PGH Petroleum Uses Everlaw AI to Reduce First-Pass Review Time by 80% and Find Deeper Insights
Business Outcomes
Challenge: Expert witness consultants would spend weeks – or months – manually reviewing 10K - 45K document sets.
Solution: Automated file identification, AI summaries, and real-time collaboration enable PGH engineering experts to deliver higher-impact insights, up to and during trial.
Results: Slashed initial document review times by an estimated 80%, freeing up more of clients’ budgets for high-level analysis.
When litigants in the energy industry need an expert perspective on highly technical matters, they turn to Petroleum & Environmental Engineers, LLC.
PGH, a GAI Company, provides petroleum engineering, environmental, and regulatory consulting services to the oil and gas industry. Based in Austin, Texas, PGH specializes in trial and litigation support, including technical document analysis and expert testimony.
Three members of its litigation support team – Division Leader Sean Weissert, Technical Specialist Lyndsey Ralston, and Lead Engineer Gary Gonzenbach – recently detailed how Everlaw AI provides powerful efficiencies and deeper analytical capabilities that let PGH improve its research, deposition, and trial prep services.
Everlaw helps the team quickly gain a deeper understanding of massive troves of documents, Weissert says. “Before Everlaw, if we received 10,000 documents from a client, we had to go through each document manually just to understand not only what it is, but whether it is described properly,” he says.
I thought we were very good before, but now I think we’re great at doing this because of the insights we can get from Everlaw.
Ralston adds that the Everlaw platform takes weeks of tedious manual effort out of every project. “I’d have to manually go through every single document and write either a title or a short description,” Ralston adds. “It would take two or three weeks, depending on the number of documents. Now with Everlaw, I can get through it in two or three days with some coding and then running the AI features.”
And Gary Gonzenbach, a lead engineer who testifies in depositions and at trial, says Everlaw has helped him stay ahead of cross-examination strategies that seek to undermine his testimony.
They emphasize that the primary reason for using this tool is not to reduce costs, it’s to deliver a more robust analysis. The client’s same time frame now allows for a significantly deeper, more effective analysis, right up to the days of testimony.
“I can use Everlaw AI to analyze the line of questioning an attorney gave me during a day’s testimony,” Gonzenbach says. “It lets me come back better prepared the next day. We were already very good at what we do, but we’re so much better now thanks to Everlaw.”
Our teams are able to use their time to provide a more thorough testimony.
The Challenge: Manual Document Prep Added Weeks to Timelines
For PGH, preparing documents for analysis by its engineers involved reviewing sets of tens of thousands of complex files, including Bates-stamped PDFs, native files, and spreadsheets. Days would be lost to the effort of identifying and categorizing document types through word searches and determining whether they were relevant to a case.
“The first two weeks of every project was spent just organizing documents, regardless of the case size,” Weissert says. And the manual review process presented several difficult operational constraints, he adds.
While the technical staff could build in that lengthy review time at the start of a new project, supplemental production just before trial meant that clients often brought another 10,000 documents with just a couple of days to review them, which caused intense pressure on the team.
And PGH’s previous method of storing documents on private local servers made it difficult for expert witnesses traveling to courtrooms or field sites to access documents. This meant that if Gonzenbach or another engineer was traveling to testify, they had limited access to documents that they might suddenly need.
“Everlaw’s platform changed all that for us,” Weissert says. “Our teams are able to use their time to provide a more thorough testimony.”
The Solution: AI and Remote Access Help PGH Deliver More Thorough Research Under Pressure
With Everlaw, the team can compress the amount of time it takes to process new documents, deliver deeper analysis, and provide traveling and on-site team members access to the documents they need to do their best work.
Everlaw allows me to spend the majority of my time on engineering, not document management and administration.
1. Data Ingestion and AI Summarization
As PGH Technical Specialist Ralston noted, shrinking the initial review and categorization of documents from a few weeks to a few days has been a game changer. It means that even on the tightest timeline, PGH’s experts move more quickly from understanding the scope of the issue to doing the deep analysis that their clients need to prevail at trial.
Ralston uses standard core categories and AI batch summaries to accelerate first-pass review, classifying documents based on defined criteria. She organizes files into about 10 general categories and runs AI-generated paragraph summaries to quickly provide early understanding of the data. From there, the team moves to deeper levels of analysis.
By leveraging Everlaw batch AI summaries and core categorization, PGH Petroleum has been able to reduce its first-pass review time on a 10,000-document production from two to three weeks to just two to three days, an 80% time savings. Historically, projects reached 32,000 to 45,000 documents which could take months or even years to process and categorize.
“Instead of spending weeks just getting new files sorted at the start of a case, our engineers can now hand over fully organized, summarized data to lead engineers in just a few days,” Ralston says.
Crucially, this increased efficiency means that expert witnesses like Gonzenbach can mine those documents for deeper analysis.
“Everlaw allows me to spend the majority of my time on engineering, not document management and administration,” Gonzenbach says. “My research is much more thorough because of it.”
We’re very deliberate about how we use AI – strictly for advanced research to help us master facts in huge document sets.
2. Deep Dive and Deposition Preparation
After the first pass, Gonzenbach and the engineering team conduct targeted analysis. Using Everlaw AI summaries and Deep Dive, engineers filter through document sets, asking natural language questions and receiving direct answers grounded in evidence, with citations to supporting documents.
“We’re very deliberate about how we use AI,” Gonzenbach adds. “The tool doesn’t form our opinions, drive methodology, or generate content for reports. We use it strictly for advanced research to help us master facts in huge document sets.”
The team can then consolidate its research and other work product directly in Storybuilder, Everlaw’s collaborative narrative building and trial preparation platform, where they can organize documents, testimony, and timelines around key people and issues.
Engineering team members also use the platform during deposition preparation to review transcript text, lines of questioning, and witness feedback and sentiments.
All of this helps the team understand the matter at hand, develop a deep understanding of key issues, and prepare to deliver and defend their perspective in sworn testimony.
“Using Everlaw document previews, AI summaries, and Deep Dive across 15,000 to 20,000 documents means the first week of a project is no longer spent just figuring out what was sent to us,” Weissert says. “It’s spent analyzing it. That delivers immense value to our clients.”
On the third day of the trial, it was a bit of a mic drop. I still remember the look on the lawyer’s face when she realized that I was able to use her own line of questioning against her.
3. Real-Time Collaboration and Accessibility
From day one, Everlaw helps PGH work faster and go deeper in its analysis in preparation for trial or deposition, but the Everlaw advantage extends beyond the preliminary phases. Everlaw’s cloud-native platform lets PGH staff access documents from any location, including airports and active trial locations.
“One of the biggest selling points for us was accessibility, being able to use Everlaw wherever we were,” Weissert notes. “When Gary is out testifying and needs some help, we can easily transfer documents to a folder within Everlaw that he can access between proceedings.”
PGH uses Deep Dive to analyze trial and deposition transcripts to track questioning patterns and opposing arguments. Gonzenbach says it helped him prepare for tough cross-examination during a multi-day trial. The opposing attorney’s questions during the first day of testimony caused him to reflect on the line of questioning. By analyzing the transcripts in Everlaw in his hotel that night, he spotted a pattern and realized the attorney was trying to use concepts from a book Gonzenbach authored in 2010, but was misusing technical terms.
“Everlaw helped me put the patterns together, and on the third day of the trial, there was a question that I was ready to answer, and it was a bit of a mic drop,” he says. “I still remember the look on the lawyer’s face when she realized that I was able to use her own line of questioning against her.”
Delivering Better Value through High Impact Analysis
Moving to Everlaw has enabled PGH’s team of expert witnesses and their tech support to work faster and dive deeper into critical evidence.
From streamlining day-one document intake to fueling “mic drop” moments on the witness stand, Everlaw helps PGH operate at a higher level and deliver superior analysis to clients for the same billed hours.
“We’re able to respond with a lot more insight,” Gonzenbach says. “I thought we were very good before, but now I think we’re great at doing this because of the insights we can get from Everlaw.”
