How often are you searching large collections of documents or trying to find a specific statement in a document? For most litigators, the answer is every day. Whether digging through discovery, transcripts, or internal brief banks, litigators and their teams are spending time—lots of it—on searching documents.
Traditional Search Tools & Keyword Prison
Legal professionals rely on search engines to find relevant information. While these tools do help to locate relevant materials, they are often cumbersome, requiring users to manually come up with ideal search terms expressed as keywords or Boolean, in order to locate the records most relevant to the matter at hand.
Litigators find themselves at the mercy of their ability to identify the perfect keywords to conduct their search. Keyword searches will then return thousands, if not millions, of possible documents to review. Attorneys spend hours sifting through result lists to find cases and other documents relevant to the pending litigation.
Essentially, litigators find themselves locked in keyword prison.
AllSearch & The Application of Neural Nets to Natural Language Processing
Enter AllSearch, the concept-based document search tool developed by Casetext to free these attorneys from lockup. AllSearch is technology that leverages breakthroughs in applying transformer-based neural networks (a form of AI) to natural language processing (NLP, another subset of AI). Let’s break that down a bit.
Neural nets have been around for decades, but there’s been a recent revival of this technology that includes the application of neural nets to NLP. Within the neural net family, there are transformer-based neural nets. In 2018, Google made a fundamental breakthrough when it developed BERT, a transformer-based machine learning technique for NLP pre-training that applied neural net techniques to capture language in a whole new way.
Casetext immediately set about applying this technology to build AllSearch, which uses neural nets to read any document. AllSeach users upload the document or body of documents they wish to search. Instead of storing documents as a “flat” keyword search index, AllSearch stores documents and their language into a vast, dimensional vector space. In this space, AllSearch uses neural networks to go beyond merely identifying keywords to match actual concepts in documents—even if the words have no overlap—because it
Speed, Accuracy & Versatility for Litigators
AllSearch allows litigators to apply the power of these technological advances to search anything with greater accuracy and speed. With AllSearch, attorneys don’t need to spend time thinking about ideal keywords or construct perfect queries for searches. Instead, they can simply input a sentence or phrase summing up the concept they are looking for, which saves them time. AllSearch will then match attorneys’ queries by concept rather than by literal keyword.
Concept-based search is more accurate and produces less irrelevant results. This means less documents for litigators to dig through to find the relevant document or information, so they can find what they need faster and cuts down on review time.
AllSearch is a versatile search tool that can be applied to save litigators significant amounts of time when searching documents. Law firms can use AllSearch to quickly search internal document repositories such as brief banks, thereby streamlining knowledge management. AllSearch can also be used to expedite e-discovery, efficiently search transcripts and litigation records, and more.
To learn more about AllSearch and its capabilities, visit https://casetext.com/allsearch/.
Rapidly draft common legal letters and emails.
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Specify the recipient, topic, and tone of the correspondence you want.
CoCounsel will produce a draft.
Chat back and forth with CoCounsel to edit the draft.
Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.
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Enter a question or issue, along with relevant facts such as jurisdiction, area of law, etc.
CoCounsel will retrieve relevant legal resources and provide an answer with explanation and supporting sources.
Behind the scenes, Conduct Research generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identify the on-point case law, statutes, and regulations, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), along with the supporting sources and applicable excerpts.
Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.
How this skill works
Enter a question or issue, along with relevant facts such as jurisdiction, area of law, etc.
CoCounsel will retrieve relevant legal resources and provide an answer with explanation and supporting sources.
Behind the scenes, Conduct Research generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identify the on-point case law, statutes, and regulations, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), along with the supporting sources and applicable excerpts.
Get a thorough deposition outline in no time, just by describing the deponent and what’s at issue.
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Describe the deponent and what’s at issue in the case, and CoCounsel identifies multiple highly relevant topics to address in the deposition and drafts questions for each topic.
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Ask questions of contracts that are analyzed in a line-by-line review
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Allows the user to upload a set of contracts and a set of questions
This skill will provide an answer to those questions for each contract, or, if the question is not relevant to the contract, provide that information as well
Upload up to 10 contracts at once
Ask up to 10 questions of each contract
Relevant results will hyperlink to identified passages in the corresponding contract
Get a list of all parts of a set of contracts that don’t comply with a set of policies.
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Upload a set of contracts and then describe a policy or set of policies that the contracts should comply with, e.g. "contracts must contain a right to injunctive relief, not merely the right to seek injunctive relief."
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Get an overview of any document in straightforward, everyday language.
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Upload a document–e.g. a legal memorandum, judicial opinion, or contract.
CoCounsel will summarize the document using everyday terminology.
Find all instances of relevant information in a database of documents.
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Select a database and describe what you're looking for in detail, such as templates and precedents to use as a starting point for drafting documents, or specific clauses and provisions you'd like to include in new documents you're working on.
CoCounsel identifies and delivers every instance of what you're searching for, citing sources in the database for each instance.
Behind the scenes, CoCounsel generates multiple queries using keyword search, terms and connectors, boolean, and Parallel Search to identifiy the on-point passages from every document in the database, reads and analyzes the search results, and outputs a summary of its findings (i.e. an answer to the question), citing applicable excerpts in specific documents.
Get a list of all parts of a set of contracts that don’t comply with a set of policies.
Ask questions of contracts that are analyzed in a line-by-line review
Get a thorough deposition outline by describing the deponent and what’s at issue.
Get answers to your research questions, with explanations and supporting sources.