Can an agent replace Everlaw?
Cloud ediscovery: ingest evidence, process and search it, review for privilege, produce to the other side.
No. Discovery has to be defensible: chain of custody, documented processing, productions a court accepts. That stays on a platform built for it. What collapses is the review labour inside, where agents now do the first pass a contract-attorney army used to.
- Indicative spend
- €1500/mo
- What it actually costs
- priced per case and per GB hosted; varies wildly with matter size
- Verdict
- The agent does the work inside it. The tool stays because that is where the data lives.
What the agent takes over
Every job this product exists to perform, with our verdict on each. Follow one through for the step-by-step breakdown.
- Document processingYes. Reading, classifying, extracting, filing and acting on documents is one of the strongest agent capabilities. It handles the messy real-world paperwork that defeated a decade of OCR products.YES
- Legal researchHalf. An agent searches, summarises and organises legal material quickly, which is most of a junior lawyer’s week. It also invents citations that do not exist, and courts have sanctioned lawyers for filing them.HALF
- Data analysisMostly. An agent cleans, queries, models and visualises quickly and competently. The risk is not that it computes wrongly — it is that it answers the question you asked rather than the one you meant.MOSTLY
Why it survives
Legal defensibility. Opposing counsel will attack your process, and a court-recognised platform is part of the defence.
What you would still need it for
- Defensible processing and chain of custody
- Productions in the formats courts and opposing counsel demand
What replaces it
- Agent-assisted first-pass review inside the platform
- Far fewer contract reviewer hours
The brief
What you would tell an agent to take over from Everlaw, assembled from the jobs above.
I want to cut the work inside Everlaw. It currently does: Cloud ediscovery: ingest evidence, process and search it, review for privilege, produce to the other side. Take over this work: - Document processing — YES. Yes. Reading, classifying, extracting, filing and acting on documents is one of the strongest agent capabilities. It handles the messy real-world paperwork that defeated a decade of OCR products. - Legal research — HALF. Half. An agent searches, summarises and organises legal material quickly, which is most of a junior lawyer’s week. It also invents citations that do not exist, and courts have sanctioned lawyers for filing them. - Data analysis — MOSTLY. Mostly. An agent cleans, queries, models and visualises quickly and competently. The risk is not that it computes wrongly — it is that it answers the question you asked rather than the one you meant. Do not take over: - Defensible processing and chain of custody - Productions in the formats courts and opposing counsel demand These stay with me across all of it: - Legal interpretation - Approving anything with a cost - Deciding retention and deletion - Advice - Every citation check - Anything filed with a court - Professional judgement and privilege - Framing the question - Knowing the data’s history - Deciding what to do about the answer Before we start, tell me: which of these you cannot do with the access I can actually give you, and what would break if this ran unattended for a month. — brief built at cananagentdo.com/everlaw
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Keep the tool, cut the hours
Everlaw is not the line item worth attacking. The money is in the people-hours spent working inside it, and that is what an agent takes over — with Everlaw still holding the data.
Put an agent on it