Boutique Firm Dunning Vallejo & MacDonald Cuts Arbitration Research Time 50-70% with Jus AI

Dunning Vallejo & MacDonald (DV&M) is a young, nimble New York boutique firm handling international arbitration and complex business disputes, but with limited staff it had to devote scarce attorney hours to legal research. International arbitration compounds the problem: decisions, pleadings, and briefs are frequently confidential, and no generic legal research product was built specifically for this niche, making it slow to locate useful precedent.

DV&M adopted Jus AI, Jus Mundi's arbitration-specialized legal research assistant, chosen for its purpose-built international arbitration database (including hard-to-find confidential decisions and pleadings), ease of use for a lean team, and responsive vendor support.

Partner Damián Vallejo says Jus AI is "saving us 50 to 70% of the time we would usually deploy or spend doing legal research," in many cases, or most cases, he says. Facing a 48-hour tribunal deadline for research that would probably have taken 20 to 30 hours, the team spent a couple of hours tweaking the prompt and then had the research it needed within two hours and 15 minutes or less. Overnight cross-examination prep using daily witness transcripts dropped from 5-10 hours to 2-3 hours, and early case assessment was accelerated, which he says can mean being engaged by a client sooner. He says the efficiency lets the firm go head-to-head against much larger teams.

• Jus AI gives the firm a database curated for international arbitration, including confidential decisions and pleadings that are difficult to locate through other means; the partner says other products do not have the data the firm needs.
• AI-driven research speed lets small, resource-constrained firms take on tight deadlines and compete against larger, better-staffed teams, according to the partner.
• The firm chose Jus AI for user-friendliness, client service and access to specialized international arbitration data.