AI legal document review: what a law firm should demand.

What is it actually good at?

Volume. A person reading page four hundred is not as sharp as they were on page four. Software is. It is good at building a dated chronology, listing every person and provider in a file, spotting the one email that contradicts the complaint, and flagging dates that start a clock.

It is not good at judgment. Whether a fact helps or hurts, whether a witness is credible, what to do about it: that stays with the lawyer. The right tool knows that and is built to hand the file back to you, not to decide for you.

Six things to demand from any AI review tool

Ask every vendor these, including us. A tool that cannot answer all six in plain words is not ready for a client file.

1. 1

   Every fact points to the exact words and the page

   A summary you cannot check is not evidence. If the tool says a doctor noted a prior injury, you should be one click from the sentence that says so, and the page or Bates number it is on.

2. 2

   It tells you what it did not read, by file name

   Every tool skips something: a corrupt PDF, a video, a folder it could not open. The dangerous ones skip it quietly. Ask for the list of files it opened and the list it did not.

3. 3

   No source, no fact

   When the record does not answer a question, the right output is an open question, not a confident guess. Ask the vendor what happens to a claim it cannot trace back to the file.

4. 4

   An attorney approves before anything is used

   Drafts, memos and fact lists should only be built from what a lawyer has reviewed. Ask whether a rejected fact can still end up in a draft.

5. 5

   Scans and photos are read, not skipped

   Real case files are scans of scans, phone pictures of documents and spreadsheets. Ask what the tool does with a photographed page and with handwriting.

6. 6

   You know where your files go

   Ask where documents are processed, who can see them, how long they are kept, and whether they are ever used to train a model. Get the answers in writing.

Medical records for injury cases

For a personal injury firm, the medical records are usually the biggest and most important part of the file. What you want back from a review is specific:

• A dated chronology of every visit, test and treatment
• Every provider and facility, in one list
• Gaps in treatment, with the dates on either side
• Any mention of a prior injury or condition, with the page
• What the records say about work, pain and daily life

Each line should carry its page cite, because the defense will read the same records looking for the same things.

What the ABA says about using AI on client files

On July 29, 2024 the American Bar Association issued Formal Opinion 512, its first ethics opinion on generative AI. It does not create new rules. It says the ones you already follow apply: competence (understand the benefits and risks of the tool), confidentiality (protect client information), communication with clients, and reasonable fees.

In practice that means the six demands above are not just good sense. They are how you show you understood the tool you used.

How our case-file reader measures up

We build a case-file reader for law firms. It is live at a firm today on real, active matters. Held to the list above:

• Every fact comes back with the exact words it came from, and the page where the file has pages.
• A fact that cannot be traced to the file is dropped. If the record does not say it, the memo records an open question instead.
• The report names the files it opened and the ones it did not, and the folders it could not reach.
• Scans and photographs are read, so a picture of a document is still read as a document.
• The memo lands in the matter folder marked privileged attorney work product, labelled as an AI draft to verify, and kept out of anything the client can see. Nothing is filed or sent on your behalf.

Medical-record and discovery summaries in the same cited format are rolling out now. The full story, including the time our own coverage count was wrong and how we fixed it, is in the case-file analysis case study.

Common questions