Question about the $800 e-discovery tool that kept eating my time

Last month my firm tried out a new e-discovery platform that promised AI sorting for $800 a month. I was skeptical because the sales demo felt too polished, but I figured it was worth one billing cycle. Turns out it flagged 60% of our PDFs as duplicates when they were just different versions of the same contract. I spent three evenings manually fixing its mistakes, which was worse than our old keyword search. What finally convinced me it was overhyped was when our paralegal found a relevant email in 10 minutes that the tool had buried under 200 false positives. Has anyone else had a pricey legal tech fail that made you go back to basics? What did you switch to instead?

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harper_wells21d ago

...and that 60% duplicate rate sounds way too familiar because we had a tool that did the same thing with settlement agreements, different dates and all. What finally worked for us was going back to a simple folder system by case number plus a shared spreadsheet where everyone logs what they reviewed and when they searched. It is ugly and manual but it saves us hours compared to untangling what the AI mislabeled, and honestly our paralegals trust it way more now.