Everlaw for Journalists: One Year Later
Two years ago, we noticed a trend in the news. More and more of the most important stories originated in information that reporters were pulling from email and other electronic records. To bring stories like the Panama Papers to light, investigative reporting teams were digging through literally millions of documents to find the ones that told a story.
In a lot of ways, it reminded us of the process lawyers go through to prepare cases for court: first discovering key documents in vast amounts of data, then assembling them into a coherent narrative.
We knew how hard that could be, and how much of a difference the right technology could make. And we believed in the role of investigative reporting in a free and open society. So we launched Everlaw for Journalists to give journalists free access to our platform.
Since then we’ve had a chance to meet investigative teams at publications like Buzzfeed, Florida’s Sun Sentinel, Gizmodo, the New York Times, ProPublica, the SF Chronicle, and more, and consulted with editors and producers at the Online News Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors.
We’ve learned a lot about what they value in a platform like Everlaw: speed and accuracy, natural-language search, and features like optical character recognition, native file viewers, and built-in audio and video transcription. Journalists also love the ability to begin drafting and collaborating on their story right within Everlaw, using our StoryBuilder® toolset.
And we know that security matters just as much to journalists as it does to litigators, so rest assured that it’s incredibly important to us. Everlaw’s SOC 2 Type 2 certification assures the security, availability, and confidentiality of your data. Users seeking an extra layer of security can activate two-factor authentication, which requires validation from a mobile device or secured email account in addition to your password.
One group we’ve worked with closely is the Associated Press’ Data Journalism Team. Serdar Tumgoren, the News Applications Team Lead, recently shared this feedback:
Dealing with the latest document dump can be an exercise in controlled chaos. In addition to handling a mix of often unexpected file formats, we have to coordinate the review of documents among reporters who may be scattered across the country or the world. We’re excited about Everlaw’s potential—especially the workflow management tools—to help tame this process so we can focus on what matters: uncovering the news.
If you’d like to learn more about Everlaw and help your news team get to the facts faster, we’d love to hear from you.
