Everlaw launches plugin linking ChatGPT Enterprise to legal evidence

Connecting ChatGPT to the evidentiary record

Everlaw, a legal technology company, says the plugin links its "evidence layer for legal AI" with ChatGPT. The idea is to give practitioners a way to access and question case materials while using Everlaw's tools for organizing, searching and understanding complex matters.

The company argues that litigation data rarely comes as a tidy set of documents. According to Everlaw, relevant information can span millions of emails, chats, spreadsheets, transcripts, images and other records, surrounded by metadata and matter context that can be essential to understanding what happened. A general-purpose AI system can answer broad questions from its training, but questions such as which documents relate to a company or what the record says about an issue require access to the matter itself.

Through the plugin, ChatGPT Enterprise users can connect to the evidence and information they are authorized to access in Everlaw. Everlaw says this avoids treating litigation data as a static set of files exported into another environment.

Security, permissions and verification

Everlaw describes the plugin as built on defensibility and security. The company lists several design points:

• Outputs are linked directly to the supporting documents behind the answers, which Everlaw says makes verification and validation quick.
• Existing permission structures are preserved. Users and their agents can see what that user could see when logging into Everlaw directly, and no more.
• Documents are accessed on demand, without being exported, replicated or absorbed into a partner environment.

These points address concerns that legal teams commonly weigh when considering AI tools, namely confidentiality, accuracy and human review. The latter themes also appear in the company's discussion of responsible use.

What lawyers can do with it

Everlaw groups the plugin's capabilities into four areas.

• Getting oriented: A lawyer joining a case can ask which Everlaw projects, binders or datasets they can access, then drill into relevant materials using natural language.
• Searching the corpus: Practitioners can identify documents associated with a person, organization, issue or event. Everlaw says it expects more sophisticated search and corpus-analysis workflows as the integration expands.
• Early case assessment: The plugin is meant to help explore a large, unfamiliar collection, narrow the relevant material and turn results into analysis and visualizations. Everlaw points to custodians, communications, themes and timelines as typical areas of interest.
• Tracking work: The integration can also answer operational questions about matters and teams, including project, usage, analytics and billing information.

Responsible AI and what it means for legal teams

Everlaw ties the launch to a wider effort to help legal professionals adopt AI responsibly, including where access to technology and resources is limited. Earlier this year, it says, the company took part in an OpenAI Academy series with the Legal Services National Technology Assistance Project for legal aid and access-to-justice professionals. The programs covered AI foundations, practical workflows and responsible use, including how practitioners can use tools like ChatGPT for drafting, summarization, planning and information organization.

Everlaw's position is that legal AI is moving from tools that generate content toward systems that take part in more sophisticated legal workflows, which makes reliable access to evidence more important. For now, the plugin is limited to joint customers of Everlaw and ChatGPT Enterprise. Firms in that group can query their case records from within ChatGPT, with Everlaw's permissions and source links still in place. The company did not provide pricing or performance figures in its announcement.