Humans Behind the AI: Two Inventors Transforming Doc Review

Ever wanted to patent a world-changing idea?

James Snyder (Chief Architect) and Matt Hinze (Principal Software Engineer) have. In our interview, they took us behind the scenes of developing and patenting solutions that advance the way we do document review — and shared their dreams and fears for the future of technology, humanity, and the law.

Meet the patents and the minds behind them

?? U.S. Patent No. 11,818,232 (System and Method for Tenant-Specific Data Modeling for Field and Domain Interconnection)

This invention addressed a pernicious issue with metadata management, including storing and searching fields.

Jim Snyder explains: When a lawyer is conducting document review and creating a production, the search fields that they are working with are not always consistent. Before, a user would search for fields that were not in their production — and those fields were producing things that they weren’t able to search for. This made users crazy, and as databases kept growing, so did the problem.

We had to figure out a set of protocols for the product to have a consistent model, and for users to be able to add new production fields to sort and search through on their own. This process used to take six weeks of coordinated releases. With this patented technology, customers can now do it on their own.

Why does this matter? At DISCO, we work on a lot of very cool problems. We have the potential to actually impact material change in the practice of law, making it more transparent and equitable as an institution. What I call the “human toil problem” is that we have so much information to process at all times that it becomes difficult to make decisions. We spend so much time doing very tedious, manual work.?

What AI can assist with is parsing through massive amounts of information to find important details. Then we’re more equipped to make decisions with high quality, high confidence, and in a much faster time.?

?? U.S. Patent No. 11,790,017 (Systems and Method for Searching Related Documents and Associated Search Operators)

This invention solved a problem that had been plaguing legal reviewers since 2016.

Matt Hinze explains: This patent is about a way to query documents and their attachments while selectively excluding some documents from that query. If you do a search for documents that are tagged “hot,” you’ll get all those tagged documents plus their attachments, which we call “family members.” That wasn’t super helpful in terms of understanding the consistency of a tag across families if, for example, you had an email attachment that was tagged hot but the email itself wasn’t.

We built a query that would let you compare the attributes of a parent document against the attributes of its family documents. This problem has been around since 2016, and through working on different products, we were able to develop a technique for solving it. This wasn’t an overnight invention.

Why does this matter? The work we do makes the legal system more humane and accessible to real people. When lawyers are able to spend their time doing “lawyerly” things instead of laborious document review, it makes the legal system work better for everyone. I believe the legal system is the best way we’ve seen to resolve disputes throughout history: we went from sword fighting to the courtroom. Legal matters affect us in so many different ways, from politics to family life, and I’m proud that this patent is able to help make small, incremental improvements to such an important process.

Sneak peek into the patenting process

According to Jim Snyder, the greatest asset in pursuing a patent is curiosity.

He says, “The only good patent is the one you’ve defended. To patent something is a lot of work, and the invention is really only an idea until it’s been enforced and tested. To do something like this, fundamentally, you have to be curious. You have to ask yourself how something works and push yourself to figure it out. Just observing the world won’t get you very far in this process, you have to continuously ask questions and remain curious.”

Matt Hinze agrees, adding, “The main thing I want to highlight about inventorship is that it’s a team effort. I didn’t get this patent by myself: I’m on a team of highly experienced, brilliant engineers who enjoy working on really hard problems. The opportunity to work with people like that is rare, and it’s what’s kept me here at DISCO for almost nine years.”

Hear more from Jim and Matt on their hopes and fears for AI here.