Leading international law firm Baker McKenzie recently used LitiGate in a high-profile dispute. The team needed to learn a new case’s factual story, prepare a risk assessment in advance of proceedings, and to instantly create a Dramatis Personae list.
The team benefited hugely from LitiGate’s transformation of raw case data into analysed assets. First, the platform automatically detects duplicate documents, saving the team the job of dealing with those. LitiGate’s algorithm compares similarities in the content of the case documents to ensure that completely identical materials are only logged once. Secondly, LitiGate classifies case documents – and the events mentioned within them. Third, LitiGate de-clutters the dataset by grouping together related email threads, even if saved and uploaded separately. Finally, LitiGate automatically converts documents into searchable text, even previously unsearchable PDFs, paving the way for easy in-depth case analysis.
The team leveraged the LitiGate Chronologies tool for instant identification and extraction of key data points (down to the sentence level) from across the case. This allowed the team to condense what would have been dozens of hours of work into approximately one hour to create a chronology and review all of the relevant data that it contained. The team were impressed by LitiGate’s “sifting” capabilities and by the extraction of items that had not been picked up in a more general review, as well as discrepancies between descriptions of events by two different witnesses. With LitiGate, legal teams can shift their focus and create customised chronologies targeting specific timeframes, actors, tags and document categories. Lawyers can even add comments to their chronologies, allowing them to capture and share preliminary notes in context, and work together directly on the data, in live time.
The users found it quick and easy to pin down specific items in their case with LitiGate’s SmartSearch – with its date range and category filters set atop a natural language search. All documents automatically become searchable on LitiGate, so the team were able to find the “needle in the haystack” much more quickly than when using other tools.
The team found that LitiGate speeded up and sharpened the work that they were doing, meaning that they could reach their goals in a fraction of the time that they would have spent otherwise. The AI added value was also seen in data extraction and analysis results that went above and beyond the scope of a general manual review.
The team estimated that using LitiGate throughout the project saved them dozens of hours of “heavy lifting”.