Extract from Reveal’s article, “How AI Agents Are Moving eDiscovery Work Upstream: From Scoping to Strategy.”
eDiscovery has traditionally sat downstream of case strategy. Attorneys set direction, then hand data off to a technical team that scopes, collects, and reviews it, often reporting back only once a phase is complete. Thomson Reuters Institute’s research on agentic AI adoption in the legal industry found that about half of surveyed organizations are either already using or actively considering agentic AI, even though widespread adoption remains under 20% today. That gap between interest and deployment is exactly where the handoff model between eDiscovery and strategy is starting to break down.
Legal agentic AI refers to AI systems capable of planning and executing multi-step legal tasks, such as building a chronology, assessing a new dataset, or drafting a factual summary, under attorney direction rather than simply classifying individual documents one at a time. As these systems mature, the work that used to happen exclusively downstream, after strategy was already set, is moving earlier into the process and directly into it.
Why eDiscovery Has Historically Sat Downstream of Strategy
In the traditional model, a matter opens, outside counsel or in-house attorneys set an initial strategy, and eDiscovery specialists then take on the technical work of identifying custodians, collecting data, and running review.
