

And finally, offering a standalone tool that addresses real needs is golden. Law firms can put their toe in the water with a tool, see how well it works, and whether it addresses a real need they have. When it comes time to look at tech tools for other needs now or in the future, where are they going to look? At unknown providers? Or at a provider that gave them something good even if for a limited need?

Again, I can’t talk about implementation and execution. But I do applaud the thinking and approach. I only wish more vendors would do the same.

Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.

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