Announcing the 2026 Everlaw Summit Award Winners
Recognizing the legal professionals, organizations, and partners advancing innovation, leadership, and impact across the profession.
Now in their fifth year, the Summit Awards honor legal professionals, organizations, and partners demonstrating exceptional innovation, leadership, and impact, selected from nominations submitted by the legal community and reviewed by a panel of expert judges.
“Congratulations to the winners of this year’s Everlaw Awards,” said Rachel Gonzalez, Senior Director of Customer Marketing at Everlaw. “These awards recognize people whose contributions often happen outside the spotlight, but are essential to promoting justice and illuminating the truth. We’re proud to celebrate our winners and finalists, and grateful to our judges for their thoughtful consideration.”
This year's awards include seven customer categories and, for the first time, three partner categories recognizing the managed service providers advancing growth, innovation, and AI-enabled workflows on behalf of their clients.
The 2026 Judges
This year's winners were selected by a panel drawn from across the legal profession:
Jessica Heavy Runner, Manager, Information Security and eDiscovery Team, Epic Games
Niki Black, legal technology journalist and analyst
Randy Abraham, Deloitte contractor with the U.S. Department of Justice/EOUSA
Leo Park, Senior Product Manager, Everlaw
Allison Patrick, Vice President of Sales, Public Sector, Everlaw
Corporate In-House Innovator
Reed Willis, Senior Litigation Director at Align Technology
For a visionary organization that has fundamentally transformed its efficiency by leveraging technology to streamline workflows, reduce external spend, and master complex data challenges in-house.
Reed Willis turned generative AI at Align Technology from an isolated pilot into a measurable part of how the company manages litigation. When outside counsel proposed a contract review team for a large document population, he directed the matter to AI-assisted review instead, then carried that model into subsequent matters including a review of more than 240,000 documents on a one-week timeline.
What distinguishes the work is that it crossed organizational lines. Reed pushed adoption with Align's outside counsel, connected those teams to training and technical support, and changed what the company expects from the firms that serve it.
AI Trailblazer
Greg McCullough, Consultant at Fire Litigation Consulting
For the legal innovator who has pushed the boundaries of generative AI to solve a complex challenge through a truly unique, first-of-its-kind use case.
Greg McCullough works at the intersection of ediscovery strategy, data engineering, and subject matter investigation, specializing in wildfire and utility liability litigation. Starting the day the Everlaw and Anthropic integration was announced, he mapped its capabilities and its limits, then built a repeatable investigative method pairing MCP-driven search with Deep Dive analysis.
The result is dozens of documented workflows covering production summaries, custodian timeline reconstruction, deposition preparation, and privilege log comparison, each one flagging where human verification is still required. He also documented the confidentiality architecture behind them so firms handling privileged material could adopt the approach safely. His use of AI in West Coast wildfire litigation was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle in April 2024.
Leadership in Generative AI
Bradley Hyde, Partner at Russ August & Kabat
For organizations building the future of legal practice through the use of generative AI.
Bradley Hyde built a repeatable AI discovery workflow for patent litigation rather than running another round of tool evaluations. The workflow assesses patent claim limitations and scope, analyzes infringement and invalidity contentions from the parties, reviews served and received written discovery, builds a living proof chart tracker for claims and defenses, identifies evidentiary gaps, generates targeted searches in Everlaw, and then helps update contention charts and remaining discovery gaps, with the goal of surfacing key documents earlier in a matter and creating a workflow where discovery is actively being pushed forward across all claims and defenses.
Bradley has provided roadmap-level feedback to Everlaw's product team on agentic workflows, Deep Dive, and MCP capabilities, and has helped turn a single-matter approach into a firm-wide initiative with training behind it.
Impact Agent of the Year
Erin Exum, Paralegal at Motley Rice LLC
For paralegals and litigation support professionals making measurable impacts in their organizations.
Erin Exum specializes in research and document review for mass tort matters involving millions of documents. Over nearly a decade working in Everlaw, she has become the practical resource other members of her team turn to, and the person most likely to find a way through a problem that has stalled.
The clearest example came on a pharmacovigilance question her team had been working on for months. Using Extractions, Erin identified more than 300 late safety reports in two to three hours, work that would otherwise have required manual review of thousands of documents.
Rising Star in Litigation
Jonathon Merriman, Litigation Support Senior eDiscovery Analyst at BCLP
For professionals with 10 years or less of legal experience whose early accomplishments distinguish them as future leaders in the profession.
Jonathon Merriman pairs innovative thinking with hands-on execution, which is a less common combination than it sounds. He has developed AI-enabled workflows at BCLP covering low-text image review and privilege analysis, and has worked through the nuanced parent-child, Bates-order, and cross-border data problems that tend to stall complex matters.
His strongest recent work was a hybrid Coding Suggestions and Predictive Coding strategy applied to a population of roughly 30,000 potentially privileged documents. The workflows he built for that matter have since become templates used across the firm.
Everlaw for Good
David Abell, eDiscovery and Legal Operations Manager at Sierra Club
For leaders in nonprofits, pro bono practices, and investigative journalism helping to level the playing field for justice.
David Abell has spent more than 15 years building the operational foundation beneath one of the country's most influential environmental organizations. He oversees ediscovery and legal operations across more than 60 matters, spanning litigation holds, custodial collection, document review, and productions, and he led Sierra Club's migration onto Everlaw.
Much of that work is invisible from the outside, which is rather the point. By turning large administrative record reviews and FOIA productions into usable evidence, David has supported appellate briefing and advocacy in cases challenging high-stakes fossil fuel infrastructure approvals.
People’s Choice
Stephanie Biehl, Partner at Sher Edling
Voted on by Everlaw Summit ‘26 attendees, recognizing a standout Summit presenter.
Stephanie Biehl represents a modern standard of litigation leadership by pairing aggressive courtroom advocacy with thoughtful organizational transformation. At Sher Edling, she tackles complex, high-stakes environmental litigation where data volumes rival any corporate matter and the strategic margin for error is razor-thin.
Summit ‘26 attendees heard that perspective firsthand. In her session on change management for plaintiffs' firms, Stephanie shared candid, actionable strategies for bringing order to data chaos and guiding trial teams through the realities of AI adoption. Later, she joined The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Anthropic’s Robert Mahari, and Everlaw’s Max Christoff for the evening keynote, offering a grounded practitioner’s perspective on how generative AI is actively redrawing the balance of power in litigation. Stephanie’s wit and humor, alongside her sharp analysis and insights, inspired attendees. Her ability to translate bleeding-edge technology into practical, ethical litigation strategy is why peers across the community cast their votes for Stephanie as this year’s People’s Choice honoree.
Partner Awards
Everlaw recognized three managed service providers this year, the first time the Summit Awards have included partner categories. Each honors a different kind of contribution to the ecosystem that delivers Everlaw to customers.
Partner of the Year
Consilio
For a partner demonstrating outstanding year-over-year growth and new-logo acquisition.
Consilio is Everlaw's largest partner by platform activity, usage, and hosted data, with the highest number of Everlaw customers of any partner and collaboration spanning corporate, insurance, and other industries. That scale has grown steadily year over year.
What stands behind the growth is investment. Consilio built a dedicated internal Everlaw practice, met its certification targets, and developed enough expertise to operate with unusual independence. Its investment in enablement is the reason its platform expertise translates into both sales success and strong customer support.
AI Partner of the Year
Repario
For a partner pushing the boundaries of the Everlaw platform or pioneering AI matters into advanced workflows.
Repario has distinguished itself through the scale and sophistication of its AI use in complex plaintiff-side litigation. Its activity across Deep Dive databases places the team among the most advanced AI users anywhere on the platform, partner or direct customer.
That work spans class actions and multidistrict litigation, where teams have to analyze large document collections quickly while developing focused insight for their clients. Repario's sustained investment in AI-enabled workflows reflects a commitment to changing how litigation services get delivered rather than how fast they get delivered.
Breakout Partner of the Year
Morae
For a newer partner showing strong early success and deep Everlaw integration.
Morae formally signed with Everlaw in March and, in roughly seven months, became one of its top partners. In that time, Morae has landed a dozen joint customers spanning corporate legal departments, midsize firms, and Am Law firms.
The pace is notable, but the approach is what earned the award. Morae’s teams lead with Everlaw and its AI capabilities, worked closely with Everlaw’s sales directors and sellers, and invested early in certification. Rather than referring customers to the platform, they train and support them directly, which is what turns early momentum into a durable partnership.
Shaping the Future of Legal Tech
These award winners showcase the remarkable ingenuity and dedication driving modern legal practice. As technology continues to transform ediscovery and litigation workflows, their achievements set an inspiring benchmark for the entire industry. Congratulations to all of the 2026 honorees and nominees for leading the way forward!
