Pairing Incredibly Sharp Legal Minds With Brilliant Data Scientists
talent, the domain expertise, the business development
Wendell Jisa, CEO of Reveal, and Jay Leib, executive vice president of Reveal, discuss a new technology-enabled legal service, Aiscension, that’s aimed at discovering business risks posed by cartels.
and the client development. And DLA is going out to its clients, particularly those in areas of industries that have risks around cartels, and they’re saying, “Look, if a cartelrelated event were to take place, you could be on the cover of The Wall Street Journal, the regulatory fines would be
CCBJ: Together, Reveal and DLA Piper have announced the launch of Aiscension. Tell us about how this collaboration came together, and what you’re striving to achieve. Wendell Jisa: Reveal is a cloud-based e-discovery provider. We started working with DLA Piper on the launch of Aiscension about 30 months ago. The idea was to bring the resources from the legal experts at DLA Piper, which is a top global law firm, together with the data science team at Reveal – to have them collaborate on a joint venture. It has been a really exciting opportunity. What we’re striving to achieve is to bring more automation to the practice of law, and to allow Aiscension customers and DLA clients to be able to use this technology to get answers from their data faster.
enormous – they could be up to 10 percent of your worldwide revenue, right? Instead of waiting for that to occur, why don’t we go ahead and analyze your data proactively and see what the risk is? You can do it as a one-off, once per year, like a medical exam, or you can do it quarterly, as a subscription.” Aiscension is going to analyze the data using Reveal’s AI technology, which we developed in collaboration with Aiscension, and it’s going to be able to look through all of a company’s electronic communications, documents, everything that is of particular interest. It’s going to analyze all of that data and say, “These documents, these communications, are of high signal to this issue.” Then the legal talent from Aiscension, which is the DLA talent, is going to go ahead and check those documents to see if
How does Aiscension work?
there truly is an issue there.
Jisa: Aiscension is a technology-enabled service, powered
Basically, the algorithms that we’ve developed are going
by this spinoff company, Aiscension, which is a subsidiary of DLA Piper as part of Aldersgate Holding Company. DLA and Aldersgate have really been investing in technology and business platforms that are going to revolutionize their business model, and Aiscension is one of those subsidiaries.
to go ahead and analyze this data, and say, you know, “Out of all the data, here are the five, 10, or 20,000 documents – whatever the case is – that have some signal of risk. We’re going to use our legal expertise to analyze them and see if there truly is risk there, or if there’s actually nothing to worry about.” If they don’t find anything,
Jay Leib: Right, that’s a great overview. More specifically,
they’ll move on. If they find something, then they’ll go
Aiscension is a technology-enabled cartel risk-management
ahead and jump-start a true investigation, which could
service that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help detect
save the company millions, maybe even billions of dollars,
risks in a business. DLA Piper Global supplies the legal
depending on how large the fines could be.
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MAY • JUNE 2021
