In a move extending generative AI’s global reach in the legal industry, DISCO announced the launch of its Cecilia AI Platform across the European Union and the UK. Note how we said, “European Union and the UK” as opposed to just “European Union” there? The UK blew up its whole economy just so we have to append its name separately! Brilliant trade-off.
Alas, Cecilia AI promises to streamline the data-heavy lift of modern document review and ediscovery, aiming to turn days and weeks of discovery work into hours.
Getting AI into the hands of the European market requires navigating Europe’s complex regulatory environment. The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act erected a framework to address the risks and ethical concerns posed by AI, introducing stringent requirements on transparency, accountability, and the ability to explain AI decisions. Satisfying Europe’s call for visibility in AI decision making involves a little extra work than in the U.S., but in addition to the products launched this week, DISCO expects to have more generative AI tools in that market in 2025.
With this launch, DISCO introduces Cecilia Q&A to the European market. This AI fact expert is fully integrated within a user’s DISCO Ediscovery database. Lawyers can interrogate their document sets directly, receiving quick, citation-backed answers that highlight key documents swimming within the terabytes of data. It’s a tool designed to put eyes on the most important documents quickly and efficiently. Or, if the attorney wants, there’s a single-document version of Q&A that limits the interrogation to one item. All of which is done without sourcing source information from online, with answers limited to the information within a customer’s specific database.
Basically keeping AI from hallucinating by cutting off access to the internet shrooms.
And the document summary function creates the reader’s digest version of lengthy, complex or important documents to speed up the all-too-familiar process of slogging through a long document only to realize it’s totally irrelevant.
Which gets back to the theme I took away from my ILTACON meeting with DISCO — generative AI’s most powerful application might just be its appeal as an interface. Legal tech has had the power to deliver a lot of these insights for a while. Providing material relevant to a query or generating a ‘Key Word In Context’ style summary existed before. But now, AI’s ability to offer a natural, conversational interface — delivering coherent, easily reviewed results — makes a difference.
But something about generative AI products have proven more accessible to the lawyerly mind. Personally, I think it’s the iterative nature of the interface. Prior technology could only answer the most recent query and left it to the user to figure out if their prompt delivered the right result. Hunting and pecking but with inquiries. Generative AI learns from its interactions with the user mimicking the back-and-forth between a partner and associate and improving the results incrementally. This dynamic interface feels more intuitive to lawyers, who are used to a process of refining insights through dialogue.
And occasionally yelling.
Whatever it is, studies reveal that these AI tools have brought many senior attorneys to technology for the first time when they would historically farm that work out to juniors or outside providers. It will be interesting to see if the European and UK contingent follow their American counterparts in embracing this tech.
Because technology is only useful if it gets used.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.