Webinar: Transforming Digital Case Management in the Courts with AI

Let's go through some of the new features in eBrief Ready. So hopefully in a moment you'll see my screen pop up and I think the main thing I want to show you today is the four new AI functionalities that we've got in the product. You may have used some of these already. Smart classifications been in the product for a little while now, so you may have been using that. And the bank statement analysis was recently introduced and chronologies and analyse are very new features in the product. So smart classifications really the ability to take in documents which have got names that you want to automatically rename. And also it'll figure out what folder to put the documents into and it will also extract the date. So it's quite a useful addition to the product, the ability to automatically rename documents.

And you can do this in the process for uploading documents, but you can also do it for documents that are already on your system. You can tag them and say you want to put them through smart classification and it'll go through documents that already exist on your system and come back with recommendations. And the bank statement analysis allows you to upload bank statements or credit card statements and as part of that process it will extract the date period for the bank statement and also put the bank statements into the correct folder for you and rename them. Chronologies allows you to create a chronology on a single document or multiple documents. And again, we'll take you through this and every document that you put through the chronology, each chronology's got a citation that allows you to make sure you can go back to the source document where it came from.

Now because we just use our chronology across the documents you supply us, there's no chance of hallucinations because it's not going outside the documents. But nonetheless it's important that when you bring back a document that you can actually also check the dates, sorry, you can also check that the citations correct. And then finally we've got the ability to query documents. So not only have you got the ability to do a chronology on them, but you can run a query. So those of you familiar with something like chat GPT, we can ask questions about a document. This is similar, but again we're just staying inside the document four walls of the document or documents. And so there's no chance that it'll hallucinate by going outside those documents. It'll stay inside the documents you are doing a query on and it'll also come back and tell you where it's pulled the information from, the actual document itself.

So without further ado, let's go into the product. And for those who have just joined late at the bottom there's a q and a section. So if you feel free to ask any questions as we're going along and Peter and Chencha will potentially answer them as we're going along or wait till the end and we can obviously talk to you at the end about any questions you might have. This should take about another 20, 25 minutes and then we've got 15 minutes for questions if you want to, if there are any questions. So let me go into it brief ready. You'll be familiar with this screen which has got just three matters on there. So I'm going to walk you through the smart classification, the bank statement process now. So the first two AI functions, I'll also point out to you as I'm going along, any new additions to the product which may be interesting for you.

So for example here we've got Mattertype name. Most of you probably have seen this before, but I always like to point out in any of these webinars the difference between a standard and multi-party matter because I think it's important. Most of the time you'll be using a standard matter type because you're just sharing with people inside your team, whether it be a barrister or whether it be in your case, it could be a judge or it could be an associate, whoever's on your team you would just call standard. A multi-party matter though is if you're involved in a mediation for example, and often judges are involved in mediations, you would then be able to set up a multi-party matter and each party has their own area that they upload documents into and they can make them shared or not shared. The big thing about a multi-party matter is that if you make annotations in a multi-party matter, they only stay relevant to your team.

So it's at least a very good thing for mediations and things like that. Or if you need to collect documents from both sides. So you're in a court and you want to collect documents spot from both sides, you'd set up a multi-party matter and the documents could come in from both sides and you could also have your matter, your own area if you like for that matter, so that you're all involved in the matter. You can all see the documents, but each team has their own area for annotations. This is a new function on the system to allow you to have templates. So in the old system, the old user interface, you could only ever have one template. Now you can have multiple templates for different types of law that you might be running. So quite handy Anyway, I'll create a matter now and that matter gets created.

It's called demo matter. If I go to my setup, you'll see here that this is where I can create a matter template. So for example, I'll show you how that might work in practise. I'll go down to my folders here and I'm going to create a new folder. I'm going to call it bank statements and this folder I need to say that there'll be some additional processing that happens on this folder when I go in here. So I'm going into advanced and I say for this folder it's bank statements, I want it to be processed as bank statements. So whether I upload bank statements or credit card statements, if I put them into this folder, then those bank statements will show up on the system and there'll be an extra process done. So I just move that folder up now into the right location. I could also make a credit card statements folder.

And again I would say this is bank statement type information and so extra processing would be done. But just to take you back now to my meta template, I could create a meta template called bank statement template. I want to in the future be able to have bank statements always as part of my folder structure. So I hope to get the idea that you can start multiple different templates for the different types of work you do. And when you do that, the folders will be reflected in whatever template you use. So let's now go and add some documents onto our system. And this is AI feature number one, which is we'll add some bank statements just so I can show you how that works in practise. So I've got a bank statements folder and I'm uploading NZ three and bottom 99 from 1 0 1. And I'll say open that and I'll say it's going into my bank statements folder.

I click upload and those three documents are coming onto the system now. And if I go across to my index, you'll see that there'll be process. You can see in the page numbers coming down on the right hand side now. And what should happen in a moment is that they should explode into the actual folder and folder name. And so that happens in real time. You can see what's happening there, those folders have been opened up, the bank statements are being processed and there you go. All three bank statements are now being put into their correct folders and it's even coming back and telling us that there's a bank statement missing. So from a court situation, probably not something you would use all the time because it's more the solicitor doing it, but good for you to see that they've got this ability now to upload documents and statements and process them automatically.

The next thing to show would be just the ability to do smart classification. Again, more useful for solicitors when they're pulling the documents together, but it's quite a good process. So I go into here, I've got five documents and if I go, I just want to upload those five documents and I want the system now to figure out what folders to put them into. So it's got those five documents and it's going through and processing these. And just remember you can run the smart classification anytime you like. It doesn't have to be just when you upload documents, you can actually run it on documents that you've already uploaded onto the system. So again, if you had documents in eBrief Ready and you weren't very happy with the name of them, you could run smart classification across them and it would automatically rename the documents for you.

So in a moment what will happen is that I'll see in the top right hand corner here, the documents are ready for classification, there it is there. And so I can click on that and it comes back and tells me what the document was called previously was document one, number one and now it's called evaluation report. And you can also check the document type. So I can come in here and see that, oh yeah, that looks pretty right February the first, 2024. If I don't like a folder that it's putting into, I can say place it in another folder like this and then I can say I'm pretty happy with that. And so I can just go validate and that'll validate those documents for me and they'll be put into the correct folders. So that's really the first two AI functions. One is the bank statements.

Number two is for being able to do smart classification. Generally speaking, paralegals would use this all the time to help them get documents onto the system quickly. So smart AI feature number three and four, I'm just going to use our free demo matter if you ever want to use this matter, it's under help import demo matter. And in this particular matter I want to do a chronology. So I can go down under extras and I've got my upload history here and I can say, look, I want to run a chronology across my entire matter, all the documents I've got in there. So I can just click the tick box here, I can go to bulk actions and I can say correct chronology and that will then go through and extract all the dates from those documents for me automatically. You see that was fairly quick.

There's a reason why it's so quick. I have done this chronology across these documents before, but you can see it's pulled out 800 dates from the documents and it's given me a reference to each document. So if I wanted to check on this document, I can just click on here and it tells me where it's found this particular piece of information from the document. So even though there's no chance of hallucinations where stuff's coming in from the outside because we're only working on these 30 documents, it's still good to be able to go through and fact check this information and just make sure that the information you're getting back is correct and the dates that the 4th of July, 2019, that's correct, of course I can click on the document here and go directly into the document and check it for myself to make sure that I'm happy with it.

I could find down here, I could say that's really relevant to my case and I can even start to run my own annotation programme across the stuff that's coming back. So hopefully you can see there's multiple ways you can start now to drill down on this information, I could even put a date in there, the 4th of July, 2000 if I wanted this to be part of some really key information that I want to bring back at a later date in my own date report. Remember this is bringing back all the dates across everything Vine. Maybe all those dates aren't so important, but some are critical to you. So you can basically work with an automated chronology and build your own. You can also export this to a CSV file. And so that'll put into an Excel spreadsheet and again, you can work through and delete stuff that you don't want on the system.

So hopefully that's helpful. That's creating a chronology. And remember you can do that across entire documents or you can just choose a particular folder and say I want to run a chronology, say across just these five documents. And again, same process, create a chronology and there it is. Now the first time you run across the documents it will be a little slower because it has to go through and extract information from the documents first. So these are very quick because these documents are in memory already and so you can just very quickly do these types of chronologies for you, but if it's the first time, it might take some time. So what we recommend is that possibly you can run this overnight if you wanted to have all your documents ready to report back on, you could just go into extras, you could go into your upload history and you just go run a chronology across this or whatever you want really.

It can also run an analyse function and it will then bring all these documents into memory. This would take me about if I just had done this from the ground up first time, it would take about 15 minutes I think to read those documents in and bring them into memory. There's a couple of big ones here, but just to give you an idea how long that would take, but I've done this already. I've got them in memory for me, it will stay in memory. So if you come back tomorrow, the next day, those documents will still be available to you. So another feature is the ability to also do analyse on the product. So again, I'm going to click these five documents and this time I'm clicking bulk actions. You can see here I could run smart classification again, I could run a chronology again.

This time I'm going to run analyse. So I'm clicking on analyse here it comes back with a default prompt, summarise the key facts. So if I click on analyse now it's just going to go through and figure out what are the key facts from these site documents. I've got respondent's documents, applicant's documents, and it'll come back. And there you go. There's the response. And any of these you can check again, just like we can check the chronologies, I can click on any of the references here and check where is it getting this information from in terms of it was harsh or unjust or unreasonable. Where was this suspension payment made? And again, you can go back to the page number on there, open up the page, you can go back to where it was recorded and you can highlight that and mark it and again, create an annotation on it if you want to.

So there's one query and then once I've got that in memory, I can do further queries. So another query I might want to make is something like compare these statements and list any inconsistencies between or contradictions between. So we've got the respondent and applicants statements here. So again, I click on analyse and it'll go through and look at the differences it can find between the statements that's been given here on the system. So it can take up to maybe 30 seconds on the system. We'll just let it run. Here it comes. You can see it's generating its response now. And there we go. So it's coming back and telling us that it believes that the definition of zero tolerance is inconsistent between the two parties. The respondent defines it one way and the applicant argues a different way. And again, you can click on here to find out exactly defining it here, 49 gls as against here, it's absolutely saying zero.

So really handy. And then there's another inconsistency around the relevance of impairment to the dismissal. Again giving you the references to that the parties disagree on whether there's mitigating factors, disagreement on the applicant, on the just culture within the organisation, et cetera, et cetera. So again, the whole idea of this AI is not to replace lawyers and judges. The whole idea is really just to help you, the lawyer, to narrow down and see if anything's missing that might should have been picked up. So really handy check. I remember a barrister saying the other day to me that it's like having a junior, having my junior being able to find information for me, but this is an AI junior if you like, and they're working 24 7. So they're like a personal assistant just helping you to drill down. But there's no way this is meant to be replacing anybody.

It's actually meant to be assisting you in being able to drill down on what your key information is. One of the things that the barristers that they may use the system for is that I'm acting for the applicant. What are some good cross-examination questions to ask? So again, clicking on analyse there, it'll come back with a set of questions that would believe to be reasonable to be asking under cross-examination if they're acting for the applicant. So let's just have a look at that and I think this will give you a sense of the types of ways you might use something like this to help you. But here we go, some cross-examination questions. So when we talk to Barrers about this, I'll often say, look, most of those questions I would've asked, but occasionally they would say one or two of these questions I hadn't thought of.

And so it can sort of help that whole process of thinking through what you might've missed. And if you haven't missed anything and you've got all of this and some more and then you go, well, it's sort of like a check to make sure that you're across it. I know we've used this previously in handwriting examples and often barristers won't be an expert in handwriting handwriting. And so this is quite a useful thing of what would be some reasonable handwriting questions if it was to do with handwriting stuff that they need to cross examine on. And then one final one to think about, which is I think an interesting one is this is where I'm a lawyer and what are some good prompts to ask this set of documents. In other words, you're asking the AI to come back with what are some good questions to ask of this set of documents.

So it's actually helping you to think through what might be useful. And so in some ways it breaks down these documents into what it thinks are the most important components. And here you go, it's outlined where it thinks the issues are to do with this set of documents and what it thinks might be some reasonable questions to ask around that. And again, all of these, as I keep saying, can be fact checked. You can go back into the documents and you can look at them. So that's a pretty quick overview, but hopefully you can see it's pretty easy to use and those AI functions particularly I think for lawyers, for judges, the ability to ask different questions on a set of documents and knowing that it's just staying inside the four walls of the documents you're asking, there's no chance of hallucinations I think would be pretty helpful In terms of the workflow, I know a judge is using this in this type of technology in the UK at the moment and I was able to use it for just being able to extract from all the transcripts what were the key issues so they could use to summarise to the jury and then would actually obviously go through and check that, but found it tremendously helpful that it could create an initial summary of the information that then could be summarised back to the jury because often it's very lay person type language that the technology will use.

And so that can be kind of helpful. So it's definitely being used now in all sorts of jurisdictions. And so the idea here today is just to encourage you to also have a play with it in order to use it. It does need to be turned on. And if you go to your account, you'll see whether it's not it's turned under the security and privacy, there's a little tick box here. If you're part of an organisation then that needs to be turned on by your administrator, but if you're just using it yourself, then you can turn that on unless that tick box is turned on, you won't be able to see the AI functionality. So if I was to go into this matter again and click on actions add documents, if I can't see the smart classification here, it means that I don't have the AI turned on the system.

And I think one other thing to show you on the system, which is just a recent edition, which I think could be handy if I was to go through and just add another document here, add a document, I'll just go into where I was before and I'll just add these five documents again. This time I'm not going to run smart classification on them, I'm just going to put them into exhibits. So this's going to come in as 1, 2, 3, 4, and five. What the system will also allow you to do now is check for duplicates. This is a relatively new feature on the system and so what I'll be able to do is in a moment just go back and ask the system, are there any duplicates? I expect it'll be five duplicates because I know I added five documents, those five documents before I changed their names to something else.

But these 1, 2, 3 should be these documents I've got down here on the system. So let's try that out. So I got actions and I go identify duplicates and there we go. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. There are the documents and I can go, you know what? I don't like the numbering one, I want to get rid of that. I want to get rid of number three. So you can see I can just go through and get rid of my duplicates that I've got on the system here and come back in so that I just have only one copy of the document, not five copies of the document. So there we go. And there we go. No duplicates left. If I ran that operation again and go actions identify duplicates, it'll come back and say there are none. And indeed my 1, 2, 3, 4 and five are all gone and I just had my other documents.

I know we've got a few more minutes so I just want to show you one other function on the product that's not commonly used but it's good for you to know. I had this, obviously we've looked at members, you know how to add members onto the system settings, folders, but there's a menu item called fields and under fields I can add new fields on the system. So maybe I want to add a notes field on the system, I want to say that's a text field. I can change the type of field it is and I want to create that field now. And then I could go back into my folders and say for other documents I could edit that and say I want to go to my fields and I want to add this notes field and I want to put it up to my document name.

And so if I update the system now when I look at my index, you'll see that the other documents, I've got a new field called notes and if I ever wanted to make a note on there, I could go back in here and I could say, I want to write a note and my note is important or whatever it is that I want to say. So just way of being able to add extra information if you like, to the normal folder structure. So good for you to know that that exists on the system also. Yeah. Is there any questions at all that

No, so far everything's very clear.

Great. Alright, well if there's no other questions, we'll obviously send this out to everybody so that you've got a copy of this presentation. Sometimes I get accused of talking too quickly and so it's probably good that you can use it in slow motion. And don't forget you've always got those other features which are always on the system, which is the ability to go across a document set and you can just run the search. I think it's still, even though we've got all this wonderful AI stuff, it's still really good. If I can just put in a term like search for impairment and I can come across and why did I do that? Am iRead, do I spell it incorrect? Oh, that's interesting. Oh look, I can tell you why, because I've got no folders selected, so it actually is working perfectly well. Let's do the same search and there's having a moment they're going, oh look, how could that be?

Yeah, so you've got to make sure there's folder select, I must have clicked it off for some reason. That's such a useful ability to do. And also the ability to refine that a little bit more with impairment and cannabis and within 10 words or something like that. So really drilling down, this is all in our knowledge base under help is a knowledge base. If you want to find out some more of the bullying operations you can use and then the ability just to go into these documents and be able to highlight a passage there that you want to refer back to and just to say, yeah, that's important to me, I want to put that under the issue, say impairment. And then you know that you can come back at a later date and you can run a report across the system and it'll come back under all your key issues. So while we've all got all this wonderful AI stuff and I think it's really amazing technology, I still think the basics of being able to search and drill down on the key information put in under the right subheadings is invaluable in terms of breaking matters down into their key issues and time. If there's no other questions, we might call it a day. Chicha, was there anything else that you thought we might want to talk about at all? What about the AI group that we've got?

So yeah, this is exciting times to be testing the AI features. We have an AI advisory group to which you are more than invited to join. Provide us with your feedback and help us shape how will the future of these new AI features that Stephen has showcased today. I'm going to share the form in the chat, so feel free to join the group.

So if you're interested in all this AI technology, we've got about I think 30 or 40 people that are already lawyers and different people that are involved. And so we'd love to have you involved if you want to be sort of part of transforming, I guess the way we work with AI in Australia. And I've also got a couple of people in the UK that are part of that group. So yeah, please feel free to join if it interests you. Thanks again for your time today. Hopefully that's been helpful. If you've got any other questions, feel free to come back to us. If you want us to run a specific session for your organisation, we're more than happy to do that. Thanks very much everybody. Thank you.