Briefpoint Unveils New Propounding Discovery Generator

In a conversation with Bob Ambrogi, Briefpoint founder Nathan Walter unveils its new Propounding Discovery module drafts 3 sets of outgoing discovery using a single pleading .pdf upload.

Briefpoint is for attorneys who are interested in incorporating AI into their practice without having to change how they practice. Briefpoint’s patented AI system drafts discovery response and request documents in minutes (instead of hours).

Questions asked in this video:

01:19 - How was Briefpoint started?

04:24 - What does the new Propounding Discovery Generator do in Briefpoint?

07:58 - Can you talk about AI's role in this new tool?

09:43 - What control does an attorney have over the documents generated by Briefpoint?

11:25 - How does Briefpoint handle the filing requirements of different states?

13:51 - How much time does Briefpoint actually save lawyers?

Transcript

00:00:07:07 - 00:00:29:23 Bob Ambrogi Welcome to LawNext PR, the podcast where we put a spotlight on the latest news coming out of the local tech industry. This is Bob Ambrogi, and in each sponsored episode of LawNext PR, I interview a legal tech company about its just released news or latest developments. Today we're going to be talking about a new tool for propounding discovery requests introduced by the legal tech company Briefpoint.

00:00:30:01 - 00:00:38:06 Bob Ambrogi And joining me to discuss this new feature is Nathan Walter, the CEO and co-founder of Briefpoint. Nathan, good to see you.

00:00:38:08 - 00:00:41:02 Nathan Walter And it's good to see you too, Bob.

00:00:41:04 - 00:00:51:20 Bob Ambrogi So before we dive into exactly what this new feature does, for those who may not be familiar, I want to give us an overview of Briefpoint. What you do. Yeah.

00:00:52:01 - 00:01:19:01 Nathan Walter So Briefpoint drafts, discovery responses and discovery requests. It's an out of the box solution where you basically got a Briefpoint. Com you create an account and you draft your propounding and responding discovery. It's very user friendly. You know we're not changing the world, but we are laser focused on propounding or responding to discovery. And our goal is to remove that work from litigation just entirely.

00:01:19:01 - 00:01:20:06 Nathan Walter Basically.

00:01:20:08 - 00:01:29:16 Bob Ambrogi And I'm always interested to know, because I know that you were a litigator earlier in your career. What was it that led you to want to give that up and do this?

00:01:29:18 - 00:01:56:06 Nathan Walter Well, I drafted a discovery response, and I wanted to die. So, there was there was a large demand for it. But, yeah, I practice for five years. I was on the West Coast, spent some time with Buckhalter, which is sort of a West Coast law firm. And I, as a litigator, I was inspired to do Briefpoint because of a mediation I had one day where basically very small room mediation.

00:01:56:06 - 00:02:19:07 Nathan Walter You're trying to negotiate a settlement before having an attorney's fees accrue. And as a associate, I think I was a fourth or fifth year associate at the time. Excuse me? I knew the facts of the case, and I knew my opposing party had no case, and they were just trying to get some money out of this borderline frivolous lawsuit.

00:02:19:09 - 00:02:21:19 Bob Ambrogi And I said, yeah.

00:02:21:21 - 00:02:48:11 Nathan Walter Which never happens every time. And, yeah, the opposing counsel was, you know, arguing, and he was going crazy. And then at one point he said, well, my client would never agree to that. And I showed him an email, had this big binder. I knew exactly what he was going to say. I showed him the email where his client, you know, the smoking gun email, basically, and the opposing counsel legitimately started crying in the mediation room and he would say, like, I've, you know, worked so hard on this case.

00:02:48:12 - 00:03:09:13 Nathan Walter And I was looking at my partner like, what is happening right now? This guy is a lunatic. And he gathered himself and said, I don't care. It doesn't matter. I'm going to go to court. I'm going to bang my fist on the table, and it's going to cost you so much to defend me that this $100,000 I'm asking for is going to be nothing.

00:03:09:15 - 00:03:39:02 Nathan Walter And I was infuriating. But he was right. So he left with that money and I. It was incredibly frustrating for me. And I had already sort of been involved in tech in the first I way with technology assisted review. And I thought, you know, there's got to be a way where we can automate some of these rote tasks in litigation so that my clients can defend themselves for longer.

00:03:39:04 - 00:04:02:14 Nathan Walter On the defense side. And then on the plaintiff's side, you can take on, you know, less or more risky cases because the potential financial exposure to use is lessened. So I started teaching myself coding, and the goal was to take out the edge or dull the edge of a common bleed dry tactic, which in litigation is often discovery.

00:04:02:16 - 00:04:27:00 Nathan Walter And that's what we set out doing. And I started building this platform. And then once I realized that there was a real way to actually eliminate this work, and in totality, I left my firm and I started building Briefpoint. And that's our goal. We're just trying to make litigation less financially ruinous for clients. While also making the work life of a litigator better because they don't need to do this really boring work.

00:04:27:02 - 00:04:46:19 Bob Ambrogi So. So what I've known have brought a Briefpoint up until now, has been seemed to seem to me to have been primarily focused on responding to discovery requests, upload a discovery request, generate the the kind of the rote responses that can be created and really lead the attorney to to then fill in what needs to be done beyond that.

00:04:47:01 - 00:04:56:04 Bob Ambrogi But this new feature that you're talking about today really enables litigators to also propound requests, right. So can you tell us about that?

00:04:56:06 - 00:05:20:06 Nathan Walter Absolutely. Yeah. It's been really exciting. So our discovery response module has been out since June of 2022. And we spent the last year fine tuning different AI models to generate this propounding update, where now what you can do is upload a pleading PDF, maybe complain, get an answer across compliant or really honestly, any document could be a deposition summary.

00:05:20:08 - 00:05:51:12 Nathan Walter And then our ten different systems will analyze that document. It will then generate a set of requests for admissions, a production demand or request or production and interrogatories all in one go. And it's actually really high quality work, because one of those systems that we have is our objection identification system. So when you're responding to a Briefpoint, will automatically review every request and lodge objections to those requests.

00:05:51:12 - 00:06:15:13 Nathan Walter And this is based on 230,000 samples of attorneys objecting to, requests. So that sort of acts like an attorney objecting. We took that model, that system, and we now have it review every propounding set or every propounding request. And whenever it identifies an objection like overbroad privilege, ambiguous, it will then rewrite the request to evade the objection.

00:06:15:13 - 00:06:40:12 Nathan Walter So what we're getting are these propounding discovery sets that are designed to defeat or lessen the likelihood of objection, so that you can get your information from the opposing party without having to dive into a large, drawn out discovery dispute, which is if you think discovery is bad motions to compel is is even worse because everybody hates judges hate it.

00:06:40:12 - 00:06:53:09 Nathan Walter Nobody wants to do it. It's pedantic. And so we wanted to make a product that actually inherently, had some sort of protocols or some way to lessen the likelihood of any sort of dispute.

00:06:53:11 - 00:07:12:08 Bob Ambrogi That's really interesting. So, so you're effectively taking some of what you've learned from creating responses to discovery requests in order to fine tune it. I don't mean in the sort of technical way, but but fine tune the process of generating discovery requests.

00:07:12:10 - 00:07:32:09 Nathan Walter Exactly. Yes. And we that's is sort of our long term product philosophy, where we look at the adversarial nature of litigation and whenever we generate and will generate new documents, we first train an AI to behave like an attorney or a judge if we have the data for that, in making counter arguments. And so we have this product that does counter arguments to some argument.

00:07:32:11 - 00:08:00:06 Nathan Walter And then we then once we have that really just nail down, then when we generate the arguments we have the counter argument system refine those to increase quality. And that's like something that a lot of our companies, they just talk about like efficiency gain efficiency. Well, using this adversarial process, we're able to also increase quality and reduce likelihood of disputes, given that we're sort of training it to avoid disputes.

00:08:00:06 - 00:08:01:00 Nathan Walter Right?

00:08:01:01 - 00:08:13:07 Bob Ambrogi Right. So I think it goes without saying, but you have actually said it, that this is using AI in order to generate these requests. So we could you talk a little bit more about how you're using AI here.

00:08:13:09 - 00:08:38:02 Nathan Walter Yeah. So we're using fine tuned models, where you know for our know we're and the fine tuned models are based on court documents that we've spent. I mean, my docket alarm receipt is about 400 pages long. But we yeah, we use downloaded court documents. We use data we've purchased from law firms. We don't use any user data or anything or any work product like that.

00:08:38:04 - 00:08:57:17 Nathan Walter Not that, you know, we need to necessarily, but also we don't we want to make sure our users are comfortable using our product. So we don't, you know, we just don't touch that. And often we have we can find sufficient things on court websites, but that often involves like manually downloading documents from court websites, which is a, a task I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

00:08:57:17 - 00:09:21:12 Nathan Walter But regardless, the fine tuned models are mostly GPT models, so we have three five GPT four. Oh, we also have other AI models that help with document processing. So we're using like Google and some computer vision stuff and this is all in the background. Our users are not prompt engineers. We it's all in the background and it happens all at the same time.

00:09:21:12 - 00:09:47:06 Nathan Walter And the AI that we use is not drafting everything all at once. Rather, we find that these large language models today are really good at specific tasks. And when you specify the task for a large model to make it smaller, you also greatly reduce the likelihood of hallucination. We also don't generate citations using any large language model, so there really are no hallucinations to begin with because we're not that ambitious.

00:09:47:08 - 00:10:04:21 Bob Ambrogi Right. And for the attorney using this that you, you you create this set of, of discovery, documents for them. What what control do they have over those documents after you've generated them or during the process of generating them?

00:10:04:23 - 00:10:25:18 Nathan Walter Yeah. So we show them when propounding discovery, the first thing we show them is all the information we're going to use to generate the discovery. So they upload a complaint, for example, and then we break that out into every cause of action, the document type, every single injury. We show them a timeline of the event, all the allegations, and they can review and control that information.

00:10:25:18 - 00:10:45:15 Nathan Walter To the extent, you know, maybe there was something that they want to ask questions about that wasn't in the document. Well, they can add that in. And so we show them this sort of we break out the steps we take, so that they can have control there. And then on the output document or the output before it's even put into word, they can see it's sort of map of the actual requests themselves.

00:10:45:17 - 00:11:03:14 Nathan Walter They can remove things, they can add in things. One thing they can add is their standard discovery. If they have standard discovery, they can just drag and drop that. So they have their standard questions and then the tailored questions additionally. So we give them a lot of control before it gets to word. And then when it's in word, it is just a word document.

00:11:03:14 - 00:11:27:03 Nathan Walter So they can make tweaks. But we want to make it really easy for them to review and ensure everything is up to their standards of quality before giving them a document. Because the last thing we want is someone to just click a button, get a document word, serve it on opposing counsel, and then realize something you know what was not generated to what they wanted and that, you know, we so we take steps to ensure.

00:11:27:03 - 00:11:38:17 Bob Ambrogi That, yeah, different states have different styles and other, other requirements around filing discovery documents. How do you address those differences among the states?

00:11:38:19 - 00:11:46:22 Nathan Walter Yeah, no, all 50 states and DC. So that is yeah, it is. Yeah. They do have

00:11:47:00 - 00:11:50:09 Bob Ambrogi They really hit a sore spot for you there. Oh my God.

00:11:50:11 - 00:12:19:05 Nathan Walter Yeah. So that is, something that we spent a ton of time on. And it is, it is crazy. So every document is formatted pursuant to local state drafting rules. Fine. Those rules are publicly available. We can make that happen, but that doesn't really tell you what the document actually looks like at all. The attorneys have customs, in Indiana, for example, at the top margin on the first captain page, there's a s colon, colon slash.

00:12:19:05 - 00:12:41:23 Nathan Walter And then there's some words. No. And that's on every document. No one can tell me why that's there. It's some artifact from the typewriting era, likely, but it's just there's these customs and traditions have been passed down in every state that is just used, because that's what that's what you need to do to make your document look like you're from that state.

00:12:42:01 - 00:13:02:07 Nathan Walter And so we've actually taken crazy, painstaking attention to detail steps to ensure that every document generated by Briefpoint is formatted pursuant to that state's formatting rules. And customs. And this is down to the pixel. This is a little I mean, this is kind of like a boring thing to talk about. But in Texas, for example, they have the T colon and then the telephone number under the attorney.

00:13:02:08 - 00:13:22:11 Nathan Walter This is times from a 12. And then they have the F colon fax number. Well times Roman 12 F and times Roman 12 t are one pixel difference where the f is one pixel shorter. So the colons are one pixel misaligned if you just use times Roman 12 for each. So we had to find a new font for the F and so that it looks like Times Roman 12.

00:13:22:11 - 00:13:40:02 Nathan Walter But is exactly aligned with the T on the Texas documents. And we took that level on every single state. And yeah, that's it's not the most exciting work, but once we've coded in, when you get a document, a Briefpoint, the idea is you don't need to tweak the formatting or anything, cause that's like sort of the process of document generation.

00:13:40:02 - 00:13:53:09 Bob Ambrogi If the goal is to save lawyers time, you don't want to be done and have to go back and reformat the whole darn thing and, and all of that after they get the document. And of course, all of this does end up in word, and they can make any changes or edits or whatever at that point, right?

00:13:53:11 - 00:13:55:05 Nathan Walter Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

00:13:55:06 - 00:14:09:19 Bob Ambrogi So, so if the goal that you set out to achieve, is to reduce the number, the amount of time that lawyers spend on propounding or responding to discovery documents, how much time do you save lawyers.

00:14:09:21 - 00:14:28:17 Nathan Walter So it depends on the complexity of the document. So if we're looking at an RFA response that's about a 99% time save because we can get all that content out. If we're looking at a request for production, you know, we're not doing document review. So the actual workflow that it emanates or is sort of caused by a request or production document review, we don't even touch that.

00:14:28:22 - 00:14:54:17 Nathan Walter But if you're looking at the actual document itself, we can reduce the time by hours per document easily. Really like honestly, you're probably saving 7/8 of your time. So like users will say, it took them an eighth of the time it would normally take. But because we're really going over all this rote stuff, you're and you can get these documents, by the way, within 45 seconds of your first signing, you can have a document that's ready to serve.

00:14:54:19 - 00:15:06:08 Nathan Walter So we're seeing huge time saves. And the reason we're saying seeing huge time saves is because we're so focused on like these one document types, you know, so like we've sort of nailed those things.

00:15:06:10 - 00:15:09:14 Bob Ambrogi Yeah. And what's going to cost me as a lawyer to use this?

00:15:09:16 - 00:15:34:10 Nathan Walter We start at 89 bucks a month. So, you know, we, we really are used often by small solo firms. We have some medium sized firms and all that, but, people use Briefpoint, especially when they there can't find sufficient support support staff to do this work for them, or they're having trouble finding paralegal work. So we find people that are in smaller law firms using Briefpoint.

00:15:34:10 - 00:15:37:05 Nathan Walter So our pricing is fit for that market.

00:15:37:06 - 00:15:43:16 Bob Ambrogi Yeah. Anything else you'd like to share with our audience before we wrap up here today?

00:15:43:18 - 00:15:57:17 Nathan Walter Sure. Oh, yeah. Briefpoint’s free you to try, by the way, so you can test it for free. If you go to Briefpoint and click Get Started, you can there's no credit card required. We don't wait for you not to cancel to charge you or anything like that. Totally free to try. So if you're interested at all, please give it a shot.

00:15:57:18 - 00:16:02:04 Bob Ambrogi It's briefpoint.ai, I not

00:16:02:06 - 00:16:03:00 Nathan Walter yes, oh briefpoint.com, we own that domain.

00:16:03:04 - 00:16:08:01 Bob Ambrogi Oh, okay. So go. Go wherever you want with the word Briefpoint at that.

00:16:08:03 - 00:16:09:07 Nathan Walter Exactly.

00:16:09:09 - 00:16:15:11 Bob Ambrogi All right, well, listen, thanks so much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure to talk. I didn't hear about this, new developments.

00:16:15:13 - 00:16:17:08 Nathan Walter Thank you. Bob, I appreciate the time. It's always a pleasure.

00:16:17:10 - 00:16:36:05 Bob Ambrogi Yeah, well, that does it for today's episode. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube or at, law next. Underscore PR on YouTube, and you can also find all the episodes on the LawNext Legal Tech directory under the resources tab. This is Bob Ambrogi. Thanks so much for listening.