Canadian law firm McCarthy Tétrault has deployed Altorney’s MARC document intelligence platform to analyze documents across litigation, investigations, antitrust, tax, and data breach matters, as law firms continue to explore how AI can accelerate complex legal workflows.
MARC is designed to help legal teams identify relevant information within large document collections while providing an explanation for why a document has been classified in a particular way. According to Altorney, the platform can classify documents based on relevance, responsiveness, privilege, personal information, trade secrets, and other matter-specific categories.
McCarthy Tétrault, which has more than 800 lawyers, is currently using MARC for relevance and privilege review, issue coding, and the identification of personal and confidential information. The firm’s use of the technology spans general litigation, investigations, and data breach response.
Explainable AI enters the legal review process
One of the challenges surrounding the adoption of AI in legal work is the need for lawyers to understand how systems arrive at their conclusions. Rather than providing only a classification, MARC is designed to provide a rationale for each coding decision, allowing legal teams to review and validate the system’s analysis.
Susan Wortzman, a partner at McCarthy Tétrault and president of the firm’s e-discovery division MT>3, said the firm is using MARC for relevance and privilege review as well as identifying personal and confidential information.
“The MARC team is highly responsive and works closely with our MT>3 team to develop bespoke workflows for highly challenging and unique matters,” Wortzman said.
She added that the platform’s detailed rationale allows lawyers to validate its results while focusing their time on legal judgment. The firm also keeps its data within its own private environment, according to the company.
For Altorney, the deployment reflects a broader approach to using AI as an aid to legal professionals rather than as a replacement for them.
“We built MARC to give legal teams better intelligence wherever their data resides,” said Shimmy Messing, CEO and co-founder of Altorney. “Our goal is not to replace legal judgment; it is to give exceptional legal teams a faster, more explainable foundation for applying it.”
AI moves earlier in the legal workflow
Unlike tools designed for a single stage of document review, MARC can be used before documents enter a review platform or with information already hosted in existing review systems.
That means legal teams can use the technology earlier in the process to identify potentially irrelevant material before it reaches downstream review, while also applying it to quality-control workflows on documents already being examined.
The platform can be deployed in a client’s cloud environment, a client-controlled data center, or Altorney’s secure hosted environment.
Founded in 2021, Altorney develops legal technology focused on helping organizations analyze complex data and execute legal work. Its MARC platform is designed for use across litigation, investigations, transactions, compliance, privacy requests, and data breach response.
The deployment at McCarthy Tétrault illustrates how AI is increasingly being introduced into the document-heavy stages of legal work, where the ability to process large volumes of information quickly can affect both the cost and speed of legal matters.
For law firms, however, the value of these systems may ultimately depend not only on how quickly they can analyze documents, but also on whether lawyers can understand, challenge, and validate the results.
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
