Everlaw's Commitment to Legal Tech Innovation: Transforming the Practice of Law
Technological innovation has transformed the way we live and do business. From tablets, new payment systems, and edge computing to machine learning and artificial intelligence, innovation has enabled organizations to take advantage of productivity gains and reap significant cost savings.
The legal industry is no different; in the last ten years alone, legal tech innovation has disrupted the practice of law. Firms are gradually adopting technology like analytics and cloud-based ediscovery solutions that help serve their clients better. The pandemic and subsequent stay-at-home orders are also forcing law firms and their IT teams to embrace solutions that enable virtual collaboration and productivity.
Innovation is a linchpin of our mission at Everlaw. One of our five key principles is that our customers deserve the same innovative technology experience that’s available to them as consumers. We built Everlaw as a platform to help promote justice by illuminating truth through a combination of technological expertise with a deep respect for and understanding of our users. Innovation within the platform allows Everlaw to keep up with legal professionals’ current needs and anticipate their future needs.
How Everlaw Innovates
We take legal tech innovation seriously here at Everlaw. There are a variety of ways that we leverage it to feed into our greater mission and to execute our vision:
1. Cloud-native solution
As a cloud-native software, our customers enjoy instant product deployment without lengthy setups and onboarding. Every user on the platform has access to the latest version of the software instantly, avoiding waiting for their IT departments to perform complex software upgrades or manage arduous version control.
With a self-service uploader, users can rapidly upload data directly from popular cloud-based storage solutions, such as Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, and Google Vault. Organization administrators have the flexibility to toggle on and off fine-grained permissions for complex legal teams, ensuring the right users have access to sensitive data.
2. User-centric design.
The Everlaw platform is designed for legal teams to focus on substantive legal work and provides a technology experience that is seamless, intuitive, and inherently collaborative. Legal teams can share everything from key searches, folders, and binders to homepage folders.
With the in-platform messaging tool, there’s no need to go back and forth between email and Everlaw. Users can securely message groups of users — even those in different organizations — and engage in a dialogue directly on the Everlaw platform.
Storybuilder enables collaboration and alignment among teams in the narrative-building process. Users can collaborate when crafting an argument, preparing a deposition, or outlining case strategy. With intuitive Drafts, multiple users can work simultaneously on the same document, saving all changes in real-time.
3. Four-week release cycle.
Everlaw commits to a four-week product release cycle to continuously improve the product and release high-impact features that elegantly solve core discovery challenges. In just the last six months, Everlaw has released nearly 30 new features and 25 significant product improvements compared to only a handful of new features that other ediscovery vendors have released in the same timeframe. Most notable features in our 2020 releases are:
Storybuilder. The continued evolution of Storybuilder, including a complete depositions tool, a text transcript viewer, an exhibit marking workflow, a high-level dashboard for all Storybuilder work, and much more.
Conversational search enhancements and visualizations. This allows for more intuitive and powerful searching across contact names, domains, and email addresses. Users can also employ the Data Visualizer to more easily narrow searches to an exact set of documents.
Metadata redaction improvements. Streamline review by taking advantage of the metadata redaction improvements we’ve implemented. Users can directly redact metadata fields on individual documents, apply batch metadata redactions to a group of documents, confirm metadata redaction suggestions for metadata that is redacted from the body of a document, as well as produce redacted metadata.
Final Thoughts on Legal Tech Innovation
The practice of law is evolving rapidly to embrace digital transformation — legal teams, including witnesses and co-counsels, are increasingly embracing remote work. Additionally, court systems are increasingly managing case matters online, with teams presenting arguments and conducting depositions virtually. In this watershed moment for the legal industry, legal tech innovation that fosters collaboration and promotes productivity will be critical to success — and Everlaw will continue to deliver innovation that helps our customers promote justice.
Read “A Critical Evaluation of Ediscovery Vendors” on key questions to consider when evaluating technology solutions to meet your company’s needs.
