In a major new product announcement, Seattle-founded eDiscovery and information governance provider Lighthouse will today (27 May) unveil Lighthouse AI Search, which leverages both predictive and generative AI to help attorneys interrogate data at any point in a case.
The AI-first search enables anyone, regardless of their familiarity with traditional search syntax, to query an entire document set and receive back an answer to their question, together with the specific documents and passages within those documents that underpin how the answer was reached.
One of the early adopters is Cleary Gottlieb, where Christian Mahoney, counsel and global head of eDiscovery and litigation technology said: “Having the ability for any attorney to interrogate all the data related to a matter is tremendous. Lighthouse AI Search empowers our attorneys to easily and quickly find key information at any point during a matter, meaning they can develop case strategy sooner, validate or investigate new information easily, and make confident, data-informed decisions.”
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Dan Brassil, executive director of search at Lighthouse, said that the new release puts the power of both a predictive model and GenAI model into the hands of users. “It allows them to do a natural language search over their data and what you get back are answers as opposed to just documents,” he said.
Traditionally in eDiscovery, teams run searches, receive back a number of documents, and then have to review those documents to synthesise that information. Brassil said: “What AI Search allows you to do is ask questions as if you’re asking your associate. You get back an answer and then you get access to the documents that support that answer.”
Brassil explained that finding the documents that support the answer is based off predictive AI, and the summarisation is based off GenAI, commenting: “That’s because predictive AI is very, very good at finding and classifying information. And GenAI is really good at summarisation and synthesis. Let the predictive AI do what it’s really good at and let the GenAI do what it is good at: that’s what this tool allows us to do.”
He added: “As far as I know, this is the first tool out there that is combining predictive AI and Gen AI and putting it into the hands of the end user.”
AI Search is a retrieval-augmented generation model, meaning that while the underlying LLMs are trained on world knowledge, the answers provided are always contained within the documents itself. Brassil said: “That really reduces any chance of hallucination.”
Where it does give you an answer, you’re able to go straight to the portion of the document where the answer comes from. “Moreover, when you click on a document, you get a summary of that document,” Brassil said, “so it’s really, really helpful and powerful.”
Lighthouse has taken feedback from its early adopter firms and the use cases include internal investigations, where in-house attorneys are looking to quickly gauge their exposure. Brassil says: “The speed to knowledge is the real game changer.”
This release has the possibility of democratising search, with all of the various ramifications that may flow from that in terms of who conducts the search and at what stage. “In terms of getting started, you just ask whatever question comes to mind,” Brassil says.