Bracewell

Bracewell, a Houston-based Am Law 200 firm with seven U.S. and three international offices, handles large-scale litigation across energy, regulatory, and commercial matters — virtually all of which now involve significant ediscovery. Partner David Shargel, who leads the firm's ediscovery practice, notes that terabytes of data and millions of records are routine, a burden compounded by the proliferation of mobile data across nearly every case. Legacy platforms required two to three days to ingest incoming data, forcing review teams to be reassigned to other matters during idle periods, threatening budget overruns, and risking missed client turnaround expectations on time-sensitive litigation.

Bracewell adopted Everlaw as its primary ediscovery platform, replacing legacy tools with a cloud-native system capable of ingesting diverse and complex data types — including phone images and mobile data — at materially higher speeds. The platform integrates directly into the firm's review workflow, enabling associates to begin document review within a day of data receipt. Everlaw's AI suite, built on large language models and generative AI, includes predictive coding, document clustering, coding suggestions, a writing assistant, and a review assistant. Bracewell is actively evaluating these capabilities to further accelerate relevance identification and document analysis. The firm embedded Everlaw training into its new associate onboarding program to drive durable, firmwide adoption rather than dependence on individual power users.

Bracewell reduced data-to-review time from 2–3 days to same-day delivery, a turnaround that has shifted client expectations from tolerating delays to expressing surprise at the speed. Key outcomes include:

• Same-day ingestion eliminates reviewer idle time and prevents budget overruns from stalled review cycles
• Scalability from 100 to 5 million documents per matter with no workflow changes, enabling a single-platform strategy
• Everlaw's customer support — included at no additional cost — has enabled rapid troubleshooting without delays
• Associate onboarding now includes structured Everlaw training, accelerating firmwide capability and reducing reliance on individual champions
• Bracewell participates in Everlaw's product feedback process and can see its suggestions reflected on the platform roadmap

• Ingestion speed is a client-facing metric — same-day data availability directly shapes client confidence and fee predictability in litigation matters.
• A single scalable platform eliminates the operational complexity of tiered solutions for small versus large matters.
• Embedding vendor training into associate onboarding converts a tool into institutional infrastructure, reducing churn risk as attorneys cycle across matters.
• Evaluating AI capabilities (predictive coding, clustering, generative review tools) in parallel with core platform adoption positions firms to accelerate document analysis as the technology matures.
• Vendor responsiveness — live support, fast email turnaround, and visible product roadmaps — is a meaningful differentiator for firms managing time-sensitive, high-stakes matters.