AI-Powered Search Speeds Time to Answers in Contract Dispute

Background

When an engineering partner suddenly pulled out of a major project, a global manufacturer needed answers fast. Was the termination allowed under the contract, or had the partner crossed a line that could lead to litigation?

The company’s law firm had to move quickly. A deadline was approaching to file a termination claim, but that was only the first step. Once the partner responded, the firm expected tough follow-up discovery. To be ready, they needed to understand the full story before the dispute escalated.

The firm identified and collected more than one million documents across fifteen custodians, most in the United States. While this is a large but not uncommon volume of data for such a complex investigation, the real challenge was determining how to interrogate it quickly without iterating dozens of times on keywords as is the case with traditional keyword search.

As one attorney explained, “Most of the time, we don’t know the exact words people used and everyone uses different language anyway.” Every guess costs time, and every missed variation risks overlooking critical evidence.

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At A Glance

Industry: Manufacturing

Challenge: Time-intensive evidence investigations slowed this client down during a partnership contract dispute

Lighthouse Innovation: IQ Answers, an AI-powered data search, retrieval, and synthesis application

Results That Matter:

• Fact-finding is 6x faster than manual document search and review.

• 1M+ corpus narrowed to 6,300 docs using IQ Answers; 835 potentially key documents identified with 190 confirmed as critical after QC

• Strategic use of technology for navigating search term engagement saved client dozens of billable hours and allowed team to reallocate efforts to higher-complexity work

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The Lighthouse Approach

Looking for a faster and more reliable approach, the firm used Lighthouse IQ Answers directly inside their Relativity environment, starting with Microsoft 365 data from the U.S. custodians.

IQ Answers is not a general-purpose chatbot. It’s an enterprise AI tool that leverages large language models and other AI and ML models to answer questions but is grounded solely in the documents in your case. Instead of building complex keyword searches, attorneys simply asked questions and received clear, document-backed answers.

Using this approach, the team conducted an early case assessment without relying on months of manual review. Once all documents were loaded, they used the AI to explore the data directly. Over the course of less than two months, the team asked 182 natural-language questions. That process captured 6,325 documents, of which the team flagged 835 as potentially important.

To confirm the results, the firm conducted a second-level manual review of those documents. Attorneys validated 190 documents as key evidence and identified another 130 as potentially key. Notably, 832 of the 835 documents directly related to the 14 issues identified for the case.

By combining AI-driven discovery with focused human review, the team turned an overwhelming volume of data into clear, actionable insight—delivering results in a fraction of the time required by traditional methods.

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Results

Based on the intelligence IQ Answers delivered, the firm made a critical strategic decision: they opted against a full review. What would have been months of traditional document review and significant expense became a targeted, AI-driven investigation that gave them exactly what they needed in pre-litigation.

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