Boosting Litigation Success: Enhancing Legal Expertise with AI

Whether you've tried five, ten or a hundred cases, generative AI tools for litigation can make your job easier, faster, and yield rich insights for the next trial you've got coming up. It might even help you settle it, and you can take some time off! 

Let's dive in and look at how AI is revolutionizing trial preparation and enhancing legal expertise.

Understanding Generative AI in Legal Contexts

Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence that can create new content, insights, or predictions in response to questions or instructions. It is powered by large language models (LLMs) that rapidly process requests. If you haven’t tried them, you should!  We recommend checking out ChatGPT or Claude to experience just how powerful they are. (For reasons explained in our post about the legal ethics of using these services, we urge caution in using these services for client work.)

Practical Applications of Generative AI in Litigation

In the context of trial preparation, this technology can be used to analyze witness testimony, conduct legal research, check citations, and more. By analyzing vast amounts of information quickly and accurately, generative AI helps trial teams uncover critical insights and make informed decisions.

These tools offer a level of speed and accuracy that surpasses human capabilities, making them invaluable assets during the intense preparation phase before a trial. For example, AI can highlight inconsistencies in witness statements or find precedents that support your case strategy.

The pretrial workflow of litigation generally follows a consistent process: complaint, answer (or motion to dismiss), written discovery, depositions, pretrial motions, hearings, court-ordered mediation, exhibit creation, witness preparation, jury research, and finally . . . trial!  Anyone who has ever tried a case knows how much work is involved and the huge amount of time it takes.

While generative AI assistants cannot attend hearings, negotiate with the mediator, or argue the case to the jury, they can do an awful lot, and excel at legal work that requires searching, reviewing, summarizing. AI tools can assist with tasks such as sifting through medical and discovery documents, identifying key evidence, developing deposition outlines, and drafting pleadings. Imagine tasks that used to take hours being completed in minutes – that is the promise of generative AI.

This post offers some ideas and tools to consider in two areas that involve a lot of pretrial work: document review and depositions.

Challenges of Document Review During Discovery

During the discovery process, litigation professionals commonly face the daunting task of reviewing thousands of documents to identify relevant information and evidence, as well as information that may be protected from disclosure due to privilege. This task can be extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive, often requiring teams of lawyers and paralegals to manually sift through the data, under deadlines set by discovery rules. The sheer volume of documents can lead to missed details, inconsistencies, and a lack of comprehensive understanding of the case. The stakes are high because a failure in producing documents can lead to court-ordered sanctions. 

AI available in e-discovery platforms solve these challenges by quickly sorting through large datasets, flagging crucial pieces of evidence, and ensuring that no important detail is overlooked. This is done with carefully crafted searches and instructions to the AI system on what to search for and find.

A Real-World Example: Massive Document Review

Our company founder led a team defending  a complex multi-party commercial case involving over two hundred thousand documents. The AI in their e-discovery platform quickly narrowed the documents that needed human review with automated labeling. It also flagged documents for privilege issues, allowing for careful review to determine whether to assert a claim of privilege. Finally, it did a capable job of identifying which documents to cover with nearly 50 witnesses in each of their depositions. In the end, less than 400 documents were used in the depositions and about 250 were listed as trial exhibits.

For readers who have never used an e-discovery platform, the challenge is selecting the right one.  There are dozens of e-discovery providers, and each has their strengths. To get started, you may want to check out Everlaw, KLDiscovery and Logickull (acquired by Reveal).

Enhancing the Deposition Process with Generative AI

Once documents are produced, cases generally move to the oral discovery phase of witness depositions. This process customarily begins with fact witnesses and corporate representatives, then eventually expert witnesses retained by the parties. It is useful to break it down into phases.

Drafting Witness Outlines

Generative AI can assist in drafting witness outlines by analyzing case information, such as medical records and expert witness reports. By pulling relevant data points and highlighting critical issues, AI helps legal professionals create detailed and effective witness outlines that are well-informed and comprehensive. Tools like CoCounsel can assist in drafting witness outlines based on a few case specifics.

Preparing Witnesses for Deposition

Preparing witnesses for deposition can be a time-consuming process. AI can streamline this by generating potential questions based on case details, previous depositions, and key issues. This allows lawyers to conduct thorough preparation sessions, ensuring witnesses are ready to provide clear and consistent testimony. 

A quick way to get started is by using a deposition transcript from a similar case, preferably one taken by the same opposing counsel. Upload it to your preferred generative AI service, and tell it to strip out all the answers, providing a list of just the questions.  You can then modify them to fit the facts of the case at hand and use it when preparing the witness for what to expect.  One cautionary note: if the generative AI service will retain or use your data for training, to comply with ethical requirements you should obtain informed consent from your prior clients before uploading depositions from those cases.

Conducting Depositions: The Modern Court Reporter

The days of lugging around documents to be used as exhibits during a deposition are fading as modern court reporting services offer exhibit hosting services. Being able to access exhibits and mark them up on screen is far more efficient than managing paper copies for everyone.

Transcribing depositions accurately and quickly is also important. AI-powered transcription services like Remote Legal provide real-time transcription with high accuracy rates. It includes features like keyword search and timestamping, making it easier to navigate and reference specific parts of the deposition while it is underway.

One handy feature provided by Remote Legal is the ability to flag the real-time transcript during the deposition. Instead of asking the court reporter to look up an exchange during a break, counsel can easily find it to ensure the answer was satisfactory, if it needs clarification, or for later use in the case. 

Summarizing Deposition Testimony

After a deposition, generative AI can be used to summarize the testimony, extracting key points and creating concise summaries. This capability saves significant time and ensures that the most important information is readily accessible for case strategy development, motions practice, mediation, and trial preparation. esumry offers AI-powered tools that can quickly summarize deposition transcripts, highlight critical information, and generate page-line digests.

Identifying Inconsistencies in Testimony

AI's analytical capabilities extend to identifying inconsistencies in witness testimony. By comparing deposition testimony to other evidence and prior testimonies, AI can highlight discrepancies and suggest areas for further questioning or investigation. This helps legal professionals build stronger cases by addressing and exploiting these inconsistencies. LexLink provides an AI solution that can detect inconsistencies and anomalies in large sets of legal documents, including depositions.

Teaching Less Experienced Lawyers

Admittedly, using generative AI to teach less experienced lawyers how to take or defend depositions is just a pipedream (for now). So far, firms are only focused on training younger attorneys how to use generative AI tools. However, by providing examples of effective deposition techniques and common pitfalls, AI should be able to help new lawyers learn how to take and defend depositions more effectively. 

Conclusion

As the legal industry continues to evolve, the integration of AI into trial preparation will become increasingly essential. The benefits of AI—especially enhancing the trial lawyer’s ability to be more strategic and efficient—are clear. Litigators who embrace AI as a valuable partner will be better positioned to achieve litigation success and provide superior service to their clients. Now is the time to explore AI solutions and harness their potential to enhance legal expertise.

esumry is ready to help your firm meet the growing demands of the modern litigation landscape. 

Try It Out!

We invite you to see firsthand how AI and automation can revolutionize your deposition analysis.

Get a 14-day free trial of esumry today and start transforming your litigation practice for the future.