A new case usually involves a flood of hundreds or thousands of documents waiting to be pored over and deciphered. The deadline to understand it all is often yesterday.
For years, Opus 2’s litigation management software has made that process more sane, but the company recently took a more ambitious step. With last year’s acquisition of Uncover, a Dutch legal tech startup, Opus 2 has advanced its AI to make the platform more powerful and easier to use than ever.
“Everything that Opus 2 has been known for in the litigation space, that’s still here as a core part of the platform,” said Dana Morrison, Product Marketing Manager. “What we’re doing now is adding a more streamlined UI option, and additional AI functionality.”
Opus 2 recently gave us a tour. Here are the highlights.
Getting Started
Opus 2 has been known for 15 years as an industry-leading case management and case preparation solution where dispute teams organize documents, transcripts, issues, chronologies and key actors into a structured case strategy. It’s still comprehensive and configurable, which is why it has long occupied the space between eDiscovery and trial presentation, giving firms a centralized environment—or “situation room”— for preparing complex matters.
That foundation remains unchanged, and the same interface of the previous version of the software is available in the Detailed View section. What’s new is the Focused View, which applies large-language model AI to access the same information in a simplified, chatbot-like environment.
“As a startup, we were able to really differentiate ourselves,” said Ingrid Van de Pol-Mensing, who co-founded Uncover and is now Opus 2’s Principal AI Solutions Evangelist. “Now together we both had this shared goal of bringing AI-driven functionality into the hands of more lawyers.”
Users can toggle between Detailed View and Focused View with one click. But the intention with the update was to create an intuitive design that puts verifiable AI first, streamlining how lawyers interact with their case materials.
Lawyers can now query their case files in a conversational way to facilitate analysis, without an overload of information clouding their view.
“We do not want to distract or bother people with information that isn’t strictly necessary for the job that they need to perform,” Van de Pol-Mensing said.
Using Matter Assist to Understand a Case in Minutes
Opus 2 highlighted three new AI tools. Matter Assist allows lawyers to get answers sourced from all documents across a case. Document Assist enables specific queries on one document or set of documents. General Assist is an enterprise LLM for handling research, drafting, and analysis not tied to case documents. All of these tools include access to a prompt library and prompt builder.
With Matter Assist, the platform analyzes all documents within the matter and generates structured summaries, thematic insights and targeted answers.
Van de Pol-Mensing offered the example of a new associate who needs to get up to speed fast.
“Without having read anything or opened a document, you can ask, ‘Explain to me what this litigation is about, including an overview of the parties and attorneys involved.’”
The system extracts relevant text and synthesizes a detailed response, linking directly to the location in source documents that support it.
Lawyers don’t even need to know what documents they need to search, she said. The AI does already.
Document Assist Dives Deep Into Specific Materials
If Matter Assist provides the macro view, Document Assist handles the micro.
Document Assist allows users to run focused queries against one or more documents. Lawyers can compare clauses across contracts, identify inconsistencies in testimony, summarize complex arguments, or extract key facts.
Rather than toggling between multiple documents and manually noting differences, lawyers can ask questions in plain language.
“For example, you upload 20 employment agreements and say, ‘Which one has a deviating, non-compete clause?’” Van de Pol-Mensing said. “Or you upload a couple versions of testimonies and say, ‘What are the inconsistencies?’”
General Assist Expands the AI Toolkit
The third major addition, General Assist, is a secure workspace embedded within the platform that goes beyond any particular case. It can help draft emails, write internal memos, prepare client updates, simplify research into new industries and clarify procedural rules.
“It’s a really great tool to focus on specific information and to then perform follow-up actions,” Van de Pol-Mensing said.
The advantage over doing the same thing in Gemini or ChatGPT is that here, it’s a closed system that never compromises confidential case information. Lawyers can generate summaries in Matter Assist or Document Assist, then move to General Assist to use the output to draft an email, outline arguments or prepare talking points without exposing it to public AI tools.
A Helpful Prompt Library That Will Continue Growing
The new prompt library offers pre-built prompts tailored to specific practice areas, sparing lawyers from having to engineer effective instructions from scratch. The prompts users will see are quite short, but they are much more complex on the back end to make sure they will get an answer that makes sense, Van de Pol-Mensing said.
“So the whole exercise of developing an effective prompt, we try to take that burden away from the lawyer to make it quicker and easier,” she said. The library will also continuously evolve as more users engage with the prompts.
For those who want more control, the prompt builder helps structure prompts for more consistent and comprehensive outputs.
“That prompt builder is a pretty big deal for attorneys,” Morrison said. “One of the big challenges with generative AI is figuring out how to ask a question in a way that gets the information you want, in the format you want, and laid out in a way that makes sense.”
Security—and More to Come in the Future
For litigators, AI is only as useful as it is verifiable. Outputs generated through Matter Assist and Document Assist are tied back to specific source documents, so lawyers never take it on faith in the AI’s work. They can easily examine the underlying evidence.
Morrison acknowledged that one of the biggest hurdles to AI adoption in law is trust. Lawyers often worry that sensitive client data is being shared externally or used to train outside models. She emphasized that Opus 2 has made security and compliance a central priority throughout its 15 years in the legal space.
“Because the AI operates entirely within the Opus 2 platform, attorneys can use it without needing to anonymize data,” she said. “They can be very confident.”
The acquisition of Uncover also bodes well for the future of Opus 2. Besides back-end updates that increase the software’s speed and power, the latest release features only a portion of the new system’s capability.
That means faster, more frequent updates in the future, Morrison said.
“It’s only step one of many to continue integrating those new AI features and growing our roadmap to accelerate that innovation,” she said.
The post Opus 2 Steps Up Its AI Game With Acquisition Of A Legal Tech Startup appeared first on Above the Law.
