Lighthouse Announces AI Search

Welcome to LawNext PR, the podcast where we put a spotlight on the latest news coming out of the legal tech industry. This is Bob Ambrosie and in each sponsored episode of LawNext PR, I interview a legal tech company about its latest news and developments. topic today is the launch of Lighthouse AI Search by the global e-discovery and information governance company, Lighthouse. And joining me to discuss this news is Dan Brassil executive director, search and information retrieval at Lighthouse.

Dan, Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So before we get into talking about what you've announced here, can I ask you to kind give me in a nutshell what Lighthouse is for anybody who might not be familiar with the company? Yeah, I think you did a great job at the very beginning, right? We're a global e-discovery and information governance company. We've been around for, I think, like since 1995.

We've been in this space for a really long time and really evolving with the technology, but also pushing forward, being on the vanguard of what's possible as we incorporate new and different types of technology like AI. Yeah. And what about your own background? What's, how did you get into all of this? Yeah, well, so actually, this month, it will be my 20th anniversary in the industry. Thank you. Like a lot of people, you you don't choose eDiscovery, eDiscovery chooses Right.

I have a background in linguistics. And I found my way into at the time back in 2005. And they were doing really cutting edge things about modeling language from its information retrieval space for responsiveness and hot docs. And it was really, really interesting that I was able to take the training I had about looking at language sort of how variable can be to help lawyers do practical things with my training.

And I think that's the cool thing about the AI, right, which is now we have large language models that can also really understand the variability of human language and being able to melt. So my expertise with this really powerful analytic tool is really interesting. Yeah, that is really interesting. mean, legal work is all about words, ultimately, and it comes down to that.

So Lighthouse has just announced the launch of Lighthouse AI Search, and we can get into kind of more details about what it is. But at a high level, why don't you kind of describe what it is that you've just, what you've launched here. Yeah, you know, at a high level, Lighthouse AI Search is an AI driven or AI first, as we like to say, search platform that allows someone to just ask a normal everyday question of the tool.

And what you get back are answers to that question as opposed to getting back documents that then you have to find the answers in, right? It does give you the documents, right, that it generates the answers from so that you can always, you know, do that sort of level of analysis, but it gives you back an answer to your question, which is incredibly powerful. Yeah. So you're able to ask questions against the corpus of documents that you have.

Can you kind of give me an example, perhaps, of a question you might ask? Yeah, so again, like I said, you can ask a simple question. It can be as simple as what are Juul's products, again, I'm talking about what is the product we're talking about, the Juul data that we were using to show a client as publicly available. And then we asked other questions like what were the first flavors that Juul had, right?

Again, these are things that if you didn't know the answer to them, you would not, it would be a hard time figuring out how to craft a search to find all that information, right? You'd have to sort of dig through the documents that a search like flavor within five of Juul would give you, right? So this just gives you a list and says, these were the flavors at launch. If that's your question, what were the flavors at launch?

So again, it's It's sort of what it allows you to do is just ask a question as if you're asking a colleague or if you are a senior associate or a partner at a law firm, what you would ask a junior associate to do. Right. I need to find out this. Can you go find it for me? it sounds like it may be a situate like the example you just gave. You probably could have found that answer eventually without AI search, but it would have taken you a long time.

And maybe you wouldn't have been absolutely sure that you were covering all the bases in terms of what you were looking for. Yeah, most definitely. You know, as someone who built his career on helping people use linguistics to find things, right? I, one of my expertise in this field is the crafting of search terms, right? Using syntax and then you have to know the arcana of syntax, right? and that can be difficult because sometimes you're like, did I get all the right words, right?

Because that's how search engines work. and then what you get back when you write when you do a search like that you get that document again you don't get back the answer to your question with Lighthouse AI search. You don't need to know. search syntax you just need to ask your question in a normal way then again what you get back is the answer to your question backed up by the documents that. the AI search was able to use to generate your question. Again, I think it's really powerful,

So, I mean, you know, traditionally in e-discovery, you would have keyword search, Boolean search, as you say, there are also tools like technology assisted review or predictive coding or those kinds of things. So where does this fit in that universe? Does this replace those kinds of search? Is it a supplement to those kinds of search? I think it works in tandem with a lot of different types of things.

So first and foremost, this is a tool that allows litigation teams to get early insight to query their documents when they're doing sort of like investigations or litigation. It's not just an e-discovery tool, more of a, you know, again, I think investigation is a great example. or early case assessment, is there a there there, right? Even prior to sort of litigation or anything like that, you can say, what is my exposure, right? And you can just ask the tool this.

Now, going back to your question, how does this sit along, sort of say predictive AI or predictive coding, I think you said, and other types of tools. Again, it has a different use case. I would say this about what AI search or Lighthouse AI search does, right? It is a combination of predictive AI to find the information you're looking for in your question and then generative AI to generate the answer to the question you ask based off of the information it found using the predictive AI.

I know I got into the weeds there, but I think it's really important to understand that we're using the best of both worlds when it comes to the different types of AIs that are out there.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. You talked about the fact that this search not only gives you the answer, but gives you. the sources that it relied on in terms of creating or generating that answer. And, you know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that because again, we all know that lawyers are skittish about generative AI because of their fear that it's gonna make stuff up or hallucinate answers.

So how confident can they be of the kinds of answers that they're getting using this AI search? That's a great question. So yeah, we all know about hallucinations, right? Especially when it comes to generative AI. What I think is really special about Lighthouse AI Search is it's a RAG model or RAG stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation. So what that allows you to do is instead of looking for answers out in the internet, right?

It restricts its answers to the corpus of documents you point the system at. So it won't go outside if it doesn't find the answer within the document population. that you're querying, it will say there is no information that supports that answer. there is, I can't find an answer. It will say use better words than that, obviously. But yes, it really reduces the likelihood of a hallucination, like rape date. In fact, I haven't exactly, right.

document that I used or here's the sources and you can go check them yourself basically, right? Yeah. Most definitely. And then if it doesn't, if it can't find an answer, it will say, there is no answer and there will be no documents. Right. So it won't, it won't make something up. Yeah. Yeah. Very good thing. Yeah.

So you talked a little bit about use cases, but I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit. mean, where are the appropriate use cases for AI search in the eDiscovery process? Right, yeah, so as I said, you know, the first one that comes to mind is any form of internal investigation, right? Where you're like, is there a there there? Right, and you want to point it at a small subset of data to understand your exposure. The same thing with PCA, right? Early case assessment, right?

Where you're, you don't need to find all of something, you need to find information that lets you make a strategic decision about what to do next. Right. You need information. You don't need documents. Right. That's a quick way of putting it. Another case is when you're doing, you know, motion prep or you are looking to see what's coming in from incoming production. Right.

All these things were again where you don't need to find all of something, but rather you need to you need to get grounded in what's in this data. What do I need to know? And then you can then make strategic decisions based off of what you learn. Traditionally, what people often do is do just a full man review of all the data, right? They might use keywords to help navigate what to look at first, but they do tend to do sort of, if not exhaustive, quasi-exhaustive review of that data.

This is a situation where you can just start interrogating the information right away or the data right away to get at the information you need. And then if you decide based off of what you learn to do a more fulsome review, you can, but you don't need to start there. Does it matter the type of data in a sense? If I've got a collection of documents and I've got say medical records in there or deposition transcripts or that sort of thing, can it be used against those kinds of documents?

It can, right? I mean, it's based off of, you know, it's like all AIs, right? It's based off of large language models. And so it does require text, but as long as you have text, you can use it.

Yeah. And what about in the in the litigation context? mean, kind of post discovery a little bit. I don't know. I don't know whether you're you've talked to any of your customers who are kind of using it in this way. But I'm curious whether you can do things like go in and find out whether I don't know whether something a witness just said might have ever been contradicted in something they said before that sort of an application. mean, that's funny.

You should mention that we were just talking about that yesterday amongst my internal team about what are some other use cases. And that was one of them, which is someone said something. Can we find contradictory information? Right. And that's a great use case because here you have something very specific and then you can say, is there any information in this data that contradicts? You can literally just say that that contradicts this and whatever this is, right? So yeah.

And again, you can just ask it that type of question as opposed to thinking about how do I graph Boolean searches or proximity searches to try to get at this sort of information.

Dan I've been asking you lots of questions but I wanted to give you an opportunity. there other features you wanted to point out or anything else you wanted to say about this that we haven't talked about? Yeah, I think buried in sort of what we've been talking about, right, is sort of the value proposition, right? And I think the value proposition for Lighthouse AI Search is speed to knowledge, right? That is incredibly valuable.

Again, as I said, I've been working in this space for 20 years, and that is the one thing that case teams are often sort of, concerned with, which is like, need to know something. How long is it going to take me to find it out? This is a tool to really speed that up. mean, greatly so. We think about using it all the time to answer basic questions that in the past, when we worked with clients, we would have crafted Boolean searches and then said, OK, within this set, here's the answer.

we could just now say, here's the answer. Yeah, seems like, I mean, you mentioned early case assessment, seems like it would be incredibly powerful at that stage of a case when you're still not quite sure what you have or what you're working with, but where you can dive in and find something really quickly. Yes, exactly. You know, we have we have one client who's thinking about using Lighthouse AI Search to do QC over production. That's going to be an interesting use case.

We'll be helping them with that as well. We have another client who, again, is thinking about they need to respond to interrogatories again. great use case. Right. And I guess the other thing we didn't really mention, but it probably is obvious to people who listening who work in work in the discovery. But I'm presuming this can be used as effectively against your own documents and against incoming production from from another side, from their side.

yeah, incoming production is just a primary use case, right? Because this is a situation where you don't need to review all of them, right? You have very specific questions. Or you might actually have a real sort of what's in here, right? You know what the contours of the matter are. You can just start interrogating what did they produce to me, right? Does it have the answers I expected to have? Are there documents that are expected to be produced? Are they in here? Right?

And then you can, again, decide what to do based off of what you find out.

And Lighthouse AI Search, this is now generally available. Is it out there? It's out there, but it's not in general availability just yet. are, yes, it's a great question, right? We are working with some early access clients. And then, but we fully expect to, as the summer and fall roll around, we'll really start opening it up to general availability come the end of the year Q4. Okay, so by the end of the year, he'll be out there and he'll be kind of testing it with customers until then.

Well, sounds really cool and I really appreciate your taking the time to come on the show and talk about it. Yeah, thank you. It's been a pleasure. That's it for today's episode. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts, or you can also find us on YouTube. Just search for LawnexPR there. You can also find it all in the Lawnex Legal Tech directory under the Resources tab. This is Bob Ambrogi. Thanks for joining us today.