Introduction

What Discovery Engine is, what it does with your case files, and how the pieces fit together.

#The yellow highlighter problem

Your attorney sends over a folder with a few thousand files in it and a short note: "Please go through all of these. Just yellow-highlight anything important."

At twenty minutes a document, 5,000 documents is about 1,667 hours of reading. That is roughly forty-two working weeks with a highlighter in your hand, and at the end of it you would still have to cross-reference everything you read.

Discovery Engine is the alternative. It is a desktop app for Mac and Windows that reads every file in a case on your own computer, makes all of it searchable with citations down to the page or the second, and gives the AI agent you already use (ChatGPT desktop or Claude desktop) a way to work across every file at once. You still make the decisions. You just don't have to read 5,000 documents to make them.

#What it does

1. Reads every file, on your computer. PDFs, scans, Word files, e-mails, spreadsheets, photos, recorded calls and videos. Scans and pictures are read with text recognition (OCR). Recordings get a transcript with timestamps. Nothing is uploaded to do this.
2. Finds the people and personal details. Names, organizations, account numbers, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and similar details are detected on your computer. Each one gets a stand-in (PERSON A, ACCOUNT 1, ADDRESS 1), and every spelling of the same name is linked, so a search for one person finds them however the documents write it.
3. Makes everything searchable. Search by exact words or by meaning, filter by kind of file, date, people and folder, and open every result at the exact page, paragraph, spreadsheet row or moment in a recording.
4. Lets your AI agent work across all of it. The app installs a command-line tool called discovery. Your agent runs it to search, count, read only the passages that matter and cite them. The agent never has to read the whole case, which is just as well: a big case is far more than any AI can hold at once.
5. Turns findings into work product. Your agent proposes passages to highlight, each with a one-line reason. You approve them. The app then exports yellow-highlighted PDF copies and an exhibit index for the attorney. Your original files are never changed.
6. Shows who is connected to whom. The People, Graph and Connections screens show who appears with whom, who wrote to whom, and every passage where two people (or a person and an event) meet.

#Who it is for

• The client or paralegal doing the reading. You don't need to be technical. You will click buttons in the app and paste one prompt into your AI agent. You will not need to type commands unless you want to.
• The attorney. The attorney does not need the app at all. They receive the exports: highlighted PDFs and a spreadsheet exhibit index, in forms they already use.

#The screens at a glance

The left column of the app is the same everywhere. At the top is a Case picker. Below it are the screens for the chosen case, then the app-wide screens.

At the bottom of the left column you'll find the Show stand-ins switch, the engine's status and the app's build number.

#What it is not

• Not legal advice. The app finds and organizes evidence. It does not tell you what the evidence means for your case.
• Not a formal e-discovery production tool. It does not Bates-stamp documents for court or write privilege logs. It does read Bates numbers that are already on a production's pages and uses them.
• Not a cloud service. There is no account to sign up for and no server holding your files. The app's own built-in AI is switched off in this version; the AI work is done by the agent you choose to connect.

#Where to go next

• Check your computer against the System requirements.
• Install on Mac or Windows.
• Walk through First launch and setup, which includes a fictional sample case to practice on.