For the ultimate installment of our LawNext on Location sequence, all recorded throughout my journey to San Francisco, I head throughout the bay to Oakland, to the headquarters of e-discovery firm Everlaw, the place I sit down with founder and CEO AJ Shankar for a dialog about expertise, AI and being in it for the lengthy sport.
AJ grew up in Connecticut, got here west in 2002 for a pc science PhD at UC Berkeley, and has lived inside a couple of blocks of the Berkeley campus ever since. He stumbled into the authorized trade virtually by chance — recruited to function a technical knowledgeable in litigation involving how the web labored — and shortly realized that the authorized world was residence to among the most technically fascinating and underserved issues he’d ever encountered. He by no means left.
AJ had a previous startup, a pc imaginative and prescient firm that was acquired, earlier than launching Everlaw in 2011. The corporate was cloud-native and ML-infused from the beginning, constructed on the conviction, AJ says, that there’s no single option to discover the needle in a discovery haystack, and that constructing a genuinely helpful litigation platform requires fixing for collaboration, ease of use and scalability suddenly.
The majority of our dialog focuses on generative AI, and the way Everlaw has approached it in a different way than a lot of the market. Somewhat than bolting on a chatbot, AJ says, Everlaw embedded AI intentionally all through the platform — doc summarization, coding ideas, deposition evaluation, reality extraction — at all times grounding responses within the precise paperwork at hand and citing sources so customers can confirm the work. The December launch of Deep Dive, which lets litigators pose a query and get a synthesized, cited reply drawn from a whole doc corpus in a couple of minute, is the function AJ calls a “new period” for discovery — one he genuinely believes represents a categorical shift.
As Everlaw continues to develop, it additionally stays unbiased, with no personal fairness and no exterior majority homeowners. As for AJ, he says he’s in it for the lengthy sport, and has by no means included an exit slide in a fundraising deck.
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