For the final installment of our LawNext on Location series, all recorded during my trip to San Francisco, I head across the bay to Oakland, to the headquarters of e-discovery company Everlaw, where I sit down with founder and CEO AJ Shankar for a conversation about technology, AI and being in it for the long [\u2026]<\/p>\n
For the final installment of our LawNext on Location series, Bob heads across the bay, from San Francisco to Oakland, to the headquarters of e-discovery company Everlaw<\/a>, where he sits down with founder and CEO AJ Shankar<\/a> for a conversation about technology, AI and being in it for the long game.<\/p>\n AJ grew up in Connecticut, came west in 2002 for a computer science PhD at UC Berkeley, and has lived within a few blocks of the Berkeley campus ever since. He stumbled into the legal industry almost by accident \u2014 recruited to serve as a technical expert in litigation involving how the internet worked \u2014 and quickly realized that the legal world was home to some of the most technically fascinating and underserved problems he\u2019d ever encountered. He never left.<\/p>\n AJ had a prior startup, a computer vision company that was acquired, before launching Everlaw in 2011. The company was cloud-native and ML-infused from the start, built on the conviction, AJ says, that there\u2019s no single way to find the needle in a discovery haystack, and that building a genuinely useful litigation platform requires solving for collaboration, ease of use and scalability all at once.<\/p>\n The bulk of the conversation focuses on generative AI, and how Everlaw has approached it differently than much of the market. Rather than bolting on a chatbot, AJ says, Everlaw embedded AI deliberately throughout the platform \u2014 document summarization, coding suggestions, deposition analysis, fact extraction \u2014 always grounding responses in the actual documents at hand and citing sources so users can verify the work. The December launch of Deep Dive, which lets litigators pose a question and get a synthesized, cited answer drawn from an entire document corpus in about a minute, is the feature AJ calls a \u201cnew era\u201d for discovery \u2014 one he genuinely believes represents a categorical shift.<\/p>\n As Everlaw continues to grow, it also remains independent, with no private equity and no outside majority owners. As for AJ, he says he is in it for the long game, and has never included an exit slide in a fundraising deck.<\/p>\n Listen here:<\/p>\n