Artificial intelligence can plow through mountains of information to unearth pertinent details far faster than any associate or paralegal, but the technology can't really speed up individual cases since lawyers still need to decide how to best use the material to make their arguments in court, litigators say.

Artificial intelligence has helped take some of the burden of certain, mainly tedious tasks off the shoulders of litigators.

At the start of a case, litigators can now use AI to go through and assimilate huge numbers of documents and pick out the details they need from those documents, making it far quicker to put together timelines and organize cases.

"Let's say we have a thousand documents in a case, and you want to know: Where are the conflicts and the information? AI's really good at those types of tasks," said Sharon L. Caffrey, Duane Morris LLP partner and trial practice group co-chair. "And you can get it early in a case, where it would take a paralegal or a young associate several weeks to come up with the same information."

While the use of AI may not do much to speed up the overall pace of litigation, the tools do continue to ease the workflow of the litigators — and even enhance the experience of being a lawyer.

Duane Morris special counsel Timothy J. Witczak, for example, said using AI has made "just the practice of law a lot more enjoyable, because it gets you to the point of being able to act like a lawyer as opposed to really grinding through a lot of material."

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