It’s announcement day and a three-post day as well!  In addition to this earlier announcement from Ipro, DLA Piper announced today the launch of Aiscension, a ground-breaking AI-enabled service designed to find cartel risks within corporations. Aiscension is designed to revolutionize risk detection by combining DLA Piper’s legal know-how, with cutting edge AI technology from Reveal.

A copy of the press release from the Reveal site is here and an overview of Aiscension is available here from the DLA Piper website, which notes that “Aiscension is a cartel risk-management service that uses AI to help detect risks in your business. It combines Reveal’s best-in-class AI tools with DLA Piper’s renowned legal knowhow to audit parts of your business.”

I interviewed Wendell Jisa, Founder and CEO of Reveal and Jay Lieb, Executive Vice President, Innovation & Strategy, who provided some additional information regarding today’s announcement.

Wendell: We have been working on this for about 30 months now, so it’s been a well-planned joint venture.  DLA Piper has created a holding company called Aldersgate, which is building out several disruptive technology capabilities.  Partnering with DLA and the domain expertise they have in the practice of law, coupled with our data science team and our development team is a joint venture that we think will be disruptive to the practice of law. 

This is not about the law firm going out and trying to hire a couple of data scientists and doing it on their own, this is about the world’s third largest law firm and largest litigation law firm coming together with the industry’s leading AI eDiscovery company, collaborating in a joint venture to create something that we think will be a game changer in the automation of legal technology.

Jay: This is a long-term joint venture relationship that involves talent, technology and domain expertise. We both believe that this is the future of law firms and there will be other use cases coming.  The reason why cartels worked so well as a first use case is that cartels, from a financial standpoint, incur huge penalties – up to 10% of worldwide revenue – and those who report potential involvement soonest can reduce those penalties, so there is a huge incentive to understand the data as quickly as possible.

DLA Piper put together a committee to understand disruptive technologies: those technologies that will disrupt professional services, such as legal and accounting professional services. They felt that the innovators will put the non-innovators out of business, so they chose to be proactive and be the innovators. They also saw this as an opportunity for their law firm to be embedded into their corporate client thinking about their risk 24/7, so that they can move up the stream and really partner with their corporate clients even more fully.

Wendell: The other factor in this joint venture is the re-use of historical data. The more data that is being run through this, the more accurate these models will be.

Jay: Yes, the recipe for great AI is to have: 1) great domain experts who know the data and are the best in their field, combined with 2) great domain experts in the area of data science, and 3) amazing technology that we’ve spent years together creating at Reveal with Reveal AI and our acquisition of Brainspace.  We’ve spent thousands and thousands of hours developing innovative technology, millions of dollars of R&D and hundreds of millions in investment to get us to this point.

We believe this type of technology is going to precipitate the ability for corporations to maximize return on their technology investment.  The more a corporation partners with their law firm, the more they get that closed loop of reusing work product and knowledge from an AI perspective to reduce costs, and this kind of disruptive practice will serve to make things faster, easier and get to the truth more completely.

So, what do you think?  Do you think we’ll see more joint ventures like this between law firms and eDiscovery providers?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.