DISCO Transforms the Practice of Law Using AWS and Serverless Computing

Austin-based legal technology leader DISCO is on a mission to reinvent the practice of law through software by making lawyers more efficient in everything they do. Founded in 2013, it has revolutionized the way law firms and corporate legal departments operate, using technology and cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze data quickly and free up resources for tasks that require legal judgment. DISCO provides a key competitive advantage in an industry where speed and accuracy are critical.

When DISCO entered the market, the legal industry was stuck using antiquated on-premise technology—which was becoming increasingly untenable as the volume of data in litigation continued to expand exponentially. This huge opportunity caught the eye of Keith Zoellner, who joined the company as CTO in 2015. Zoellner has previously successfully grown three Austin startups from a handful of engineers to over 100 and was well suited to bring the legal industry into the 21st century.

“When I joined DISCO, I saw limitless opportunity,” Zoellner said. “For starters, lawyers were using ediscovery software that could take a minute or more to load a single document. As cases could have millions of documents and files to review, it was clear a new kind of approach to ediscovery was needed. The legal technology industry was ripe for disruption.”

Keith Zoellner, CTO

Zoellner built DISCO’s infrastructure on AWS, taking advantage of its autoscaling architecture to ensure the platform always remained fast. DISCO’s original calling card was sub-second document load speeds and sub-second search speeds, even when a database had millions of documents. These speeds were unheard of in the legal industry.

In addition to building a fast platform for everyday use, DISCO sought to address the huge spikes in the demand for computing resources over the life of a case. Attorneys will get thousands, if not millions, of files from their clients, and need to get them ready for review as fast as possible. Processing all of these files—creating images of every page and extracting and analyzing metadata for every document—takes an insane amount of computing power.

“Other technology providers would require multiple days just to get everything into the platform. With AWS’s serverless capabilities, DISCO can spin up thousands of AWS Lambda instances in a fraction of a second, and throw all of those resources at processing the data,” Zoellner said. “As a result, we’re able to do in minutes what used to take days. In addition, once the data is in, we wind those servers down. It would cost a fortune to get that much computing power in the world of on-premise software.”

DISCO has also used AWS to become the industry leader in AI. DISCO’s AI works to push relevant documents to the front of the review queue, so attorneys can find the key documents in their case while reviewing only a fraction of the total document population.

The startup’s AI uses a patented algorithm to make incredibly accurate predictions about which documents should be prioritized in a review. These predictions are based on a 300-dimensional word embedding that constructs a model of the relationships between words for every database—this ensures the algorithm knows the difference between “grandma eats chicken” and “chicken eats grandma.”

On top of that, DISCO’s AI models retrain constantly as they get more feedback from the user and are updated in almost real-time. The training begins as early as when the first documents are reviewed and tagged, making their AI effective at matters of all sizes, from hundreds of documents to tens of millions.

“We are constantly testing different AI models in the background to see which model is giving the best results. Doing this many complex calculations across millions of documents would be impossible without the ability to throw computing power with AWS GPUs at the problem as necessary,” says Zoellner.

DISCO is now a leader in legal technology with solutions that power the entire litigation cycle. For example, DISCO Case Builder leans on AWS to revolutionize the way depositions are reviewed and used in litigation. “But this is just the beginning,” Zoellner says. “Our plan is to build world-class software for every part of the legal function. And our cloud-native architecture is going to ensure we are set up for success.”