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AUSTIN, Texas — DISCO (NYSE: LAW), a leader in AI-enabled legal technology, announced the upcoming release of DISCO Cecilia, an AI chatbot that is designed to allow lawyers to find their evidence faster and more easily. DISCO has long focused on bringing technological advances in artificial intelligence and cloud computing to bear on legal problems. Now, DISCO intends to take the latest advances in large language models and generative AI, making them accessible to lawyers through DISCO Cecilia. DISCO expects Cecilia to be commercially available in 2023, following a planned phased introduction to DISCO customers.
DISCO Cecilia is designed to allow lawyers to ask questions and receive answers with specific citations to supporting evidence in large-scale, private DISCO Ediscovery databases. Unlike chatbots that answer based on only public data sources or the Internet, DISCO Cecilia is designed to cite evidence drawn from the user’s private documents in DISCO Ediscovery. These private DISCO Ediscovery databases can contain millions or tens of millions of documents.
DISCO will demonstrate DISCO Cecilia this week and accept waitlist registrations online and at Legalweek New York 2023 for interested customers. To schedule a demo and sign up for further release updates, visit csdisco.com/discovery/cecilia.
"Our firm has increasingly looked to integrate new technologies that can increase efficiencies and enhance the likelihood of success in legal matters," said Anna Berman, a partner at Kutak Rock. "In today's environment, customers expect efficiency and it has now become imperative for lawyers to advocate for strategies that foster innovation and unlock new value for clients. The idea of using DISCO's generative AI tool as a way of responding to complex legal questions in plain English is very exciting, and we're eager to test it out."
Many traditional approaches to ediscovery involve asking a question about the evidence, crafting searches to identify documents related to that question, reviewing the documents to find evidence, and then answering the question based on the evidence. For example, a lawyer investigating a surge in electricity prices might ask the question “how was energy company X involved in the rising prices?” and then craft searches to find documents and communications related to the relevant energy market issues. Then the lawyer reviews those documents and applies external knowledge to determine whether they constitute evidence of market manipulation, and forms a view of the answer to the question with citations to supporting evidence.
DISCO Cecilia is designed so that a lawyer can simply ask the ultimate question and get an AI-generated direct answer, with citations to supporting evidence, without the steps of crafting a search and reviewing documents. These answers could then be the starting point for further exploration and document review in DISCO Ediscovery or testimony review in DISCO Case Builder.
“As a law firm for some of the world’s most innovative companies, we are constantly looking for ways to leverage artificial intelligence in everything we do,” said Geoffrey Vance, a Perkins Coie partner and firmwide Chair of its E-Discovery Services & Strategy practice group. “The idea of using generative AI in all of my cases, combined with the news that DISCO has integrated generative AI into its e-discovery platform, is incredibly exciting. This could be game-changing technology with the potential to drastically improve the way we advocate for our clients.”
“With DISCO Cecilia, we believe that lawyers will be able to treat a DISCO Ediscovery database like a witness who has read every document and always tries to tell the truth by citing documents for every answer. We expect that question-and-answer workflows, like those enabled by DISCO Cecilia, will be a powerful addition to the traditional search-and-review workflows enabled by existing DISCO products,” said Kiwi Camara, DISCO’s Chief Executive Officer. “DISCO’s mission is to combine world-class engineering with a deep love and respect for the law to build products that make the law better. We are delighted to do this again in the space of natural language processing, generative AI, and advanced search technologies resulting in an amazing DISCO chatbot for legal.”