How Filevine Brings AI to Government Legal Teams (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Thank you all so much for joining us. Really excited to get to know you all a bit today, introduce you to some of the Filevine government team, show you some of our solutions. But today, as you all should know by signing up for this, you're at our AI for Government legal teams exploring what's possible. So we are really excited to bring together this group. We have folks attending today from a variety of different agencies across the U.S. from district attorney's office to attorney generals, the public defenders, a few different civil agencies. So really representative of an interesting group here. And by virtue of attending this webinar, I would say you all are part of the kind of cutting edge innovators, early adopters within government, leading with curiosity about how AI can help your offices run more efficiently with better outcomes to ultimately serve justice for our citizens. So thank you all for being here and thanks for being curious and interested in what's possible. We are running a recording on this today. So we'll be sure to send this out to you afterward. And please feel free to pop into the Q&A throughout the webinar. Any questions that come up, throw them out there. Then on my team, we'll answer a few in real time. And then we'll also have a Q&A section at the end of the webinar too. So put it out. Anything that's coming to mind in real time, we welcome it. So really quickly, we'd like to introduce our team. He'll be talking to you today. So my name is Tess Manning. I'm our VP of sales for our government team here at Filevine based in Salt Lake City. I've been at Filevine for a few months, but I've been in the legal technology space for a number of years. And I'm really excited about what we're building here at Filevine for the public sector. We also have Ben Hanson on the call, who's one of our experienced government account executives. Ben works closely with many public sector organizations to modernize their legal and case management operations, helping agencies streamline their workflows and better serve communities. So he'll be a great practical partner in helping answer some questions today and talk about how we work with other customers. Hannah Fields is a member of our sales engineering team. And she brings a practitioner's perspective to her work. We're very lucky to have her here. Before joining Filevine, she actually worked as a program analyst with the public defender's office in Salt Lake County, where she actually led key components of their Filevine implementation in 2023. So she knows our platform inside and out, and will give you a real honest perspective on what it's like to take the jump into modernizing your case management technology. Hannah also understands deeply the day-to-day challenges that offices face, and will be able to speak to that. And lastly, we have Tony Klinger, who is another sales engineer here at Filevine, who has 10 years of experience as a government attorney himself. He was a prosecuting attorney and deputy attorney general, both in criminal and civil law. Tony's incredibly passionate about empowering agencies with the proper tools to serve their communities. So as we go out through the conversation today, we'll talk about what it's like to work with Filevine. We'll jump into some real world examples of how agencies have seen impact with our platform. Tony's actually gonna walk us through some applications of some of our AI tools for government agencies. And then we'll talk about what does the future look like? As you all mentioned in the poll, many of you are just in the early innings of looking at AI tools. So what kind of hurdles are you facing? What's gonna be important as you evaluate and start to try new products? And then we'll close with Q&A. So as you are all instantly aware of, we know from working with hundreds of agencies and talking to thousands annually that government legal teams in particular face growing caseloads that are managed by limited staff. And of course, outdated legacy systems that you may be locked into a contract from, you may be tied to some on-prem services, you name it. It's a lot to take on change management and to figure out how to evaluate for new tech. We understand that. And so we know it's a big effort to look at new technology. But on the flip side, there's a cost to not changing. And so we're gonna jump in to chat a little bit about what the needs are that we hear from you all and why you need to modernize.

[00:04:55] Speaker 2: Yeah, I wanted to dive in here. I appreciate everyone participating in this. Some of the things that I've been seeing, public expectations are rising. People want transparency, faster service and clear accountability across all the organizations that are representative today. And to meet those demands, we need secure compliant tools that can scale as you grow. Modernization isn't optional anymore. It's essential to making sure we can deliver effective, trustworthy public service. And Filevine is here to ensure that we provide the best possible technology to everyone within the public sector. We're extremely passionate about that as a company and make sure that to Tessa's point, that we're here to help manage all those workloads that you all have on a constant basis that are a lot higher than maybe what they would have been a few years ago. And then with data only going up into the right. And on this next slide here, Filevine is built specifically for governments with security, compliance and standards that agencies are going to need to rely on. We've already laid that groundwork for a safe and confident move into AI. There are the right guardrails in place and governance baked in to ensure that the right control, clear controls and audits are available for your teams as Filevine helps you modernize responsibly while staying fully accountable and utilizing tools that are readily available at your fingertips. But we want to make sure we take that cautious approach and Filevine is built specifically to enable you to do that.

[00:06:38] Speaker 3: All right, as Tessa already mentioned, my name is Hannah. I'm a sales engineer at Filevine. And before working for Filevine, I worked as a program analyst for the public defender's office. My role there really focused on reporting data to stakeholders and analyzing our workflows and our different software to identify opportunities for growth and just efficiencies and improvement. But while I worked at the PD's office, one thing that became immediately clear is just the evolution of the criminal legal world. And how many government agencies are still trying to catch up. The biggest shift I saw was the move from paper or physical discovery to digital discovery. Digital discovery is hugely beneficial, but that transformation requires so many changes in workflows and storage and processes. And at the PD office, we struggled with that. Mainly we stored all of our digital discovery on what we call a SAN, or like an external hard drive on premises. And that was difficult because we kept running out of storage. We kept running into capacity issues. Whenever that happened, we would have to stop uploading new discovery and make more storage to add our new discovery where it belonged. It just caused a lot of logistical challenges for our office. And running out of capacity was one of the issues, but sometimes our SAN would completely fail and we wouldn't actually have access to our discovery at all. And so not having access to discovery in a public defense office is pretty scary and pretty challenging. And we knew we needed to make some changes in order to address that issue. One of the biggest benefits about moving to Filevine is the fact that there is scalable, unlimited cloud storage. And it's just a great way to modernize your storage systems and your office as a whole. When we moved to the cloud, when we moved to Filevine, we mostly moved because we wanted that unlimited cloud storage. That was a huge component of our transition and it helped us in a lot of ways. It eliminated the unpredictability of a physical infrastructure. We also got rid of that maintenance burden. We didn't have to keep making more room for more digital discovery and the downtime. We eliminated the downtime that came with the failure of our SAN. But it also just allowed us to grow and to add more information and to not be worried about those issues. So the unlimited storage was a huge element of why we moved, but there were a lot of other features that Filevine had to offer that really brought us into utilizing that system in a meaningful way. One of the features is the fact that Filevine is really customizable. And so Filevine's customizability really allows government agencies to have control of the data that they're collecting and why they're collecting it. In our previous case management system, we always had to work with vendor engineers in order to add a new field. And it usually came with additional costs and wait times, and there wasn't much flexibility. So we rarely ever did it. We rarely ever added data points that we needed to collect to adapt to the things that people wanted to learn about our clients and about our workload. When we moved to Filevine, we moved to a low code solution, meaning that anybody can really learn how to customize this system and they can come in and they can add the different fields or the different data points that they need to collect in order to do their job in a meaningful way. It allowed us to track data related to local initiatives. It allowed us to track data related to our clients and the outcomes on their cases more effectively. We were also able to respond to legislative or policy changes that had occurred in Salt Lake County. And it helped us create a system that really just matched our current workflow. But one of the biggest challenges I had before we moved to Filevine was just making data-driven decisions for the people who worked in our office. And so one of my jobs was to essentially produce an attorney workload report, just comparing all of our attorneys and their caseloads and understanding what those look like in our offices. And in our previous system, I had to generate this massive report once a month. The report usually comprised of 200 separate attorney reports. And what was really frustrating about creating this report is a lot of the time when I was creating it, by the time I finished, it was already outdated because it took a whole day to comprise this attorney report. So it was extremely time-consuming. And then to top it off, the data wasn't necessarily relevant after I created the report. We would depend on that report for 30 days and we would keep assigning attorneys cases based on that report without being able to pull in more accurate up-to-date data in an easy way. So moving to Filevine really helped with this because Filevine has a native reporting tool that's super dynamic and easy to use. But we also offer an integration with Periscope. We partner with them. Periscope is a business analytics tool that you can use to report on your data in a really timely fashion. So with Periscope, we were able to push our Filevine data into Periscope automatically multiple times a day. So we went from having one report that took a whole day to build, we used it for 30 days to being able to build full dashboards that were interactive, outlined attorney caseloads, and really gave us insight to making equitable case assignments throughout our office. And so with the data and the customizability of Filevine, it can really help you work with your stakeholders and work with the different people who wanna understand the work you do to show that work in a meaningful way and to show that data in a meaningful way. But what I learned from my experience with working with government agencies is that we're all still dealing with some of the same challenges. We face aging infrastructures, limited flexibility, and increasing volume of digital data. And Filevine really offers a way forward. Filevine offers you a secure, scalable, customizable platform that helps public sector organizations modernize, adapt, and ultimately serve their communities more effectively.

[00:13:07] Speaker 1: Thanks, Anna. And I love that going back to the poll from the beginning of the webinar, most of you mentioned extracting key data from cases, searching case information, and managing caseloads as key priorities right now. So thanks for touching on all of those too, Hannah. But let's turn it over to Tony now to show us the product in action.

[00:13:30] Speaker 4: Absolutely. And one thing that I'll mention is the real benefit of, like Hannah was talking about, in modernizing your entire case management and document management system is now we have a wealth of information that we can layer our AI into where it naturally fits within the workflows, but also allows practitioners to be able to make quicker and more informed decisions about their cases. So for example, here we're in a criminal case. We have an AI feature called our AI fields, where in one of our custom sections, as I scroll to the bottom, I've uploaded a handful of, in this case, police reports. And AI was able to give me summaries, a list of key evidence, and even possible ambiguities from those reports based on some predefined AI prompts that are working in the background. This is just one example as far as police reports, but these AI fields can analyze a whole host of different document types, from medical records to deposition transcripts, police reports, a whole group of different records that you as practitioners are using every day. But one of the main tenants of AI with its incorporation into Filevine is it always allows for the attorney to review that work. It takes what the AI does very well in analyzing a large amount of documents and pairs it with what you do really well in managing your cases and making strategic decisions. So here with that AI review from the AI fields, I'm able to review that side-by-side with the reports to verify. I could come in and add notes or even links to specific pages within those reports for better accessibility and visibility of that data. The real benefit of having these run against predefined prompts that are built right into your case management templates is that now on all of my cases, I can have similar results without having to put in extra work. It automates that. In addition to being able to analyze documents both through those fields as well as some custom prompting that you can do, we also have it built into our document generation as well. So here we're leveraging a tool called Filevine Document Assembly where it's pulling in relevant information about the case, but we've actually baked in a custom AI prompt right into this document template. So in this case, I've directed the AI to look into our case summary notes and our documents to generate a list of facts or a summary of facts in a paragraph version. So you can see here, there's the date, the events unfolded at this location resulting in a deliberate fire, et cetera. At any point as the attorney, I can come in and make edits to this. So maybe I just don't like that sentence that the AI generated. I could come in and add my own touches to it. It is just a great way to jumpstart that work for you. I can't tell you how many times I sat to reply to a motion or draft my own and I get to the facts or procedure section and just kind of blinked out and wished I knew where to start. So this gives you that step up. Additionally, a recent product development that was announced is called our Draft AI. And it allows you to interact with your documents in a whole new, more kind of interactive way that has access, again, to all of the data that's already within your system, whether it's in specific documents or across your data. So it has layered a chat box right on top of this tool. And I've actually kind of preloaded a couple of prompts in here. I asked it to copy opposing counsel's interrogatories for this response. They can be found in a specific document. And then it verifies what it believes you want it to do. So it gives you that kind of that check on it to say, hey, is this what you want? Can I proceed? And so I'm gonna prompt it to say, yes, proceed. And at this point, it's going to pull that information from the document, extract it, and then put it into this document, saving some time and saving some copy and errors. This is still in testing, but we're excited that it will soon have a lot wider release and be able to be put in the hands of you as practitioners. Some of the applications of this, this is an example of responding to interrogatories, but it really is practice area agnostic. You could use this to draft a motion to suppress on the public defender side, a motion to revoke bond, civil litigation documents or discovery documents, even like a hearing prep notes so that you're prepared to go and make oral arguments. So as you can see, as it's been thinking, it was able to pull that information and put that right into our document. Similar to before, I can always come and verify and check this. This is a fairly straightforward prompt where it's just copying information. And once it's all done, I'm going to ask it to go through and make responses to those interrogatories as well. Again, by accessing all of that data, it really transforms the platform from just case management and just document management to a full legal operating intelligence system. As we keep going, sorry, this has taken a little bit longer than I anticipated, but it is really pretty amazing what it's able to do. So here in just a second, it's going to finish this and allow me to put in my next prompt. And it uses what are called the gentic workflows within our AI to where it's going to be able to intuitively understand the questions that you use and set itself up to give you the best results. One thing to point out is that throughout the system, this is a completely secure AI use. It doesn't have access to outside sources. It's just looking internally to your case and it has a zero-day retention policy. So it's not going to train the AI on your data or your client agency's data or your client's data. I'm going to jump back into our criminal case over here and highlight what I think is my favorite AI tool built into FileVine, it's called chat with your case. And what it is, is it's a chat bar, similar to what we just saw, but you're able to, let me just kind of organize this a little bit. You're able to ask any question about your case, whether that is, you know, something more along the case management side, like what deadlines are coming up, or maybe we want summaries of documents or of case history. So I can come in and just say, hey, I would like to see a summarized timeline of the events from October 28th, which was the date of incident here. And so it's going to, again, access all of the data from within your case and pull that in to a single place where you'll always have that ability to check your sources. So as you can see in near real time, it is providing those answers and not only providing the answers, but showing the source materials where it's finding those answers. So you can always trust, but verify. I can open that up, see the document that's pulling in, or a full list of sources at the end. It also will highlight the specific areas from the document where it's finding that information. In addition to just basic summary, this tool can also be a little bit of a strategic tool as well. And I guess before I get there, let me say as somebody who had the privilege of inheriting multiple different caseloads throughout my legal career, where somebody got reassigned or moved on from the office, a tool like this would have been a godsend to be able to quickly come up to speed on the case without having to go through and dive through every specific section and document. This would certainly accelerate that ability. But I could come in and ask it, like I said, something more strategic. So for example, what issues and biases should I be concerned about during jury selection? Because it has been trained and it understands that we're in a legal context, it can help analyze your cases within that framework. So here, I loved jury selection. Oh, I loved going to trial. Jury selection was probably my least favorite part of that. But this would be a great place to jump off. Like I said, I wanna bank my entire trial preparation on this tool. But here, it will give you a starting point of where you can go. From here, I gotta ask a follow-up question, provide me a couple of questions for each topic that could get to those biases and what answer should I be looking for to identify those jurors that might not be the best fit for this case. So really, when it comes to this chat with your case tool, kind of the sky's the limit. It really is a powerful way to access and to leverage all of the data that's in your case, all of the documents that you're processing to be able to, again, empower you to do what you do even better.

[00:24:50] Speaker 1: Thanks, Tony. That was an excellent walkthrough of some high-level practical tools that we have available within Filevine, as I'm sure you can imagine. That demo could go on for hours. There's a lot of powerful ways of applying our generative AI tools on top of the tools that we have available in the Filevine platform. So I'm gonna go ahead and wrap up here. Thank you. So again, kind of running through some of the key functionality that you all are looking for as you're exploring AI tools. Again, referencing back to that poll, a lot of you mentioned summarizing case files and documents, drafting motions and reports, searching case information faster. So again, I'm gonna go ahead and wrap up here. Thanks, Tony. Thank you so much. I'm gonna go ahead and turn it back over to you, Tony. Thanks, everyone. Thanks so much. Thanks, Tony. Thank you. So again, calling out some of the ways that the Filevine can be your assistant there and what Tony showed us today. But we know, you know, on the flip side, there are some practical hurdles to actually implementing, selecting and implementing AI right now across all enterprises, right? And in particular for government agencies where there is a higher standard for security. And we understand that, right? And so as Ben mentioned, we are building our tools to be available, you know, in our CJIS environments, in our FedRAMP environments. So we are currently in the FedRAMP marketplace and are building our AI tools to be able to meet those requirements as well. So this is all very top of mind for us and it's a journey, right? And so we are excited to continue partnering and working with our customers on what they need in terms of security in order to be able to adopt tools. But as you think in general about finding the right foundational case management and document management systems that are meeting those security standards, you know, you can rest assured that Filevine is going to continue innovating and building AI technology to meet those standards. And I know most of you, if not all, mentioned that security and compliance concerns are your number one obstacle to adopting AI tools right now. So we definitely understand that. The other thing that a lot of you mentioned in the poll is that limited staffing and training capacity is another hurdle to, you know, bringing on a new tool, which is completely understandable. Hopefully in what you saw today with Tony, you'll see that our UI is very user-friendly. We, you know, Tony always says it should be easy enough for an attorney to be able to make changes in the system to be able to navigate it. We know we have a lot of technologists on the call today, so no offense to anyone. But it really, like, it's supposed to be very, very simple to navigate. And hopefully you saw that with the chat with the case functionality or the draft AI functionality. It's very fast to learn, and we are here to help train your team during implementation and are available for any questions as you get familiar with the products. So as you think about, you know, what's next for your teams, for Filevine, as we keep iterating together on building tools for agencies, we talked about the security, of course, and I think just thinking about readiness, right? Having your data in the right place, having the right people trained on modern technology within your office so that when you are ready to make a decision on what AI tools you want to start with and dip your toes in, you know, you're ready. And so that's something that we keep in mind as we build with our partners. Great, so kind of wrapping up, just want to reiterate before we move into the Q&A section that Filevine is leading with security, compliance, trust. If there's one thing you take away from today, it's that. And we will continue to keep in mind and build AI at, you know, at the public sector's pace. We want to help get these tools into the hands of offices as quickly as possible while keeping in mind the realities of what's going on. So I'm going to turn over to Ben to talk through, you know, how we can actually get in touch with you and start sharing some of these tools.

[00:29:20] Speaker 2: Yes, definitely. And it has been an absolute pleasure, like it was said at the beginning, being able to work in the public sector, be inside some of these offices across the country, see what you all deal with on a day-to-day basis. What is on the screen currently is a QR code where you can see a personalized demonstration of Filevine. We, as mentioned earlier within the call, we are catered to work across multiple different practice areas in an attorney general's office to district attorneys, public defenders, city attorneys, civil agencies, you know, the list goes on and on on what we can really do and work with. So excited to actually go ahead and meet with you all on a more personal base, excuse me, a more personal basis instead of just in this webinar. So please do not hesitate to reach out and we'll be happy to walk through all of Filevine's capabilities with you.

[00:30:17] Speaker 1: Great. And the Q&A box is open for business. So please don't be shy. We would love to hear your questions. We know this is a complex moment for you all in thinking about what's possible with AI. Does anyone have any questions coming to mind? Let's pop it into the Q&A box. Has anyone, is anyone using any AI tools today with their legal teams that have been working well? That might be a good place to start. Maybe still exploring. Was there any tool today or feature today that Tony showed that looked the most interesting to you? Okay, I'll try not to call on someone, but all right, let's see, do we have, okay, we have a question. Great, let's see. I see from Heather, will this eliminate a physical file or can?

[00:31:33] Speaker 4: Yeah, so with Filevine, the idea is it can take all of the data that you need for your case management, whether that's document management, specific information, communications, email integrations, and bring that all under one file. So it can take all of the data that you need for your case management, communications, email integrations and bring that all under one roof with the ability to layer the AI on top of all of that data. So yes, this can absolutely replace your physical files. It is completely web-based and browser-based and mobile optimized. So in addition to being able to work on that there at your desk, you can work from a phone so it is a very robust, full legal operating intelligence system.

[00:32:30] Speaker 1: Great, and Shannon asks, when can we start using this in government? That's a great question, Shannon, kind of goes back to the specificities of security across each individual office. So some of these tools are, you know, CEGIS compliant already, certain offices don't require CEGIS and so really just depends on your individual office, you know, what specifically is available. So for example, the document drafting that Tony showed today is clear for all compliance levels, you know, from SOC 2, Type 2, CEGIS. There are certain functionalities that we're building into our CEGIS environment right now that will be done early next year. And then there's of course, the whole beast of FedRAMP compliance and some of our products are already FedRAMP compliant and we're working on now. And as you imagine the AI compliance landscape is evolving and so those are conversations that we would definitely want to have with you one-on-one to understand what requirements are within your specific agency.

[00:33:35] Speaker 3: Great question.

[00:33:39] Speaker 1: Okay, and we have one from Josh, can we upload documents and have AI pull out key details like case number, client name, filing date, offense date and so on and auto-fill our intake fields? Love this question.

[00:33:53] Speaker 4: Hannah, do you want to take that one?

[00:33:56] Speaker 3: Yeah, of course. So right away, Josh, the AI fields that Tony showed initially, those can extract different data points from your different documents that you upload. So you can prompt them and pull out specific data related to those documents in a field. But you can also, we have a feature coming that's not released yet that's called AI Field Extract or AI Suggestions and that is going to map certain document types and pull out the data for you. That was one that I thought would be good for opening cases or gathering basic data around the cases in your clients. And then I don't know if you've ever looked at it, Josh, but there's also the client portal where you can use intake forms to gather that data but clients self-report on that data. That's not AI technically.

[00:34:48] Speaker 4: And I will say like that's just a testament to Filevine's commitment to AI and being on the cutting edge of kind of developments with what it is capable and how it can interact with your case information. I'm really excited for that field suggestion AI. It's gonna increase accuracy and save offices like yours, Josh, a ton of time. And with the new drafting tool and others that are on the horizon, we're just getting started. I heard recently the phrase that somebody mentioned that AI is not going to take over lawyers' jobs but lawyers who use AI will take over lawyers' jobs who aren't using AI. And I believe that that is the state of AI in the legal field and that it will continue to be more and more true as we go on.

[00:35:48] Speaker 1: Perfect. And then we have a quick follow-up actually from Josh asking if AI extractions will include charges and the code sections.

[00:35:57] Speaker 4: That's a really great question. And because that is a feature that has just been announced but it's still in development, what I can say is from what has been announced is that it would be able to map to specific fields and custom fields within your own file line, build out and case templates. So theoretically, as if you have fields to pull that information or put that information into the AI field suggestions should be able to populate that data.

[00:36:36] Speaker 1: Okay. Have a question from Heather. When switching over to this system, how long does that process usually take? Yeah, great question. So Ben, do you wanna tackle talking about our implementation process?

[00:36:48] Speaker 2: Yeah, I was gonna say I can hop in on that one. Great question. Typically, this is going to depend on the agency and how many people you have and what that migration or switch looks like. We work with agencies that are coming from all levels of a starting point, whether that's utilizing a case management system currently or there are some that I've worked with that are utilizing a system sparingly and utilizing manual files. So a transition looks different for those types of agencies, but we have multiple different implementation partners that work specifically with our government agencies to pull that information into file line with you. And typically, that can range anywhere from a couple of months to maybe six months, depending on once again, the agency size and complexity of your implementation or migration. But it's something that we like to scope through and walk through with you all step-by-step to ensure that we're providing you with the best possible experience.

[00:37:51] Speaker 1: Great. And Stacey, do you have tech help to add fields or something similar at any time a customer may need without extra charges? Is that included?

[00:38:05] Speaker 4: Yeah, I can take that. So as part of the implementation process that Ben explained, you would have help setting up your build initially. If you find down the road that you need to add additional fields, you'll be trained on and given access for admin users to be able to make those adjustments as needed. And as Hannah mentioned during her portion of the presentation, it is a no-code environment. I kind of joke, as Tess mentioned, that it's so easy even an attorney can do it, right? I don't have a technical background, but I can come in and add fields or update those templates as needed. So it is very user-friendly. We'd also always be here. If you did have some need for additional help or a refresher on how to do that, you could reach out to our team and our support. Our support team would gladly walk you through that.

[00:39:06] Speaker 1: All right, we can pause the Q&A for now. And if you all have additional questions, again, please find time to talk with our team. We'd love to walk through your specific team's current technology stack, ideal workflows, what you have in mind for modernization next year to see how we can partner with you on exploring those changes. So definitely scan the QR code or reach out to us directly. We're really happy to chat, even if you're in the early innings and aren't quite sure what you're looking for yet, we can show you the art of what's possible. But thank you all for joining today. Really great to see that you're all interested in looking for something next year when it comes to AI tools and we're, yeah, we will be continuing to build for you on this side of the house. So stay tuned for more updates and looking forward to speaking with you all soon. Thank you.