Altorney’s MARC document intelligence platform has been deployed by McCarthy Tétrault to support document analysis across legal matters including litigation, investigations, antitrust, tax, and data breach response.
The deployment puts an emphasis on explainability: rather than simply assigning documents to categories, MARC is designed to show legal teams why a particular document was classified as relevant, privileged, responsive, or associated with other matter-specific categories.
McCarthy Tétrault is using the platform for relevance and privilege analysis, issue coding, and the identification of personal and confidential information. The firm’s e-discovery division, MT>3, is working with Altorney on workflows for complex cases.
MARC is designed to process complex document populations and provide legal teams with analysis that can be reviewed and validated by lawyers.
The platform classifies information according to categories that can include relevance, responsiveness, privilege, personal information, and trade secrets. It also provides a rationale behind each result.
That approach is intended to address a key requirement in legal workflows: lawyers need to be able to assess the reasoning behind an AI-assisted decision before incorporating it into their work.
“MARC provides detailed rationale for every coding decision, making it easy for lawyers to validate its accuracy and spend their time applying complex legal judgment,” said Susan Wortzman, partner at McCarthy Tétrault and president of MT>3.
The platform can be introduced at different points in the document-review process. It can analyze documents before they enter a review platform or work with information already hosted in one.
That architecture allows organizations to use MARC to reduce the amount of irrelevant material entering downstream review while also supporting quality-control processes on documents already under review.
Deployment options for legal data
Altorney says MARC can run in a client cloud environment, a client-controlled data center, or the company’s secure hosted environment.
At McCarthy Tétrault, the technology has so far been applied to privilege, personal information, and relevance analysis in litigation, investigations, and data breach response.
“We built MARC to give legal teams better intelligence wherever their data resides,” said Shimmy Messing, CEO and co-founder at Altorney. “McCarthy Tétrault’s active use of MARC for first-pass review reflects the need to turn large, complex document populations into informed legal action earlier in the workflow.”
Altorney was founded in 2021 and develops legal technology focused on complex data and legal workflows. Alongside MARC, the company offers a legal workforce platform for sourcing and managing vetted talent.