April 29, 2025 • 11 mins
I spoke with Danny Thankachan, the Head of Partnerships at CaseGuild, an AI-powered platform that finds key evidence in litigation. We discussed how legal teams can use artificial intelligence to find crucial evidence, ways that lawyers are currently trying to solve this problem, and the ideal users of this technology.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:01):
Welcome to Reinventing Professionals,a podcast hosted by industry analyst
Ari Kaplan, which shares ideas,guidance, and perspectives from market
leaders shaping the next generationof legal and professional services.
This is Ari Kaplan, and I'm speakingtoday with Danny Thankachan,
(00:25):
the head of partnerships at CaseGuild, an AI powered platform that
finds key evidence in litigation.
Hi, Danny.
How are you?
Hi, Ari.
Thank you for having me.
It's my privilege.
I'm looking forward to this conversation.
So tell us about your backgroundand your role at Case Guild.
I've been in the eDiscovery spacefor 20 years after law school working
(00:46):
in a lot of big law firms managingeDiscovery and a number of different
firms Blank Chrome most recently.
Over the course of last year we'reall anticipating the integration
of AI into everything that we do.
And I realize that, you either aredriving the bus or you get run over.
I found Vivek and Vikas, our CTO andCEO through Reddit, of all places.
(01:10):
Just volunteering to help people outand show them cool tools and technology.
They invited me to joinCase Guild last November.
And I have been havingan amazing experience.
It is a really an exciting time tobe involved in legal technology.
What problem is Case Guild solving?
(01:31):
It is targeting the time todecision making for lawyers.
In their ability to respond toclients immediately about all
of the risks and challenges.
So if a new matter is gettingkicked off that attorney immediately
gets a call and a client issaying, we have an immediate need.
(01:55):
We need to know our risk and howquickly can you assess this for us?
Case Guild turns that process, which usedto take days, if not weeks of evaluating
all the key evidence into hours.
We are directly interrogating thatevidence and providing quick and
targeted answers to the questionsthat the attorneys need answered.
(02:17):
How are lawyers currentlytrying to solve this problem?
Unfortunately, very manually.
They get a zip file or a PST filefrom a client and they're going into
eDiscovery tools trying to process it andkeyword search it try to understand what
that client is asking for, or they'resitting there with a yellow pad and
(02:38):
asking the client to answer questions.
To try to understand what happenedand then the challenge has always been
developing that narrative as quicklyas possible to really get the story
and then apply the law to the story.
We're immediately summarizing documentsas soon as they come into the tool
were immediately creating a chronologyof events as soon as it comes into
(03:01):
the tool and we have clients thatcome back to us and say, wait, we
can have our timeline right now.
Yes, as soon as you put thedata in, here's your timeline.
It's that fast and immediateexecution that's changed the game.
What type of tool is case skilledwithin the litigation life cycle?
(03:25):
Think of it as an early case assessmentand internal investigations tool.
The goal is To be left on the edrm sothat the attorney can start thinking
Interactively with their evidence comingback to that yellow pad analogy in
the past the attorney would write anoutline of the story and They'd write a
(03:50):
question circle it and they say assignto associate right now when you have
that question on that page You come tocase killed, you type in your question
and you have an immediate answer.
You're not having to wait daysfor those associates to even
understand the context of the case.
They're able to get an immediateanswer to that question.
(04:12):
How is AI making?
This is only possible withthe AI tools that we're using.
K Skilled is special in thesense that we are not RAG based.
RAG is a term of art that's reallypopular right now in order to try to
analyze and assess large volumes of data.
We're a full evaluation model.
(04:34):
And what that really means is that the,Way we build Case Guild is intended
to develop insight on the contentand not just be a similarity search.
RAG, is a similarity search, andit's shown that it misses a lot of
relationships and gets things wrong.
(04:56):
Ksguild has been from the ground upbuilt on this full evaluation approach
of applying a variety of different LLMs.
And that's been very successful.
Who is most likely to use Ksguild?
Ideally, the attorney that needs toget questions answered immediately.
A couple examples, we have aclient with an upcoming TRO.
(05:20):
On a Friday he reaches out to us,we get the, and it's something that
they can load themselves very easily.
And is immediately answeringquestions in preparation for that TRO.
We have another matter where the attorneywas parachuting in for a trial in 30
days and they want to immediately get ahandle on what's happening in the case.
(05:42):
They have very little background.
We're able to immediately load allthose documents and they can start
interrogating witnesses directly.
The ability to create a witness finderand be able to interrogate witnesses
and ask open ended questions to developthose insights is a game changer.
(06:02):
As an early stage startup in a competitivemarket, who are your ideal customers?
Anybody that needs tolevel the playing field.
That's really the name of the game.
There are many large law firms thatare using a huge variety of tools.
E discovery tools have been thepresupposed way of moving through data.
(06:28):
We're changing that conversationit's self service and it's immediate.
The attorneys that are facingthese large litigations.
Especially plaintiff side, they get adata dump, 200, 000 documents, 500, 000
documents and , the other side knows it'sgoing to take them weeks, if not months to
(06:49):
analyze and understand what was produced.
That's history.
. The same amount of effort ishappening in minutes and hours now
and we're immediately able to answerthose questions about what was
produced and what was not produced.
That gap analysis is of criticalvalue in leveling the playing field.
You mentioned that you spent much of yourcareer with law firms, service providers.
(07:14):
How have you found the move tosoftware in terms of your experience?
I was always the guy that software vendorscame to, to get the end user story,
I've been helping so many companiesmake their tools better for decades.
(07:35):
And I find it to be animmensely rewarding experience.
The team at Case Guild.
Execute so quickly.
I asked for a feature.
Hey, we need Dropbox integration.
Two days later, there'sDropbox integration.
I was always working through a productmanager to say I really want this feature.
I really need this function.
Our clients are asking for this and.
(07:57):
It would take them days, weeks, monthsto put those into implementation.
And it is so exciting to be with a teamthat's able to execute immediately.
That's the joy of this work.
I get to see my ideas come tofruition almost immediately.
It's so much fun.
How do you see the process offact investigation evolving?
(08:24):
I don't think we havethe final picture yet.
As I engage in conversations withcustomers, as we hear the questions
that are being asked by our clients,our own thinking is evolving.
So the current generation of tools arewhat I would call first order tools.
(08:46):
You're asking for a very Direct output.
You want a summary.
You want a timeline.
You want this function or that function.
That's very meaningful, valuable, but.
Direct and directly pulled from theevidence where this goes next is
(09:07):
the 2nd order knowledge that youcan now garner from the insights.
So I'll give you a simple example of this.
And this is another key feature of beinga full evaluation model versus rag.
We had a chat conversation in a longseries of iMessage chats, and a famous
person was asked to attend an event, andin the conversation, There was a request
(09:33):
to have a bodyguard present, and whenapproval was provided for having the
bodyguard, there was no further discussionabout this person attending the event.
The system was able to understand thatconversation about a bodyguard being
present was agreement, it's takingthat second level insight that a human
(09:53):
would have normally had to intuit.
That, , when they had that discussion,the bodyguard was going to be
there and they were approving it.
They've moved past whetherthe person is going to attend.
Now they're negotiatingthe other criteria.
For this timeline, this was agreementthat they would be present at this event.
And you can see how that's aninterpretation of objective
(10:16):
facts, a first order analysis is.
Is the bodyguard going to be there?
Yes or no?
A second order analysis is we'reactually reaching agreement that
the person is going to attend.
This is, just in the last couple of daysas we've interacted with our clients
and talked about different scenarios.
(10:38):
This is Ari Kaplan speaking with DannyThankachan, the head of partnerships
at Case Guild, an AI powered platformthat finds key evidence in litigation.
Danny, thanks so very muchand I'm wishing you the very
best of luck in this new role.
Ari, this was a blast.
Thank you for listening to theReinventing Professionals podcast.
(11:00):
Visit ReinventingProfessionals.
com or AriKaplanAdvisors.
com to learn more.
Welcome to Reinventing Professionals,a podcast hosted by industry analyst
Ari Kaplan, which shares ideas,guidance, and perspectives from market
leaders shaping the next generationof legal and professional services.
This is Ari Kaplan, and I'm speakingtoday with Danny Thankachan,
(00:25):
the head of partnerships at CaseGuild, an AI powered platform that
finds key evidence in litigation.
Hi, Danny.
How are you?
Hi, Ari.
Thank you for having me.
It's my privilege.
I'm looking forward to this conversation.
So tell us about your backgroundand your role at Case Guild.
I've been in the eDiscovery spacefor 20 years after law school working
(00:46):
in a lot of big law firms managingeDiscovery and a number of different
firms Blank Chrome most recently.
Over the course of last year we'reall anticipating the integration
of AI into everything that we do.
And I realize that, you either aredriving the bus or you get run over.
I found Vivek and Vikas, our CTO andCEO through Reddit, of all places.
(01:10):
Just volunteering to help people outand show them cool tools and technology.
They invited me to joinCase Guild last November.
And I have been havingan amazing experience.
It is a really an exciting time tobe involved in legal technology.
What problem is Case Guild solving?
(01:31):
It is targeting the time todecision making for lawyers.
In their ability to respond toclients immediately about all
of the risks and challenges.
So if a new matter is gettingkicked off that attorney immediately
gets a call and a client issaying, we have an immediate need.
(01:55):
We need to know our risk and howquickly can you assess this for us?
Case Guild turns that process, which usedto take days, if not weeks of evaluating
all the key evidence into hours.
We are directly interrogating thatevidence and providing quick and
targeted answers to the questionsthat the attorneys need answered.
(02:17):
How are lawyers currentlytrying to solve this problem?
Unfortunately, very manually.
They get a zip file or a PST filefrom a client and they're going into
eDiscovery tools trying to process it andkeyword search it try to understand what
that client is asking for, or they'resitting there with a yellow pad and
(02:38):
asking the client to answer questions.
To try to understand what happenedand then the challenge has always been
developing that narrative as quicklyas possible to really get the story
and then apply the law to the story.
We're immediately summarizing documentsas soon as they come into the tool
were immediately creating a chronologyof events as soon as it comes into
(03:01):
the tool and we have clients thatcome back to us and say, wait, we
can have our timeline right now.
Yes, as soon as you put thedata in, here's your timeline.
It's that fast and immediateexecution that's changed the game.
What type of tool is case skilledwithin the litigation life cycle?
(03:25):
Think of it as an early case assessmentand internal investigations tool.
The goal is To be left on the edrm sothat the attorney can start thinking
Interactively with their evidence comingback to that yellow pad analogy in
the past the attorney would write anoutline of the story and They'd write a
(03:50):
question circle it and they say assignto associate right now when you have
that question on that page You come tocase killed, you type in your question
and you have an immediate answer.
You're not having to wait daysfor those associates to even
understand the context of the case.
They're able to get an immediateanswer to that question.
(04:12):
How is AI making?
This is only possible withthe AI tools that we're using.
K Skilled is special in thesense that we are not RAG based.
RAG is a term of art that's reallypopular right now in order to try to
analyze and assess large volumes of data.
We're a full evaluation model.
(04:34):
And what that really means is that the,Way we build Case Guild is intended
to develop insight on the contentand not just be a similarity search.
RAG, is a similarity search, andit's shown that it misses a lot of
relationships and gets things wrong.
(04:56):
Ksguild has been from the ground upbuilt on this full evaluation approach
of applying a variety of different LLMs.
And that's been very successful.
Who is most likely to use Ksguild?
Ideally, the attorney that needs toget questions answered immediately.
A couple examples, we have aclient with an upcoming TRO.
(05:20):
On a Friday he reaches out to us,we get the, and it's something that
they can load themselves very easily.
And is immediately answeringquestions in preparation for that TRO.
We have another matter where the attorneywas parachuting in for a trial in 30
days and they want to immediately get ahandle on what's happening in the case.
(05:42):
They have very little background.
We're able to immediately load allthose documents and they can start
interrogating witnesses directly.
The ability to create a witness finderand be able to interrogate witnesses
and ask open ended questions to developthose insights is a game changer.
(06:02):
As an early stage startup in a competitivemarket, who are your ideal customers?
Anybody that needs tolevel the playing field.
That's really the name of the game.
There are many large law firms thatare using a huge variety of tools.
E discovery tools have been thepresupposed way of moving through data.
(06:28):
We're changing that conversationit's self service and it's immediate.
The attorneys that are facingthese large litigations.
Especially plaintiff side, they get adata dump, 200, 000 documents, 500, 000
documents and , the other side knows it'sgoing to take them weeks, if not months to
(06:49):
analyze and understand what was produced.
That's history.
. The same amount of effort ishappening in minutes and hours now
and we're immediately able to answerthose questions about what was
produced and what was not produced.
That gap analysis is of criticalvalue in leveling the playing field.
You mentioned that you spent much of yourcareer with law firms, service providers.
(07:14):
How have you found the move tosoftware in terms of your experience?
I was always the guy that software vendorscame to, to get the end user story,
I've been helping so many companiesmake their tools better for decades.
(07:35):
And I find it to be animmensely rewarding experience.
The team at Case Guild.
Execute so quickly.
I asked for a feature.
Hey, we need Dropbox integration.
Two days later, there'sDropbox integration.
I was always working through a productmanager to say I really want this feature.
I really need this function.
Our clients are asking for this and.
(07:57):
It would take them days, weeks, monthsto put those into implementation.
And it is so exciting to be with a teamthat's able to execute immediately.
That's the joy of this work.
I get to see my ideas come tofruition almost immediately.
It's so much fun.
How do you see the process offact investigation evolving?
(08:24):
I don't think we havethe final picture yet.
As I engage in conversations withcustomers, as we hear the questions
that are being asked by our clients,our own thinking is evolving.
So the current generation of tools arewhat I would call first order tools.
(08:46):
You're asking for a very Direct output.
You want a summary.
You want a timeline.
You want this function or that function.
That's very meaningful, valuable, but.
Direct and directly pulled from theevidence where this goes next is
(09:07):
the 2nd order knowledge that youcan now garner from the insights.
So I'll give you a simple example of this.
And this is another key feature of beinga full evaluation model versus rag.
We had a chat conversation in a longseries of iMessage chats, and a famous
person was asked to attend an event, andin the conversation, There was a request
(09:33):
to have a bodyguard present, and whenapproval was provided for having the
bodyguard, there was no further discussionabout this person attending the event.
The system was able to understand thatconversation about a bodyguard being
present was agreement, it's takingthat second level insight that a human
(09:53):
would have normally had to intuit.
That, , when they had that discussion,the bodyguard was going to be
there and they were approving it.
They've moved past whetherthe person is going to attend.
Now they're negotiatingthe other criteria.
For this timeline, this was agreementthat they would be present at this event.
And you can see how that's aninterpretation of objective
(10:16):
facts, a first order analysis is.
Is the bodyguard going to be there?
Yes or no?
A second order analysis is we'reactually reaching agreement that
the person is going to attend.
This is, just in the last couple of daysas we've interacted with our clients
and talked about different scenarios.
(10:38):
This is Ari Kaplan speaking with DannyThankachan, the head of partnerships
at Case Guild, an AI powered platformthat finds key evidence in litigation.
Danny, thanks so very muchand I'm wishing you the very
best of luck in this new role.
Ari, this was a blast.
Thank you for listening to theReinventing Professionals podcast.
(11:00):
Visit ReinventingProfessionals.
com or AriKaplanAdvisors.
com to learn more.
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