One Small Step for Lawyers, One Giant Leap for Law

On July 20, 1969, the United States put the first man on the moon.

“That’s one small step for a man,” he said. “One giant leap for mankind.

And then, in May of 2020, Elon Musk made history by launching astronauts into space from U.S. soil for the first time in nine years. Space exploration embodies the American spirit of discovery, the possibility of boldly facing new challenges “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Why is it we put such large quantities of effort, time, ingenuity, and money towards the discovery of space but have not applied that same spirit to our data? Why have we not made the “giant leaps” necessary to forever change the lives of those impacted by data?

As artificial intelligence (AI) began to expand into the legal sphere, the practice quickly shifted from “Discovery” to “e-Discovery”. The difference is slight, and because of digital transformation and the means 85% of the world uses to communicate, the majority of legal discovery is shifting towards electronic. This is the part of the pre-trial process where one side requests evidence from the opposing party, and it makes up the largest cost to law firms. It involves reviewing email accounts, texts, documents, slack channels, apps, devices, and so on. The list is endless nowadays.

The costs continue to rise because attorneys, or their associates, have to manually look through millions of documents to locate relevant information. With larger firms, we see outsourcing of the collection, filing, and storage of this data. From there, the legal team comes in and begins its discovery process. This is a lot of information to pore over, and when we talk about big data in the legal sphere, the average e-Discovery attempt involves several Terabytes of information.

e-Discovery handles electronic data stored in any format, which means it draws on a variety of unstructured data. An enormous challenge that arises from all this is the fact that e-Discovery data is dirty data. It includes corrupted files, files of varying lengths, PDFs without searchable text, audio recordings, images, videos, and so much more. And while AI makes life a lot easier, the processes for handling unstructured data are a lot less steadfast than those for handling structured data. This is the standard approach law firms take in a wide variety of processes.

Where the industry is missing the mark is that none of its current technologies address unstructured data. With the goal of getting through discovery, the reality is that they find a few key pieces of data to build a case on and then move towards settlement or trial. Because unstructured data can be so overwhelming and costly, a lot of it is overlooked. Whether it is arbitration, a FOIA request, the start of an internal investigation, or GDPR, today’s legal tech still comes up short.

That is where Inonde can help. We take traditional software that is commonly used in large and small law firms alike. Inonde allows for your data team to apply machine learning and supervised processing, which results in unstructured data becoming highly structured AI-Model Ready data. Our software offers law firms the unique opportunity to take full advantage of their unstructured data in a way that is automated, freeing up the time and money of busy attorneys. Finding the truth can be a challenge, so let us help.

Remember that spirit of discovery?

It’s time to discover what Inonde can do for your data.