DISCO turned 11 years old in 2024, and our pre-teen year saw us continue to drive the evolution of the legal profession through innovative legal software and services.
From introducing groundbreaking Cecilia AI legal tech to embracing cultural evolution under new leadership, here is DISCO’s 2024 year in review.
🧠 Introducing Cecilia Auto Review, doc summaries, and deposition summaries
In 2023, DISCO first debuted our Cecilia AI suite, powered by generative AI (GenAI). 2024 saw the expansion of Cecilia’s capabilities as we continued to push the boundaries of what’s possible in legal technology.
Meet our new Cecilia skills and features:
🔎 Complete large-scale document reviews up to 36 times faster with Cecilia Auto Review: Provide tag descriptions for your large document review — just like you would do with human reviewers — and Cecilia tags documents, with explanations for each and every decision.
📄 Summarize lengthy, complex documents (plus foreign language docs) with a single click using Cecilia doc summaries: Summarize long or important documents on demand right in DISCO Ediscovery. Summaries appear in the document viewer right next to the document text, alongside other powerful tools like translations and annotations.
✍️Get the context 75% faster with Cecilia deposition summaries: Parse through witness testimony quickly by uploading a deposition transcript and receiving a chronological or key-topic summary in minutes, with links and citations included.
Cecilia delivers greater speed and accuracy, empowering legal teams to achieve better outcomes for their clients. In a world where precision and speed are paramount, Cecilia has become a partner in crime (pun intended) for modern legal professionals.
Learn more about our Cecilia AI legal tools.
📚 DISCO’s top 2024 resources: From polls to ebooks
2024 was a year of learning and transformation for the legal profession, as practitioners explored and refined ways to implement AI safely and effectively. DISCO was there to help.
From industry surveys and insights to ebooks and webinars, here’s a “who’s who” of our can’t-miss educational pieces:
⚖️ Generative AI for Litigation: What You Really Need to Know
A straightforward guide to using GenAI for investigation, document review, drafting, and billing – empowering you to improve outcomes and strengthen your firm’s competitive edge.
💼 Generative AI for Corporate Legal Departments: What You Really Need to Know
A guide exploring the risks, benefits, use cases, and best practices for using GenAI to level up your operations responsibly and compliantly.
🎬 Webinar: Get Comfortable Defending AI Methodologies
This webinar demystifies AI, providing an accessible overview of how to defend the use of AI in legal practice, bridge the gap between technological innovation and legal expertise, and communicate the benefits of AI to your clients.
📊 Generative AI and the Legal Profession: 2024 Report (download)
A snapshot of the legal industry in 2024, providing insight into legal practitioners’ thoughts on the speed of AI adoption, which areas of legal work they think will be automated first, and how the role of the human lawyer is going to change.
📚 How to Use Generative AI for Document Review (download)
A comprehensive ebook covering the introduction of GenAI into document review, including how to write tag descriptions for large language models (LLMs) in document review, how LLMs differ from human brains, and what to expect when using GenAI for doc review.
Together, these resources provided a roadmap for legal professionals to navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape in 2024 with confidence, ensuring they remain at the forefront of innovation while driving better outcomes for their firms and clients.
🇬🇧Cecilia hops the pond: Launching DISCO AI in the EU and UK
2024 marked a major milestone for DISCO as we expanded Cecilia’s reach beyond North America. With the launch of Cecilia AI in the European Union and the United Kingdom, we brought our cutting-edge technology to new markets, enabling legal teams abroad to experience the power of Cecilia.
DISCO was the first to bring a suite of market-tested GenAI legal solutions to the region, offering sophisticated, intuitive tools to address today’s largest legal challenges.
DISCO Chief Product Officer Richard Crum shared, “This is an important milestone for DISCO, and we’ve been encouraged by the feedback from early adopters in this market who confirm what we’ve already seen in the United States: Cecilia’s GenAI tools are fast, accurate and trusted.”
We’re confident Cecilia will become every legal professional’s favorite – or should we say, favourite? No matter how you spell it, great legal tech is universal!
🌎 From Chicago to London: Thought leadership around the world
This year, DISCO’s leadership and experts made waves on the global stage, participating in major industry conferences like CLOC, Legal Geek, and more, plus hosting our own workshops.
A few highlights:
Thought leadership and Cecilia Auto Review at ILTACON
In addition to hosting speaking sessions on AI and legal tech, DISCO gave the world its first look at Cecilia Auto Review at ILTA.
Workshops on the practical applications of AI
We gathered industry leaders in London and New York for impactful discussions on how AI is transforming workflows for general counsel and law firms, including hands-on prompt engineering workshops to show how AI can drive productivity and shape the future of legal practice.
Next-Gen Litigation and Discovery Workshop
This workshop offered a unique opportunity to engage in peer discussions with colleagues from law firms and corporate legal departments. The half-day event featured a panel discussion and workshop, focused on paralegals’ and lit support professionals’ career development and navigating the future of GenAI, and provided attendees with resources for driving conversations about AI within their organizations.
Feeling the FOMO? Don’t worry – in 2025 we’re excited to keep the momentum going by bringing industry professionals together for more of these essential conversations.
Stay connected by following us on LinkedIn and checking our events and webinars page for updates on our upcoming gatherings.
🌟New executive leadership driving DISCO forward
2024 was also a year of transformation at the internal level. Under the guidance of new members to our executive team, DISCO embraced a fresh cultural and strategic vision that positions us for long-term growth. In 2025, we’re continuing to prioritize agility, customer-centric innovation, and a commitment to fostering an inclusive and collaborative workplace culture.
Elevating customer and people leadership
To kick off 2024, DISCO announced C-suite elevations for key customer and people-focused roles, appointing Melanie Antoon as DISCO’s first Chief Customer Officer and Karen Herckis as Chief Human Resources Officer.
In her role, Melanie Antoon is responsible for all functions of Customer Experience, driving customer satisfaction and retention, and developing strategies to deepen our relationships with existing clients and attract new ones. She first joined DISCO as our VP, Professional Services in November 2019 before becoming our SVP, Professional Services in January 2021. Prior to this, Antoon held roles as the SVP of U.S Operations at Inventus, LLC, Director of Hosting at Huron Consulting, and VP of Client Services at Catalyst.
After joining DISCO in January 2022 as a Human Resources Business Officer, Karen Herckis now oversees all People-related functions including HR business partnership, talent acquisition, HR operations, compensation and benefits, and learning and development. Before joining DISCO, Herckis was Vice President, HR at event management software company Aventri (now Stova). Prior to that, Herckis spent several years at Epiq, where she held a variety of HRBP leadership roles after making a career pivot from Marketing and Communications.
Welcoming a new CEO
In April 2024, following an extensive global search, DISCO announced the appointment of Eric Friedrichsen as the company’s new Chief Executive Officer. As CEO of DISCO, Eric drives the overall strategic direction of the organization, including new market growth, product direction, operational execution, and healthy culture.
Friedrichsen has over 30 years of experience driving growth for software companies. Prior to DISCO, he was CEO and Board Director for Emburse, a leader in expense management software. Prior to Emburse, Friedrichsen held a variety of executive and leadership positions in general management, sales, services, and technology at Adobe, SAP, Concur, and Business Objects.
Innovating with a new CPO
July saw the arrival of Richard Crum as DISCO’s new Chief Product Officer, where he oversees the company’s global product vision with a focus on innovation and customer-centric solutions, as well as DISCO’s engineering teams. Crum has his extensive background in technology and B2B SaaS, and previously led product strategy at Emburse, where he managed solutions for nearly 20,000 companies — many of which were law firms.
Driving efficiency with a new COO
In September, Joe Jacobson joined DISCO as Senior Vice President of Operations as we continued to expand our portfolio of legal tech solutions. Jacobson oversees all aspects of the global operations teams, with a focus on DISCO's go-to-market strategy and effectiveness and efficiency driving demand, growing revenue and retaining customers. Jacobson has extensive strategy, operations and go-to-market experience growing B2B SaaS organizations. Before joining DISCO, he held senior leadership positions at Brex and SAP Concur, and has a proven, decades-long track record of success within revenue strategy, operations and business transformation.
Leading legal and compliance efforts
Susan Garcia joined the DISCO team as General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer in October 2024, where she leads all aspects of the DISCO’s legal and compliance efforts to ensure the company operates with the highest standards for privacy, risk management, and corporate governance. Prior to joining DISCO, Garcia served as General Counsel at WebMD and has also served in senior legal roles in legal technology and media at Thomson Reuters and NBC Universal. She holds a B.A. in government and international relations from Cornell University and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.
Championing global sales growth
Most recently, Lauren Caruso, an industry veteran and senior sales leader, returned to DISCO to as Chief Sales Officer, where she is responsible for all aspects of DISCO’s global sales efforts to help further drive adoption of our suite of ediscovery and advanced GenAI solutions among leading law firms and corporations.
This is Caruso’s second stretch with DISCO, having previously served as Vice President of North American Sales. She has also served in senior sales leadership positions at Second Nature and Tractable and began her career at Am Law 50 firms Milbank, LLP and Skadden Arps.
As DISCO enters its second decade, our leadership team remains committed to driving innovation while staying true to our core mission: transforming the practice of law through technology.
Conclusion
2024 was a year of incredible growth, innovation, and transformation for DISCO. From the evolution of Cecilia AI to our expansion into new markets, we continued to push boundaries and redefine what’s possible in legal technology.
With a renewed focus on leadership, global reach, and knowledge-sharing, we are excited to step into 2025 ready to empower legal teams around the world to achieve more than ever before.
Ready to kickstart your New Year’s resolutions? Schedule a demo to discover how DISCO can save you time — giving you the freedom to finally learn that new language, train for that marathon, or take the vacation you’ve been dreaming of.
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