Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly transforming the legal profession, with 72.5% of legal practitioners surveyed in 2024 already incorporating GenAI into their workflows — or planning to do so within the next two years.
At DISCO, we’ve been anticipating this shift for nearly a decade. Since launching our AI lab in 2015, we've been dedicated to creating secure GenAI tools specifically designed for lawyers, by lawyers.
But great tech is more than just standalone features – it’s about how those tools come together to create a seamless, integrated experience across the entire litigation lifecycle.
In this blog, we’ll explore how the individual tools in our AI-powered litigation software work together, enabling attorneys to gain faster, more reliable results at every stage of their cases.
Cecilia unpacked: a who’s who of our GenAI products
Our current Cecilia AI suite consists of the following:
We’ll explore each of these in depth below.
Q&A 💬
Ask questions in natural language and get answers with citations to your documents
What it is
Cecilia Q&A is DISCO’s GenAI fact expert that allows you to interrogate your evidence – literally. Instead of guessing at keywords, just ask Cecilia questions in plain English and get back answers with a complete list of cited sources.
The best part? Rather than pulling answers from generic information online, Cecilia Q&A answers your questions based on the information in your specific database. If you ask the same question in two different databases, you will get two different answers, each tailored to the facts of the respective cases.
Why it matters
The typical approach to finding an answer to a factual question involves multiple steps:
- Determine what you are looking for.
- Break your idea down into custodians, dates, potential keywords, and metadata.
- Draft complex search syntax.
- Review the returned documents.
- Repeat steps 2-4 if you didn’t guess the right keyword (and potentially do it again, and again, and again).
With Cecilia Q&A, you skip these steps. You simply ask questions and get answers with citations to supporting documents in your database – answers that could be the smoking gun or the starting point for further exploration and document review.
Real application
Lawyers use Cecilia Q&A to find key documents when time is of the essence, such as when a surprise issue comes up at trial or in a deposition.
One DISCO customer, Am Law 50 attorney, asked Cecilia Q&A, “Why was [a person] fired?” Cecilia Q&A returned an HR report that listed exactly why the person was fired. The customer noted, “I might have found that document with search terms, but I couldn’t have found it that fast.”
Auto Review 🔍
Tag large populations of documents based on your review protocol.
What it is
Cecilia Auto Review uses GenAI to review documents much more quickly than human reviewers based on tag descriptions provided by the case team.
Auto Review also provides explanations for each tagging decision, enabling more precisely targeted quality control by attorneys and review experts.
Why it matters
First-pass review can make up over 25% of a litigation's total cost, even when employing contract reviewers — and few attorneys are happy with the results. Relying on dozens of human reviewers means dozens of human errors, which are expensive to fix and take time to unwind. This delays crucial decisions on case strategy while eating into litigation budgets.
Cecilia Auto Review addresses this problem by using GenAI to review documents faster. Similar to kicking off a traditional review, your case team provides Cecilia Auto Review with tag descriptions, which the tool then leverages to examine documents and assign the appropriate tags.
With Cecilia Auto Review, you can get results at the rate of 3,800 documents per hour — the equivalent of a 100-person review team. For fast-moving cases or those with large volumes of data, this could be a make-or-break solution for meeting production deadlines.
Real application
In fast-moving litigation, it’s critical for legal teams to quickly interpret incoming
productions. In one case, a first-pass review that took a team of human reviewers 43 hours (five business days) to complete was accomplished by Cecilia Auto Review in a mere 7 hours with a recall rate of 97% – far surpassing the industry-standard of 75-80%.
This speed and accuracy allows you to achieve more with a smaller team and start fact development and case strategy earlier than ever.
Doc summaries 📄
Get a summary of a document on demand and in plain English
What it is
You can summarize long or important documents on demand using Cecilia doc
summaries in DISCO Ediscovery. Summaries appear in the document viewer right next to the document text, alongside other powerful tools like translations and annotations.
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Why it matters
Long documents or those in foreign languages slow down document review; they must be read or translated before they can be tagged. As a result, busy professionals can miss key pieces of information in these documents.
With Cecilia doc summaries, you can get a digest of individual documents on demand. Doc summaries also works hand-in-hand with DISCO’s other GenAI tools – for example, Cecilia Q&A users can make your review even more efficient by generating summaries for documents cited in Cecilia Q&A responses.
With doc summaries, you can:
- Speed time to evidence with short recaps of long, complex documents
- Get a succinct, English summary of contracts, reports, or even foreign language documents
- Fast-track your understanding of your case with secure, verifiable generative AI
Auto Timelines ⏳
Generate a timeline from any case document in minutes.
What it is
Cecilia Auto Timelines allows users to create a case chronology by simply uploading a case document, like a complaint or witness interview. Using generative AI, Cecilia pulls out and succinctly summarizes the key facts and dates. You can continue to add to your timeline as more documents become available over the course of your case.
To ensure confidence in the accuracy of the timeline, you can see the highlighted portion of the document from which each fact was pulled.
Why it matters
Auto Timelines allows your case team to collaborate in real time on case chronology and link evidence to key facts and dates from their ediscovery database, external sites, or deposition transcripts.
Rather than keeping track of cumbersome versioned documents on a shared drive, Timelines lets your team work together on a single living chronology, so it is always up-to-date. Timelines can also be exported to spreadsheet format for offline portability.
With this feature, your team can create a comprehensive timeline within minutes of uploading a complaint or case document, freeing up associate time for higher-level work rather than spending hours manually identifying the facts.
Deposition summaries ✍️
Summarize witness testimony sequentially and by topic.
What it is
Cecilia deposition summaries helps lawyers parse witness testimony quickly. You can upload a deposition transcript and receive a chronological or key-topic summary in minutes, with links and citations included. This helps you:
- Easily navigate to key points
- Share with your team or prep your client quickly
- Understand and leverage testimony faster
Why it matters
Deposition summaries allow lawyers to quickly make sense of important deposition transcripts – but creating them is an incredibly tedious, time-consuming, and costly process.
Cecilia deposition summaries is a solution for anyone who has lost time waiting for junior associates to summarize a deposition, struggled to remember which witness said a key fact (and when), or slogged through summarizing a deposition themselves. Depositions summaries enables you to leverage generative AI throughout your deposition workflow, saving you time, reducing write-offs, and better equipping you to win your case.
Bringing it all together: What Cecilia looks like in action
We’ve all been there. Your firm has taken on a large case and you are currently flailing under a database almost a million documents deep. A 9 a.m. deadline is coming up, and you have no clue where to start.
Now imagine that you were using Cecilia AI. Your team finished the final QC at noon and you started the production at 12:05pm. By 12:35, you’ve QC’d and delivered your production via secure, shareable link. You enjoy the sunshine as you walk to lunch, rather than eating at your desk. Better, huh?
At DISCO, the engineering team has been dedicated to making the above scenario possible, which now means:
- The most complex, longest-running productions are now 20x faster than before.
- More than 80% of productions take less than 30 minutes end to end, with speeds up to 1,000 pages per second.
- Productions can be shared via a secure direct link from the production tool within minutes of the production completing, saving hours spent downloading and copying to drives or re-uploading to a filesharing service.
And we’re just getting started.
DISCO’s Cecilia AI products are designed to work in tandem to accelerate litigation at every step. To best understand how these tools fit together, let’s follow a lawyer through his workflows and spotlight how Cecilia’s generative AI capabilities transform his case.
The AI-assisted lawyer: from discovery to resolution
John is a junior associate and is currently in the running for most stressed person on the planet. His firm has taken on a large case and, while John has always been a bit wary of using AI tools, with deadlines looming, he needs to expedite his work.
Auto timelines
The first thing the partner asked John to do is put together a chronology of the case – and of course, the partner wants to review it by end of day. John has the complaint up on his screen, but he is getting tunnel vision because he knows summarizing all the alleged facts and dates will take him hours past the partner’s deadline.
John’s uncertainty about AI is nothing compared to his fear of the partner, so he takes a breath and opens up DISCO Case Builder. Using Cecilia auto timelines, John uploads the complaint and in a matter of minutes is reviewing an AI-generated chronology of events that includes important facts and corresponding dates.
Amazed at how quickly he was able to kick off a new – and accurate – timeline, John adds document after document. Before he knows it, work that usually would have taken him days is truncated into half an hour.
John hones some language in the timeline, exports it to a spreadsheet, and flips it to the partner with time to spare, earning a coveted “that was quick - thx” in response.
Cecilia Q&A
Now that John has enjoyed a night of sleep after successfully delivering the case timeline, he can dive into the review.
Unfortunately, John is paralyzed by the sheer volume of documents in front of him. Not to mention, he has so many outstanding questions about the facts of the case he doesn’t even know where to begin, or even what tags he should be applying. Seeing some hot documents would help, but he doesn’t know how to find them and doesn’t want to risk losing his new superstar image by asking.
Thankfully, Cecilia Q&A – DISCO’s in-app AI assistant – can deliver critical evidence right into John’s lap. John simply asks Cecilia about a key event, and Cecilia answers it with facts cited.
John now has a spate of hot documents, a better idea of the facts in the case, and a convenient jumping off point for further fact development. Instead of poking through the haystack and hoping for a needle, John can spend his time reviewing documents that support critical aspects of the case.
Cecilia doc summaries
As John continues to collect and review documents, he comes across an incredibly long academic paper written by one of the key players in the case. While he has a hunch that this document will be important, John knows that it will take him some time poring over this dense document to digest it, and there are more pressing (yet manageable) assignments on his plate.
Using Cecilia doc summaries, John quickly generates a succinct and easily understandable synopsis that confirms that his hunch was right: The document is super hot and needs to be added to the timeline and sent to the partner right away. Right from the viewer, John adds the document and summary to the timeline in seconds, and shares the document with the partner, pasting in the summary to the custom message field. John has earned another “thx.”
Despite the partner’s gratitude, John slowly begins to feel overwhelmed again by the overly complicated nature of the article. Fortunately, Cecilia Q&A is able to scope to just a single document for a much more granular review. With Cecilia single doc Q&A, John is able to leverage his knowledge of the case and the doc summary and instantly get answers to specific questions. Now, a document that initially appeared overly complex and daunting can be reviewed in minutes instead of hours.
Auto Review
Using Cecilia Q&A, doc summaries, and single-doc Q&A, John has done a thorough targeted review, and has a much better idea about the nature of the case. Using what he has learned, John writes detailed tag descriptions to help the rest of his team know which documents are important to the different aspects of their case.
Unfortunately, he now needs to apply these tags to the hundreds of thousands of documents still remaining for first-pass review. Luckily, with Cecilia Auto Review, John can review these documents faster and more consistently than he ever could by himself. By using the tag descriptions John wrote, Cecilia Auto Review scans the documents and provides tag recommendations as well as detailed explanations with citations for each decision. John and the case team have been spared weeks of tedious work, letting them move right into hot doc and QC review.
Deposition summaries
John is amazed at how quickly he has flown through his work. Not only that, but the partner and senior associate are thrilled with the progress he has made. With the initial targeted investigation and first-pass review behind him, John now turns his sights to depositions.
His team has collected dozens of hours of testimony from numerous witnesses and now it’s John’s job to summarize and outline the key points of each one. Some of these transcripts are several hundred pages long – and in his last case, it took John almost eight hours to get through a single deposition. Fortunately, John is now a DISCO generative AI expert! Using Cecilia deposition summaries, John uploads a deposition transcript and receives a chronological or key-topic summary in minutes, complete with links and citations.
By using Cecilia’s generative AI tools, John revolutionized how he tackles case work. He constructed a concise and accurate timeline of the details surrounding the case, conducted a targeted and first-pass review of all the documents in his database in a fraction of the time it usually takes an entire team, and summarized hundreds of hours of depositions in a single afternoon. Far from being the most stressed person on the planet, he’s now feeling confident about his chances of making partner.
Who can use Cecilia?
Cecilia Q&A, Auto Review, and doc summaries are available for purchase to all DISCO Ediscovery users.
Cecilia Auto Timelines and deposition summaries are available for purchase to DISCO Case Builder users.
See it for yourself
As the legal landscape continues to evolve with the rapid adoption of GenAI, having the right tools to stay ahead is more critical than ever.
Ready to see how Cecilia can enhance your practice? Request a demo.
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