While the use of artificial intelligence in the legal profession has received some bad press over the past year in instances when ChatGPT bungled cases, AI technology has been used for years outside the courtroom for investigative purposes and is becoming more efficient all the time.
One area where AI tools have delivered real results is in helping to put away suspects targeting children.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has been leveraging AI technology to save time and precious resources to identify and eventually prosecute child predators at scale.
The non-profit – which works with law enforcement to prevent child abductions, recover missing kids and combat child exploitation – uses AI technology made by eDiscovery firm Reveal, which saved NCMEC over 4,000 hours in review and investigation time and helped them process more than 21,000 cases of missing children last year.
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Gavin Portnoy, vice president of NCMEC's Strategic Advancement & Partnerships Division, told FOX Business that in one instance, a defendant's attorneys served the non-profit with a subpoena that required combing through some 500,000-plus pages of documents as part of numerous pre-trail challenges in an attempt to have the criminal case dismissed.
"In the past most of our legal team would need to drop everything to complete the document review/redaction/production manually and meet the delivery deadline just a few weeks later, as required by the court so the criminal case can move forward and not risk any sanctions, or worse, to risk any possibility of the case being dismissed," Portnoy wrote in a statement. "NCMEC’s Office of Legal Counsel instead saved hundreds of lawyer hours by utilizing Reveal's Logikcull technology to quickly and efficiently handle it."
Portnoy emphasized that NCMEC does not use Reveal AI for anything directly related to child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and none of the files or documents loaded into the software for legal review are CSAM.
Reveal's founder and CEO, Wendell Jisa, told FOX Business he is thrilled that his company's AI tools are being used to catch predators, especially as a father of three. "But," he said, "what I think is actually really interesting and compelling is the fact that this technology was not created to do that."
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"It was created to do something different on a business purpose in order to essentially get through massive amounts of data…for big law, for big corporations, in order to save money, save time," Jisa explained. "But I love the fact that technology can be repurposed to solve bigger problems, bigger world problems."
Jisa launched Reveal 12 years ago with the aim of building a repository for legal data to be housed. However, the company, now valued at upwards of $1 billion, has evolved and has established itself as a category leader in AI tools specifically centered around eDiscovery and investigations.
The company has a large variety of AI-driven tools that are utilized by law firms of all sizes – and now, law enforcement agencies across the globe – to comb through massive amounts of data. However, NCMEC is just one of the success stories Reveal has heard from clients.
One major law firm uses Reveal technology to detect and prevent bribery and cartel practices within massive enterprise organizations. A Fortune 50 healthcare company used the company's tools to conduct an internal investigation to determine whether a former employee stole intellectual property, enabling the firm to take swift action and saving more than $1.6 million in attorney review costs.
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Countless government entities utilize Reveal tools, too, from local school districts to federal agencies.
"It crosses such a broad spectrum of the entire legal industry," Jisa said, "and is going beyond leveraging AI that was built for one thing, and now solving problems in other areas that actually are impacting the world."
