Smarter eDiscovery Starts Here:
A Legal Teams Guide to AI
Real stories, practical insights, and human perspectives
on how AI is reshaping legal work.
Making eDiscovery Smarter, Faster, and a Little More Human
AI is changing eDiscovery faster than most of us can draft a discovery plan. What used to take a room full of reviewers endless hours can now happen in minutes. But real progress isn’t just about better tools. It’s about people, process, and technology working together.
And this is the space where you can unpack what that means for you and your team. Here, you can explore the innovation, the strategy, and the moments that remind us that eDiscovery is still a human pursuit, even when powered by machines. Expect real insights from our subject matter experts, case studies with measurable results, a technology deep dive or two, and maybe even the occasional meme to make you smile while you learn.
So, dive in. Pick your perspective. You might just discover new ways to make eDiscovery smarter, faster, and a little more human.
Explore by Perspective
Featured Content
The Tech Explorer
The TCDI Perspective
Dave York
Chief Client Officer
“Those inputs and the feedback that we get, it is very human-like. Because a lot of us come from a world of database prompts where you’re building out very specific queries that are not how we talk. Certain words within five words of this AND/OR. You’re building out all these complex Boolean logic statements to find documents that you’re looking for.
Whereas with LLMs, we can ask very conversational type questions, and then based on the process that we go through, that’s going to drive the answers and results that we get just like it would with a human. A key difference being, computers can read 10,000 documents a minute, humans not so much.
So, you can get to answers quicker, and you can get to the understanding of why it made the decisions it made. I think that that’s key compared to some of the legacy AI tools we’ve used over the years.
Because even with Boolean logic searching, you can sort of dive in and say, okay, why did I get the results that I got? You can start analyzing and looking to see what you need to tweak, add a wildcard here and additional terms here to get the results that you want.
But, you know with traditional TAR and other things over the years, you’re just relying on scores as opposed to getting an explanation of why the machine made the decision it made. Just like you would with a human, you can actually see the LLM’s reasoning.
If you had 19 people in a room, you could sit down with each of them and say, okay, why did you make the decision that you made on this document? Why did you code it this way? And then you can make that correction, give them that feedback, so that if they’re wrong, they know how to be right going forward.
And that’s very much how the LLM interaction is seen. It’s very process driven.”
– Excerpt from TCDI Talks Episode 2: Checking In: A Unique Approach to GenAI
Revisit AI Basics
We’ve got a secret. It’s never too late to ask. In fact, if you stop asking, you run the risk of falling behind.
This technology changes faster than your morning inbox, and the only way to stay ahead is to keep learning, keep questioning, and keep improving.
Create Better Legal Prompts
Sneak Peek Into the Blog
At the heart of it, success comes down to asking better questions. Each prompt is an opportunity to clarify intent, set boundaries, and invite GenAI to think alongside us. When we do this well, the output isn’t just more accurate; it’s more useful, more consistent, and easier to integrate into the workflows that matter.
With techniques like these, we’re building smarter partnerships with technology. Tools like GPT-5 will never replace the nuance, judgment, or creativity of the human process, but it can take on the heavy lifting of synthesis and structure, freeing us humans to focus on strategy, advocacy, and insight.
As you experiment with these prompting techniques, notice where they save you time, reduce rework, or spark new insights. Share these successes with your team and colleagues and with us in the Tech Lab . The more we compare notes and refine our collective approach, the more effective our partnerships with GenAI will become. Prompting is an emerging skill, and every thoughtful experiment by one of us, if shared, can help all of us move forward.
– Excerpt from Six Principles for Prompting: Lessons Learned from OpenAI’s Build Hour
Use GenAI for Faster Insights
SMART Data is a GenAI-powered processing workflow that takes complex, messy information and makes it more searchable by enhancing OCR, translation, summarization, and classification capabilities.
That means you can now capture text from handwritten notes, describe images (that’s new!), translate multilingual content, and organize information so it’s ready for search and review, all within a single workflow.
By applying intelligence at the point of processing, not during review, SMART Data gives legal teams insight at the earliest possible moment and sets a new standard for modern discovery.
Dare to Think Differently
As emerging technologies become more accepted, it seems like people are quick to shout “AI” for every problem. And then there is the one person who says something wild like “let’s understand our customer’s needs.”
That’s us!
At TCDI, we start with Lean Six Sigma basic principles. A problem is the difference between what is and what should be. You can’t close that gap by tossing technology at it and hoping for the best.
So, we listen first. We learn what our clients are up against, what they want to achieve, and what “should be” actually looks like for their matter. Yes, every matter. Then we work backwards. Sometimes the answer is GenAI. Sometimes it’s legacy AI. Sometimes it’s tried and true legal processes that have been successful for decades. And often, it’s a combination of these solutions.
That is process-driven AI. It’s practical, thoughtful, and built around real needs. And if taking that approach means we occasionally get chucked out of a window, we can live with that.
The ROI Realist
The TCDI Perspective
“Organizations may not have much appetite to incur any near-term spend, even if it is expected to pay back dividends in upcoming months and years. For many, this is the single greatest (and most legitimate) barrier to exploring anything that is not immediately self-funding.
This objection is best managed through organizational long-term planning. It is much easier to allocate dedicated budgets for innovation activities outside of a specific matter budget. This ensures that promising avenues that may have a dramatic long-term impact on legal department spend can be explored without always needing to be self-funded. Of course, this requires organizational alignment while also mandating that innovation projects be carefully designed to understand and closely track impacts on matter and long-term budgeting.
For those innovations that are tied to reducing risks and burdens, there still needs to be a concerted effort to measure results and provide feedback loops so that an organization can sustain innovation while meeting matter objectives.”
– Excerpt from Initiating Litigation Innovation: Getting from ‘No’ to ‘Go’
Andy Cosgrove
Chief Strategy Officer
How to Get the Most Out of AI While Controlling Spend
Why Most AI Pilots Fail (and Why Ours Don't)
Up to 95% of AI pilots don’t pay for themselves. For someone who cares about ROI, those aren’t great odds. The reasons are pretty predictable too: weak problem definition, poor data quality, lack of integration, and no metrics for success.
Here’s how we avoid those traps:
- Defined value upfront. Every project starts with clear goals, cost targets, and a simple way to measure progress.
- High-quality data. Our SMART data approach and OCR pipelines give models the reliable input they need.
- Holistic workflow design. AI becomes part of the process, not an afterthought and not the driving force.
- Security and governance. Every implementation aligns with client compliance and security standards.
- Continuous improvement. Each implementation informs the next so results keep getting better.
This combination of rigor and flexibility actually delivers ROI and keeps the risk from turning the whole thing into a cautionary tale.
– Insights from Caragh Landry, Chief Legal Process Officer
The Industry Agrees, AI is Here to Stay
It’s fair to say that for a while, the legal industry was in its we-have-GenAI-but-also-kind-of-don’t era. Everyone had a slide deck full of use cases, a committee or two, and maybe even a pilot project. But more recently, something’s shifting. The conversations are less about “what could AI do?” and more about “what is it already doing?” And if you’ve been listening closely, which we have, you can hear the industry saying the same thing:
“Adoption levels varied, but it was clear that AI usage is no longer a hypothetical discussion. A large portion of attendees indicated that they are already using AI in areas like deposition preparation, data analysis, and early case assessment. Adoption is slower for higher-risk tasks, such as privilege and responsiveness review, although that gap appears to be narrowing as confidence grows.”
– Highlight from Sedona Conference WG1 Annual Meeting 2025
“Across discussions on AI-powered entity extraction, DSAR automation, data breach response, and autonomous agents, one theme was unmistakable: AI’s role in the legal industry is expanding rapidly and shows no signs of slowing down.”
– Highlight from RelativityFest Chicago 2025
“Unlike previous years, AI seems to have moved beyond theoretical debates and experimental pilot programs to become an essential tool shaping the way law firms, corporations, and service providers operate. My key takeaway (professionally and personally): Those that fail to embrace AI run the risk of obsolescence, while those that do will continue to strive for excellence in their field.”
– Highlight from Legalweek 2025
The Legal Strategist
The TCDI Perspective
Anthony Klier
Chief Compliance Officer
“Just as with laws and standards, technology also changes, and there is often a strong push to be first to market with the latest and greatest deliverable. However, it is important to pause for a second to consider what this technology means in terms of regulatory compliance, data privacy, and protection, along with the company’s relationship with the community and ecosystem.
Is this technology a solution in search of a problem, or does it provide a clear and sustainable benefit? What are the risks, and can the technology be misused? Does it promote and respect the humanity of all? Each of these concerns, as well as a myriad of other questions, must be thought through in order to provide the services and protections required by our clients.”
– Excerpt from The Evolving Risk Landscape: Navigating with Purpose
Should You Use GenAI?
GenAI is Becoming a Core Pillar of Modern eDiscovery
“AI is now a core pillar of modern eDiscovery and Litigation Management because it tackles the scale, complexity, and speed demands that become increasingly challenging with traditional methods. Its value lies in turning massive, messy data into fast, defensible insight while reducing risk and effort.
We use GenAI to streamline and enhance processing, gain insights into data, elevate review, automate routine work, and free our teams to focus on higher-value analysis. It doesn’t replace expertise. it amplifies it. In a world where data keeps growing and changing, AI is how we stay faster, smarter, and more precise.”
– Insights from Dave York, Chief Client Officer
The Industry Agrees
How to Choose the Right Tech to Stay Ahead
I prefer to watch a video:
I prefer to read an article:
Implement AI Defensibly
Why Leverage Lean Six Sigma?
Why Process-Driven AI is THE Strategy
We don’t think of AI as something you buy once and brag about at conferences. It’s a lifecycle, and every engagement moves through a clear structure:
- Define the problem. We work closely with your team to understand what challenges you’re facing, why it matters, and what success should look like.
- Assess data readiness. Is it clean, complete, and compliant, or is it the digital equivalent of a junk drawer? Either way, we figure out what’s usable and what needs attention.
- Design a workflow. This is where AI earns its keep. We map out how it fits into your processes so it creates value you can measure.
- Pilot with purpose. No vague experiments. We run focused POCs with clear success metrics, so everyone knows what “good” looks like.
- Operationalize securely. When it works, we make it real. That often means deploying the solution inside secure client environments so everything stays protected and predictable.
- Measure and refine. AI isn’t a crockpot where you set it and forget it. It’s more like a risotto. It gets our constant attention as we monitor, learn, and continuously improve.
This framework, grounded in the Data Science Lifecycle and Lean Six Sigma principles, guides all of our AI engagements.
– Insights from Caragh Landry, Chief Legal Process Officer
AI-Assisted Review is Turning Heads
Manual review will always have a home in eDiscovery. Some matters are small, quirky, or nuanced enough that a good reviewer with a strong cup of coffee is still the best answer.
But when you are staring at thousands (or millions!) of documents and a deadline that feels like it is sprinting toward you, the idea of AI-assisted review starts to sound pretty good. It takes on the heavy lifting, the repetitive coding, the patterns no one wants to hunt for by hand. Meanwhile, reviewers get to focus on the decisions that actually matter. Everyone wins.
The real trick is knowing when to use it. There are times when setting up the prompts, tuning the model, and validating the outputs would take longer than the review itself. In those moments, AI is more overkill than an upgrade.
But when the conditions are right, AI-assisted review (with human QC of course) can make the whole process faster, more accurate, and a smoother lift for the team.
The Review Buyer
The TCDI Perspective
Caragh Landry
Chief Legal Process Officer
“Any time we’ve used AI in a project, it’s been better than not using AI.
We used to get asked questions about success stories with TAR too. When TAR first came out in 2010, when people started using it, they were afraid of it. They didn’t understand it. They didn’t get how it could help. And the response from me back then was, “Well, just give it a try. And if it doesn’t work, we’ll go back to humans.” The worst-case scenario is all human review.
It’s the same thing with AI. Every project that we use AI in, every time we implement a GenAI workflow, it’s better. And it’s better because the partnership that we’re able to create with the AI tools gives us faster insights. It gives us more information. It makes us better at what we’re doing. And the consistency, I mean, it’s amazing.
So, actual examples would be PII redaction. It’s a no-brainer. You know that consistency on PII redactions is so important. And these tools are always going to find the data. It’s not going to miss one. Take Social Security numbers, for example. A human could miss it. Technology is not going to miss it, because it’s a pattern that it is designed to find.
Same thing with data breach review. Again, it’s looking for personal information. That’s a great example, right? You often have 15, 20, 30 days to actually do the project and notify people that there’s been a breach. It’s really hard for humans to do. It is not hard for AI to do. So, those are two of our biggest success stories.”
– Excerpt from TCDI Talks Episode 12: Why Pairing People with GenAI Processes Matter
Get Smoother Reviews
Learn How AI (and TCDI) is Changing Document Review
See How We're Applying AI
How the Definition of AI Has Changed
In 2018, our Chief Legal Process Officer, Caragh Landry, pushed back on the term AI because it tried to describe too many things at once. Today she is still pushing back, but now because the definition has narrowed to only mean GenAI in most conversations.
The truth sits somewhere in between, with both GenAI and legacy tools like TAR playing meaningful roles in eDiscovery. These two blogs trace how the language has changed in six years while her opinion has remained wonderfully consistent.
Is Your AI Model Missing the Mark?
If you have ever wondered why an AI model can miss the mark in such a spectacular fashion, the answer is usually hiding in plain sight. It learns from us.
All of our assumptions, shortcuts, blind spots, and brilliant ideas get mixed together in a giant hodgepodge of thought and passed forward. Bias isn’t new, and AI is more than happy to amplify whatever it finds.
Inclusive Intelligence Matters
This is why inclusive intelligence matters. In legal workflows, AI performs best when it works alongside people who understand the stakes, the context, and the nuance behind every document set.
Our quality engineers guide each model through an iterative process that reflects real human judgment, not just patterns on a page. The more perspectives involved, the more balanced and reliable the results become.
Training Reviewers Matters
We also train our reviewers to recognize their own bias. The goal isn’t to erase subjectivity but to minimize variance and help reviewers become more aware of the patterns they bring to their work. When teams understand their own decision-making, the models they guide become more balanced and consistent.
Bias will always try to find a way in. By naming it and widening the circle of voices that shape our workflows, we can get ahead of it. That’s how eDiscovery becomes smarter, fairer, and just little more human.
The Humanist
The TCDI Perspective
Caragh Landry
Chief Legal Process Officer
“So, we think about process-driven AI workflows the same way we think about our normal processes. We use the technology where it can improve on speed and accuracy and consistency. But where humans still have the most input is when it comes to context and when it comes to direction and decision making.
So, if you think about a non-AI process for document review, you’ve got counsel making review guidelines that explain what it is that you’re looking for. You then have reviewers getting initial training and then going in and doing document review.
Well, reviewers are only going to be as good as they understand the protocol and the direction and the guidance to be. They need direction throughout the entire review process, right? That’s supervision of counsel. AI works the same way.
And these AI workflows that we’re talking about, the biggest impact is after you tell AI what you want it to do, going in and deciding, is it getting it right or does it need a push in this direction or that direction? What’s it not getting right? That’s all about context, and that’s legal decision making.
The computers, the machines, the AI, the LLMs, they’re going to only get it so right. They need that validation, that guidance, and that push from the humans, and that’s where I think we see that human-in-the-loop has the biggest role: after initial training, guiding it to the answers that you’re looking for.”
– Excerpt from TCDI Talks Episode 12: Why Pairing People with GenAI Processes Matter
Keep People at the Center of Legal Processes
Keep People at the Center of AI Development and Training
What You Need for Responsible AI Governance
“AI systems are only as fair, transparent, and ethical as the people who build and train them. That’s why inclusion needs to be a cornerstone of responsible AI governance. When diverse voices are part of the design process, they help identify bias, ask different questions, and anticipate how systems might behave in the real world.
At TCDI, we draw on decades of experience managing sensitive data and developing our own legal technology to guide how we approach AI. Our roots in privacy and eDiscovery have taught us that governance as a checklist is not sustainable. It must be a central part of our culture. Whether we’re developing internal tools or advising clients on implementing AI responsibly, we bring that same mindset of transparency, accountability, and inclusion.
This approach aligns naturally with emerging frameworks and regulations surrounding ethical AI usage. Frameworks such as the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and legislation such as the EU AI Act emphasize fairness, explainability, and human oversight. Luckily for us and our clients, those principles aren’t regulatory burdens. They’re reflections of the way we already work.”
– Excerpt from Inclusive Intelligence: The Human Side of AI in Legal
Learn What Being Inclusive Means at TCDI
AI in Action: Real World Benefits from our Chief Revenue Officer
ChatGPT has become an everyday sidekick for me, and it’s changed how I work and how I want our teams to think about working. I use it all day to sort through ideas, prepare for client conversations, summarize meetings, and prioritize my day. And a big part of our goal now is getting the relationship team to think about how to use it in their daily interactions with clients, not as a replacement for judgment, but as a tool that helps them show up more prepared, more thoughtful, and more efficient.
It’s been eye-opening how much it can do. I can pull up mutual clients in seconds, map out the structure of a legal team, understand their tools, workflows, and even the types of matters or investigations they handle. That kind of insight helps us save clients time and makes it clear we’ve done the homework. It’s also helped us tailor outreach, clarify next steps, and move the sales process forward faster, all while keeping LSS at the core of how we operate.
I’ve also been asking colleagues and friends in the legal industry how they’re using AI, and the responses are incredibly human. People talk about how it’s helped them feel less overwhelmed, more organized, and more confident walking into their day. For many, it’s taken away the stress of the blank page or the fear of missing something in a fast-moving matter. There’s a real emotional shift happening, giving a sense of relief, empowerment, and even excitement as they realize they don’t have to carry everything themselves. And I feel that too. It’s given me space to be more present with my team, more strategic with clients, and more connected to the parts of the work I love.
– Insights from Ginny Gonzalez, Chief Revenue Officer
It's Not Goodbye, It's See You Later
No matter what brought you here today, we hope you found a few insights you can take back to your team.
eDiscovery moves quickly. It helps to have a place where people, process, and technology come together in a way that makes the work feel a little more manageable and (hopefully) a little more interesting. And if it gave you something to smile about along the way, even better.
Don’t be a stranger now, you hear?
Come back whenever you need a fresh perspective. We’ll be here with new insights, real results, and just enough personality to make the learning worth the scroll.
