OAKLAND, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar 18, 2025--
Everlaw, the cloud-native investigation and litigation platform, today announced a new GenAI-powered addition to the EverlawAIAssistant portfolio, code-named Project Query, available in a closed beta program and to be demoed at Legalweek 2025, delivering an AI breakthrough for legal teams to expedite the investigation of a large corpus of documents in seconds.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250318725896/en/
Finding the right evidence is the cornerstone of resolving legal cases. The advent of the GenAI technique called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) promised a long sought-after capability to retrieve information exclusively within a large corpus of ediscovery in natural language. Yet the application of RAG in legal matters is stymied by the complex nature of those docs. Unlike knowledge bases or technical documentation, legal discovery, such as emails, texts and chats, are often unstructured, nuanced and require understanding context across multiple domains. In addition, the kinds of questions legal teams pose will change as the case evolves.
How Project Query Works: RAG, Refinement and Reasoning
Everlaw AI Assistant’s Project Query aims to deliver on the promise of RAG, allowing legal teams to ask questions across terabytes of ediscovery at once, while compensating for legal’s ‘unfriendly’ corpus and ambiguous exploration with an innovative process of refinement to draw relevant facts, insights and key documents with greater accuracy and reliability. Everlaw designed Project Query with the idea that legal teams may ask about more nuanced elements: behaviors, intent, actors and conditions. Query has a sophisticated refinement process to find relevant evidence for natural language queries.
Everlaw has paired its refinement approach with the latest in LLM reasoning models, which make more logical inferences and draw more nuanced conclusions that are highly valuable to legal cases. In essence, these models mimic how humans think through a problem by breaking it down into smaller, logical steps.
With those combined capabilities, Project Query is designed to uncover insights in an entire corpus of data sooner by simply asking questions related to specific issues, parties, or events and get answers in everyday conversational language in just seconds. Answers are supported with a list of facts and referenceable resources so users can dive deeper into the breakdown of information available as part of the response.
Comments on and Responses to Project Query
“Pinpointing facts in a vast corpus is gold and doing it in seconds is game-changing,” said Steven Delaney, Litigation Support Director, Benesch. “Project Query feels more elegant than keyword search, delivering answers—not just documents—instantly. By getting straight to the facts, we can save time, prioritize strategy and reshape the discovery workflow.”
“Everlaw continues to raise the bar in GenAI innovation with Project Query,” said Ryan O’Leary, research director at IDC. “It’s one of the most practical AI applications I’ve seen in discovery—enabling investigation before review in seconds. With its ease of use, Project Query promises to instantly boost efficiency and deliver a significant impact for legal teams.”
“Project Query holds great promise for legal professionals – especially senior attorneys who for the first time can interrogate massive document sets at once, applying their honed expertise and instincts to find key evidence,” said AJ Shankar, founder and CEO of Everlaw. “In the AI arms race now shaping up in courtrooms across the country, Project Query could give tech-savvy legal teams an unmistakable edge.”
To give legal professionals confidence in the results of their Project Query work, Everlaw designed it to ensure:
Availability
In this closed beta testing of Project Query, Everlaw will provide access to a select number of customers to help test and iterate on the product. Everlaw conducted a year-long beta for its AI Assistant, which was generally available in Fall 2024. For Project Query, Everlaw anticipates general availability this year.
About Everlaw
Everlaw helps legal teams navigate the increasingly complex ediscovery landscape to chart a straighter path to the truth. Trusted by Fortune 100 corporate counsel, 91 of the Am Law 200, and all state attorneys general, Everlaw's combination of intuitive experience, advanced technology, and partnership with customers empowers organizations to tackle the most pressing technological challenges—and transform their approach to discovery and litigation in the process. Founded in 2010 and based in Oakland, Calif., Everlaw is funded by top-tier investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, CapitalG, HIG Growth Partners, K9 Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and TPG Growth. Follow us on LinkedIn.
Everlaw AI Assistant’s Project Query enables legal teams to ask questions across terabytes of ediscovery at once. It is well suited for early matter exploration; key issue and entity identification; deposition preparation and trial support; and much more.
Everlaw AI Assistant’s Project Query is designed to uncover insights in an entire corpus of data by simply asking questions related to specific issues, parties, or events and get answers in everyday conversational language in just seconds. Answers are supported with a list of facts and referenceable resources so users can dive deeper into the breakdown of information available as part of the response.
HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — At a former American air base in southern Vietnam, work abruptly stopped last month on efforts to clean up tons of soil contaminated with deadly dioxin from the military’s Agent Orange defoliant.
The Trump administration’s broad cuts to USAID also halted efforts to clear unexploded American munitions and landmines, a rehabilitation program for war victims, and work on a museum exhibit detailing U.S. efforts to remediate the damage of the Vietnam War.
In addition to exposing thousands of people to health hazards, the cuts risk jeopardizing hard-won diplomatic gains with Vietnam, which is strategically increasingly important as the U.S. looks for support in its efforts to counter a growingly aggressive China.
“It doesn’t help at all,” said Chuck Searcy, an American Vietnam War veteran who has dedicated his time to humanitarian programs in the country for the last three decades. “It is just another example of what a lot of critics want to remind us of: You can’t depend on the Americans. It is not a good message.”
Funding for the cleanup at Bien Hoa Air Base was frozen for about a week and then restored, but it's unclear whether funds are fully flowing or how they’ll be disbursed with no USAID employees left to administer operations, said Tim Rieser, a senior adviser to Sen. Peter Welch, who drafted a letter to administration officials signed by Welch and more than a dozen other Democratic senators urging the continued funding of the programs.
Other programs remain cut.
“They have reversed a number of these arbitrary decisions, but we’re far from out of the woods and we don’t know how this is going to end,” said Rieser, who was retired Sen. Patrick Leahy’s foreign policy aide when the Vermont Democrat secured the original funding for Vietnam War remediation projects.
The interruptions to aid comes as the two countries prepare to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and the 30th anniversary of the normalization of relations between Washington and Hanoi.
The two countries have since been increasing defense and security cooperation as China has become increasingly aggressive in the region. In 2023, Vietnam elevated relations with the U.S. to a comprehensive strategic partnership, the highest level of cooperation and the same as its traditional partners Russia and China.
On Inauguration Day, Trump issued an executive order directing a freeze of foreign assistance funding and a review of all U.S. aid and development work abroad, charging that much of foreign assistance was wasteful and advanced a liberal agenda.
But Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Feb. 7 “underscored the department’s support for ongoing efforts to collaborate on the legacy of war issues,” in his introductory call with his Vietnamese counterpart, according to the Defense Department.
Just 20 days later, the administration ordered all but a fraction of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, staffers off the job and terminated at least 83% of its contracts and cut programs globally, including in Vietnam.
At Bien Hoa, that halted work to clean up 500,000 cubic meters (650,000 cubic yards) of soil contaminated with Agent Orange, a wartime herbicide that was later found to cause a wide range of health problems including cancer and birth defects.
The U.S. Embassy in Hanoi and USAID referred all questions on the war legacy projects to the State Department in Washington.
In a one-line email, the State Department said that “USAID has three contracts conducting dioxin remediation at Bien Hoa in Vietnam that are active and running.”
Asked to elaborate on how long the Bien Hoa project was shut down and what operations had resumed, as well as the status of other war legacy programs, the State Department said “we have nothing to share on the details of these programs at this time.”
Vietnam’s Defense Ministry referred questions to the Foreign Ministry, which did not respond to requests for comment.
But in a Feb. 13 press conference, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Pham Thu Hang expressed concern about what could happen if American funding for war legacy projects, which amounts to some $200 million per year, were to end.
It’s too early to say exactly how the abrupt decision to then end the funding will affect relations, but it is likely to call into question whether Washington is still a reliable partner in other dealings, said Nguyen Khac Giang, visiting fellow in the Vietnam Studies Program at Singapore’s ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute.
“The level of trust gradually increased and it is very easy to dismantle,” the political scientist said.
Leahy, who retired from the Senate in 2023, told The Associated Press that it had been a lengthy process over the last 35 years to build the relationship by working hand-in-hand with the Vietnamese to address the problems left behind.
“People in the Trump administration who know nothing and care less about these programs are arbitrarily jeopardizing relations with a strategic partner in one of the most challenging regions of the world,” he said in an email.
Rising reported from Bangkok.
FILE -A woman walks next to a highly contaminated pond around the grounds of the Danang airbase in Danang, Vietnam, May 21, 2007. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder, File)
FILE- A warning sign stands in a field contaminated with dioxin near Danang airport, during a ceremony marking the start of a project to clean up dioxin left over from the Vietnam War, at a former U.S. military base in Danang, Vietnam, Aug. 9, 2012. The sign reads; "Dioxin contamination zone - livestock, poultry and fishery operations not permitted." (AP Photo/Maika Elan, File)
FILE- A Vietnamese worker sprays water over stones to be used in the construction of a silo for storing soil contaminated with Agent Orange dioxide at the site of a former American airbase in Danang, Vietnam on April 24, 2013. (AP Photo/Hau Dinh)
FILE- A detail of South Vietnamese Air Force men load up a tractor-train of 500-pound bombs from the Bien Hoa Air Base ammunition depot, Dec. 29, 1964. (AP Photo/Horst Faas, File)
FILE- A Vietnamese soldier stands guard in front of military aircraft near a dioxin contaminated area while U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis visits Bien Hoa air base in Bien Hoa, outside Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Oct. 17, 2018. (Kham/Pool Photo via AP, File)
FILE- Attendants sit next to a field contaminated with dioxin before a ceremony marking the start of a project to clean up dioxin left over from the Vietnam War, at a former U.S. military base in Danang, Vietnam, Aug. 9, 2012. (AP Photo/Maika Elan, File)
