eDiscovery & Litigation Support

Electronic discovery, or eDiscovery, is the process of identifying, collecting, and reviewing the electronic documents relevant to a lawsuit or investigation — emails, files, messages, and data that can run to millions of items in a single case. It is one of the most expensive and labor-intensive parts of modern litigation, historically requiring large teams of contract attorneys to review documents one by one. It is also, fundamentally, a massive-scale classification problem — precisely what machine learning does best.

AI transformed eDiscovery first through technology-assisted review, where models learn from a small set of human decisions to classify millions of documents, and now through generative AI that can summarize, answer questions about, and surface the key facts buried in a document set. What once took a team months can now be done in a fraction of the time. The work shifts from reviewing every document toward training and supervising the AI and focusing human attention on the genuinely important material it surfaces.

Relativity is the dominant eDiscovery platform, applying AI to review, classify, and surface relevant documents across enormous case datasets. Harvey and CoCounsel add generative analysis and questioning across case materials, and Legora supports collaborative review. The assistants Claude and ChatGPT can help summarize and analyze documents, with the verification and confidentiality caveats that govern all legal AI.

AI has cut the cost and time of document review dramatically and largely displaced the contract-attorney review work that was once a major source of legal employment — one of the clearest examples of AI reshaping a legal role. The valued work moves toward managing the review process, validating the AI's classifications, and analyzing the key documents it identifies. The trade-off is defensibility: courts and opponents scrutinize how an AI-driven review was conducted, so transparency and human oversight of the process are essential. eDiscovery is the part of law where AI is most mature and its workforce impact most visible.