I recently met with Dan Culhane, CEO of Discovery Genie^®, which is designed to address discovery for small cases. Here’s a brief discussion of the product.

Dan told me that the idea of Discovery Genie came from his experiences as a solo practitioner, where he was getting “crushed” by discovery. Not finding a product that met his needs and budget, Dan set out to create one with his son. The result was Discovery Genie, which was formally launched in Q1 2020 (after a soft launch in 2019).

Approach to Discovery

Discovery Genie takes a “keep it simple” approach to discovery – upload and ingest documents into the platform, conduct review to identify relevant and privileged documents, download your output files as a production in PDF form and generate annotated indices of your production and privilege document sets. It’s designed to streamline that specific workflow to do those specific things.

As Dan stated in our discussion: “we don’t think of ourselves in the same manner as eDiscovery platforms that are designed for huge document collections and finding the needles in the haystack”. You won’t find fancy analytics or predictive coding capabilities in Discovery Genie – it’s not designed for cases large enough to benefit from those features.

Features

However, there are several features that can facilitate and customize review. For example, you can customize the layout of your review grid:

You can also use domains and email addresses to make an initial prediction of which documents will be privileged (e.g., outside counsel emails):

You can then review the results and make changes to the predictions during your review:

And you can review and change Bates numbers before generating PDF produced files:

Discovery Genie also has an integration with Clio, which enables you to 1) Create a link between your Clio matter and your Discovery Genie case to launch and manage your document production from Clio, 2) Integrate directly into the Clio timekeeping system to automatically track your time and expenses and store this data directly to the corresponding Clio Matter, and 3) Store your completed documents directly to the documents section under the Clio Matter linked to your Discovery Genie case.

A list of system, document review, output and support and pricing features are available here.

Pricing

Speaking of pricing, there’s no mystery to the pricing model for Discovery Genie – it’s right on their web site. $1.13 per document for each document that is converted to PDF, Bates labeled and indexed for production. No other fees. You can review for as long as you need and you can have unlimited cases, unlimited document sets, unlimited pages, unlimited users, etc. Training and support are free as well. And because the cost is directly tied to the case, that cost can be billed to clients and recovered as costs under the civil procedure rules in most jurisdictions.

Latest Release and Patent

A few weeks ago, Discovery Genie released a version 2.0 of the product (some of the v2.0 features are illustrated above) and Dan and his team even were granted a patent last November. It’s USPTO Patent No: US-11507612-B2 for “Document elimination for compact and secure storage and management thereof”, which is designed to protect “Discovery Genie’s unique system for quickly and accurately producing documents in litigation, while automating the time-consuming mechanics of converting electronic documents while ensuring litigators gain mastery of their evidence throughout the life of a lawsuit.”

Small Cases Need Love Too

A lot of features in eDiscovery solutions are geared to bigger cases. However, there is a considerable need in the market for discovery software developed to support small cases – which are as much as 90% of all civil cases – and Discovery Genie is designed to address that need. It’s not designed for the big cases, but if you have a small case, it can streamline the discovery workflow to support your needs. Learn more about Discovery Genie here, where you can schedule a demo.

So, what do you think? Are you struggling with discovery for small cases? 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.