Robert Ambrogi Blog
If context switching is the bane of AI adoption in law firms, legal technology company Syntheia may just have the balm.
Recognizing that lawyers spend much of their days in email, it has developed an AI-powered document analysis tool that allows lawyers to obtain summaries and insights from legal documents by simply forwarding them from their email to a dedicated email address.
Syntheia developed the product in collaboration with the AmLaw firm Weil Gotshal & Manges and unveiled it to the public today during a demonstration at the SKILLS conference presented by Horace Wu, Syntheia’s founder and CEO, and Rita Jennings, senior director of practice systems at Weil Gotshal.
In an interview ahead of today’s demonstration, Wu told me that the product aims to address adoption challenges common to legal AI tools by integrating directly into lawyers’ existing email workflows.
The tool enables lawyers to send documents and email threads to a firm-specific email address and receive AI-generated summaries and analysis in response. Users can include specific instructions or context in their email, and the system will tailor its analysis accordingly.
The tool enables lawyers to send documents and email threads to a firm-specific email address and receive AI-generated summaries and analysis in response.
When the service responds, its response also comes by email. The email includes a link that gives the user access to a mobile-optimized chatbot for follow-up questions about the analyzed documents.
In developing the product, Syntheia found that there was very little take up of existing AI platforms at law firms, Wu said.
“Lawyers are on their emails all the time. You can try and pry it out of their hands, but they’re not going to let it out of their hands. … So we designed a solution that can interface directly via email. And that means all lawyers have to do is flick an email to the service and it comes back and intelligently answers the question or summarizes the document for them.”
While the system has so far been piloted by Weil Gotshal, another firm is starting a pilot this month. With today’s announcement, the product is generally available to everyone.
Knowledge Management Function
Beyond document analysis, the tool serves a knowledge management function by capturing not just the documents being analyzed but also the context in which lawyers are using them, Wu told me during a preview ahead of today’s launch.
“For labeling and building a collection of precedents, a law firm now can just go, ‘Oh yeah, here’s why they sent it in,'” Wu noted. “You’re building up a KM database… organically getting that human context data.”
The email includes a link that gives the user access to a mobile-optimized chatbot for follow-up questions about the analyzed documents.
The system operates behind law firm firewalls for security, and each conversation is assigned a unique identifier that can only be accessed by the specific lawyer who initiated it. The tool will be available as either a standalone product or as part of Syntheia’s broader technology stack.
As of our conversation, Wu said that the pricing had not been finalized. Whatever the price, it will include both the email functionality and associated chatbot features. The system requires minimal setup for individual lawyers, though firms will need to work with their information security teams for deployment behind their firewalls.
The product includes an API that allows firms to integrate the summaries and analysis into other systems, such as knowledge management platforms. While Wu expects competitors to eventually offer similar email-based functionality, Syntheia appears to be first to market with this approach.
The development of the tool was driven by the observation that while general AI platforms may be adequate for some tasks, they often fall short of law firm requirements. Through testing, the collaborating firm found that summarization was one of the few AI functions that met their standards, leading to the focus on creating a specialized tool for that purpose.