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Earlier today we announced a huge step forward in AI-led ediscovery with the industry’s first enterprise-grade agentic solution for fact investigation and document review. We sat down with CEO Eric Friedrichsen and Chief Product, Technology, and Strategy Officer Richard Crum to talk about the news.
DISCO: Let’s start at the beginning. What exactly did you announce today?
Eric: It’s very exciting. We announced a powerful new agentic enhancement to our Cecilia Q&A ediscovery tool. It’s a deep-thinking, autonomous, multi-step reasoning agent that assembles the broad facts of a matter and then goes deeper to draw out connections and relationships across even massive evidence sets. It helps customers move quickly from the “what” of a matter to the “why.” And, it’s purpose built for ediscovery. It’s much more than an AI assistant; it’s like adding a senior investigator to your team.
DISCO: What problem did you set out to solve with this new tool?
Richard: Generative AI fact investigation solutions do a great job of quickly surfacing the basic facts of a matter, but that’s where they stop. Our agentic Q&A takes things one step further. It surfaces a comprehensive look at your facts, what they mean in the context of the larger matter, and how they're connected. All of this is increasingly difficult as matters become larger and more complex.
We set out to solve this scale problem. In high-stakes litigation, the truth isn't usually found in one file; it’s buried across millions of documents. We built this new agentic AI to be a “deep-thinking” reasoning engine that’s purpose-built for these complex, large-scale environments.
Instead of just looking at documents in isolation, Cecilia analyzes the entire database to answer the toughest questions and provide a next-level analysis of the facts. And it provides this view without a significant active time investment from the user.
DISCO customers now get the best of both worlds: a lightning-fast overview of the key facts at hand and a deep analysis of what’s most critical and why, depending on what they need at that moment.
DISCO: It seems like there’s a new AI announcement every week – Anthropic made news with a legal plug-in for Claude Cowork; Harvey is in the news often – how is DISCO different?
Eric: This is really apples and oranges. DISCO's platform is fundamentally different in three ways: it’s purpose built for the rigors of high-stakes litigation, it's scaled, and it's secure. These are durable competitive advantages requiring significant expertise and investment and where we continue to focus to extend our differentiation.
Ediscovery requires hosting millions of documents – and terabytes of data – collected from enterprise systems and securely enabling complex workflows to review those documents in a specific manner to produce the relevant material to opposing counsel and narrow down the population from millions to the few dozen that will help you win your case. Our platform is designed from the ground up to solve these complex challenges.
Our advantage is the entire system we’ve built: security, proprietary data architecture, defensible audit trails and compliance capabilities that law firms require to avoid malpractice issues. AI is not accountable in a legal process; lawyers are. DISCO ensures that lawyers have what they need to be highly effective and defensible.
Claude Cowork’s capabilities are tuned for general legal tasks, but it doesn't propose to replicate DISCO’s secure, legal infrastructure. Harvey, similarly, is primarily focused on aspects of legal work outside of ediscovery. Neither is built for DISCO’s level of scale and the rigor of litigation discovery. Ediscovery isn’t niche, but it is specialized. It requires real expertise and the technology to match. Attempting to force a generalist tool into this workflow introduces risk and complexity. In high-stakes litigation, firms choose the purpose-built tool because it is the one that ensures accountability.
Richard: It is critical to distinguish between “reviewing” a document and conducting a "legally mandated document review" in the context of scaled, defensible ediscovery. Claude and Harvey both list “doc review” as a capability, but those deployments are very different. A general AI tool like Claude Cowork can handle discrete, task-oriented work like looking at a document, or even dozens of them. It can review a contract, flag risks, it can help draft a legal memo. That is solving for productivity.
DISCO is built for a very different structural reality and solves for process. Our clients in high-stakes litigation aren’t looking at a handful of documents, they are dealing with hundreds of thousands, often millions of emails, chats, presentations, files and videos. The challenge there is scale and workflow, not reading and understanding a single document.
DISCO’s AI is deeply integrated into databases designed to cross-reference millions of data points simultaneously. We are identifying context and connection across an ocean of evidence to bring the truth to the surface.
The next challenge is orchestrating that understanding across teams. Document review is a process involving many stakeholders. General counsels, associates, paralegals, service providers are all involved. Our platform enforces strict privilege protocols, manages data accessibility, everything is logged and traceable. Our platform ensures that a team of 50 people act as one legal mind, when reviewing a million documents and needing to produce it to the counterparty.
DISCO’s Ediscovery platform is the AI engine driving the entire litigation workflow, not a tool for a single task.
DISCO: The Anthropic announcement was notable because it’s the first time one of the platform players released a legal-specific solution. What do you think that means for Legal Tech going forward – and for DISCO specifically?
Eric: I think the Anthropic announcement shows the fast-growing acceptance of AI across legal tech and validates it as one of the highest-value verticals in AI, which is great for DISCO as one of the premier, scaled providers of AI solutions in the space. It’s just one more example that the dam holding back AI adoption in the legal field is cracking, and we expect to be among the beneficiaries of the shift as AI use becomes the rule rather than the exception. We see Anthropic and OpenAI as providers of raw technology, while vertical solutions, like DISCO, supply the context, security, and workflow specificity.
Richard: As more customers jump into using AI for legal work, it’s going to be even more important to demonstrate the unique value your products add. “AI for AI’s sake” and tools that are really just LLM wrappers won’t cut it. You’ll need to show that you’re solving an actual problem and delivering tangible results by saving time or money or through measurably better outcomes. And we believe our mature, already-scaled product suite is incredibly well positioned to capitalize on this market shift.
Barriers to accessing AI are dropping while expectations for applying it safely and responsibly are increasing, especially in high-stakes litigation. We are the bridge that makes these powerful general models safe and effective for the courtroom.
DISCO: How does this new agentic capability pair with your other AI capabilities?
Richard: This is the very exciting part. The real benefit is in the combination of Cecilia with Auto Review. Litigation isn’t a linear, black and white process. It is more of a constant loop of discovery and execution.
There are moments where a lawyer needs to be “in the data”, hunting for that smoking gun document or confirming specific details of the case. This is where Cecilia Q&A shines. With these new agentic capabilities, the AI acts as an independent partner, able to perform complex analysis and in-depth discovery across your entire case.
Finding the key documents and patterns is only step one. The next step is applying that logic to millions of documents. That is where Auto Review steps in. That same database might have hundreds of thousands of documents that need to be reviewed and understood. Using information that Cecilia has helped you uncover, you can prepare the equivalent of a review protocol faster and with more precision than in the course of a traditional review. You validate, press “start” and in a matter of hours the entire data set is thoroughly reviewed, categorized, and tagged, fully compliant with court required procedure and with superior precision and recall metrics.
Eric: Exactly. We are giving lawyers multiple integrated ways to use AI, depending on the goal and need at that moment. Cecilia can help you interrogate the data, find relationships, and find key documents. Auto Review can help you execute at scale. In one swoop, conduct a legal review in the fraction of the time and with greater accuracy than with legacy methods.
The legal profession is going through a transformation, and we are the disruptor leading the charge in ediscovery. We believe that in the long term this will be great for the industry. You need both, “general AI” and “specialized AI” working together.
Corporations will have faster and better outcomes, for a lower cost. Lawyers will be able to service their clients at an unprecedented level of quality, without needing an army of external resources. The legal professional will continue to thrive, will be more efficient and more effective, leveraging their legal expertise on top of the AI support. I am very proud of our role here, we are helping our clients adapt to the new capabilities coming their way.
Eric Friedrichsen
Chief Executive Officer
DISCO
Richard Crum
Chief Product, Technology and Strategy Officer
DISCO
Forward-Looking Statements
This post contains forward-looking statements, including, among other things, statements regarding the capabilities and benefits of DISCO’s agentic AI tool and trends in the legal tech industry, including with respect to developments in AI technologies.
Words such as “may,” “should,” “will,” “believe,” “expect,” “anticipate,” “target,” “continue,” “potential,” “build,” “extend” and similar phrases that denote future expectation or intent regarding DISCO’s business are intended to identify forward-looking statements. You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events.
The forward-looking statements contained in this post are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties, and factors, including those more fully described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), including our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended September 30, 2025, filed with the SEC on November 5, 2025. Further information on potential risks that could affect actual results will be included in the subsequent periodic and current reports and other filings that we make with the SEC from time to time.
Forward-looking statements represent DISCO’s management’s beliefs and assumptions only as of the date such statements are made. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this post to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this post or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law.
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