New legal support firm pitches artificial intelligence to review documents

A new legal services company has developed an artificial intelligence program to support lawyers during time-consuming and costly research.

iNof8 Legal is a project of attorneys Dameon Allensworth and Kyle Sweet. They said trends show legal departments are scaling back in size and budget, but not in workload. That could mean spending hundreds of hours poring over documents to comply with a discovery request or going line-by-line through contracts to make sure they include all the necessary language.

Allensworth said law firms can turn to basic technologies for routine work like spreadsheets, or outsource the work to teams of young lawyers, which is still expensive.

One of the technologies used by iNof8 Legal, however, is electronic discovery software powered by continuous active learning. Based on a set of parameters consistently weighted by an algorithm, the program can take hundreds of thousands of documents and identify ones that are most responsive to a request.

The program goes way beyond a simple word search.

"It doesn't take very long for the algorithm to then start predicting," Allensworth said. "It's identifying all those things that you and I might take a bunch of guesses on to try to get to the most relevant documents."

This kind of technology is already well-established and accepted in federal and state courts. Confidence in the technology is high, especially considering the alternative, Sweet said.

"Computers don't have a bad day. The computer didn't stay up too late watching Monday Night Football. The computer doesn't have a moment where they're thinking about the other 400 cases that they have," he said. "The good thing about anything wrapped in AI is you can test it, measure it."

Allensworth has more than a decade of experience in legal technology at major firms that pioneered the use of AI in legal work. When he moved back to Oklahoma the business partnership began, especially after Sweet realized no other company in the state was providing this level of electronic discovery services.

"There are some companies that do a little bit of stuff with software. They do a little bit of forensics, but they actually don't do the discovery where it's being run from here," Sweet said. "It's a mature marketplace for e-discovery, meaning there's a lot of companies that are using it, but they're using it from other places."

Along with e-discovery, iNof8 Legal also offers legal operations consulting, a contract management system and outsourced contract reviews.