Recapping Everlaw Summit: Three Days of Education, Connection, and Transformation
Earlier this month, Everlaw celebrated Everlaw Summit, the company’s first in-person user education, connection, and transformation conference in San Francisco, California.
Over the course of the three days in November, more than 300 leaders in the legal profession came together at the historic Palace Hotel. Attendees took advantage of 4 keynote presentations, 6 main-stage panel discussions, 18 breakout sessions, 3 networking cocktail receptions, a closed-door government networking session, a reception for women in ediscovery, and a closing night soiree.
Connecting With the Everlaw Community
Earlier this year, Everlaw launched its Everlaw Ediscovery Community, a shared digital space where users can network, interact, ask questions, and gain insights from other experts and cross-functional members of the Everlaw team. At Everlaw Summit, interactions moved from the digital to the physical, with numerous events for community members, including an invite-only plated lunch, where members got to spend time with each other and connect offline.
As Lisa Fabian, Director of Ediscovery Solutions at Hanson Bridgett put it, “The energy at the conference and the synergy between Everlaw and its community of users was palpable. I was there to rekindle old relationships and build new ones, both with the company and the community.”
Hands on With the Future of Ediscovery
Everlaw exists to help legal professionals find a straighter path to the truth, and getting feedback from users is critical to the company’s product development process. As such, Everlaw Summit hosted 48 design lab sessions, where Everlaw users got to test prototypes of upcoming products and share their thoughts with members of Everlaw’s product team. Meeting Everlaw users in-person was an invaluable opportunity for members of the company’s product and engineering teams, who got to see how the features and products they develop are used and adopted by the people they’re designing for.
Everlaw Summit exceeded my expectations so much that I added more to our budget for next year so that more people can attend,” – Lisa Fabian, Director of Ediscovery Solutions, Hanson Bridgett
“It is so rewarding seeing folks get excited about what our team is working on, and is a great reminder of the impact that our product has,” Allie Lozinak, Product Designer at Everlaw said after the event. “Having the opportunity to meet with clients in person during Everlaw Summit led to more organic conversation where we were able to dig deeper into particular user needs across a broader set of related features.”
Legal Professionals Deserve the Best Technology
AJ Shankar, CEO of Everlaw, shared his roadmap for the company at Summit, telling attendees that “our vision is to build a unified platform so that litigation and investigation teams can do all the work you actually want to do—finding the facts that matter and charting a straighter path to the truth.”
He highlighted some of the challenges facing legal professionals today, with voluminous data stored across a variety of mediums and platforms being one of the biggest, saying, “today, you’re still looking for needles in haystacks, but the haystacks are now a thousand times bigger. Meanwhile, your team and budget are not a thousand times bigger.”
You need better algorithms, better AI, better visualizations. Better discovery, period. You deserve better technology.” – AJ Shankar, CEO, Everlaw
To that extent, Shankar discussed Everlaw features, both existing and in development, that make it easier for legal professionals to find and act on critical evidence. Everlaw’s Cloud Connectors make it seamless to access data from its source – whether Office 365 or Slack. Everlaw Clustering then allows users to see that data represented through unsupervised machine learning without any human input for an unparalleled insight into your document corpus. Much to the delight of the audience, Shankar previewed products Everlaw is currently working on, including Communication Visualizer, a powerful tool to explore conversational data between parties, zoom in on particular date ranges, and dive deeper into interesting behavior.
Entire Day Dedicated to User Education
The final day of Everlaw Summit was dedicated to user education. With a focus on providing attendees with tools to rely on as soon as they returned home, Everlaw’s User Education team led 9 sessions, on topics ranging from configuring cases to maximize efficiency using AI to tips and tricks for saving time and meeting deadlines.
Attendees also got to hear from Everlaw power users, such as Hannah Meldrum, eData Project Coordinator at Travers Smith, a corporate law firm headquartered in London, and Sarah Plew, Discovery Administrator at the Office of the Indiana Attorney General. On their customer panel, Meldrum and Plew shared best practices on onboarding and learning Everlaw, and answered questions on overcoming common challenges. Hearing from Everlaw’s diverse group of customers and users in how they’re making the most of the platform was an informative opportunity for attendees to learn new tools they might not have been using earlier.
Promoting Justice by Illuminating Truth
Everlaw’s core mission of promoting justice by illuminating truth is the guiding value of the company. Meeting our users – from ediscovery specialists at boutique law firms to partners at some of America’s biggest practices – was an incredible avenue to share ideas and best practices around finding a straighter path to the truth. Ediscovery today can quite literally make or break a case, and empowering legal professionals with the critical connections and tools they need to tune out the noise and find justice could not have been a more rewarding endeavor.
Everlaw Summit 2023 will take place from the 10th to the 12th of October, once again at the historic Palace Hotel. Save the date here.
