How AI Is Transforming the Practice of Law with Cristin Traylor

AI is moving into legal practice at remarkable speed, but there’s a big difference between experimenting with a new tool and trusting it with work that could affect a case, a client, or a legal decision.

My guest is Cristin Traylor of Relativity, who brings an especially useful perspective to that question. Cristin spent more than two decades developing discovery strategy in complex litigation before moving into legal technology and artificial intelligence. Today, she works with law firms and corporate legal departments on the practical application of generative AI in discovery and other legal workflows.

We talk about where AI is already delivering real value for lawyers—and where some of the enthusiasm may be getting ahead of the technology. Cristin explains why defensibility and validation remain so important when AI enters the legal process, what lawyers need to understand before relying on AI-generated results, and why adopting these tools doesn’t eliminate the need for human judgment.

We also get into the changing role of lawyers as AI takes on more of the work traditionally associated with reviewing, organizing, and analyzing large volumes of information. What should lawyers still be doing themselves? Where can technology make them better and more efficient? And how should legal teams evaluate the growing number of AI products promising to transform the way they work?

It’s a conversation about AI, discovery, legal judgment, and how to distinguish meaningful innovation from hype as the profession works through a technological shift that is still very much underway.

Jump in to hear Cristin’s perspective on what generative AI can—and can’t—do for legal teams, how to approach it responsibly, and what its continued evolution could mean for the practice of law.

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Transcript

AI Evidence Everywhere

Tom Hagy 0:00

Hello, and welcome to the Emerging Litigation Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Hagy. Emails, text messages, images, screenshots, voice messages, on and on and on. The issue isn't just finding evidence, but it is sifting through massive troves of evidence. And the development and the advent, rather, of artificial intelligence in the practice of law has made this even more challenging. At the same time, it's also been offering tools. Anyone who's paying attention is seeing the courts are becoming far less tolerant of mistakes, I should say, mistakes and abuses of using AI in the practice of law. It brings all sorts of complicated issues around if you're asking an AI bot a qu a legal question and it's giving you an answer. Are you obligated to disclose that? And by the way, where is that conversation taking place? And are you sharing confidential information? So I mean, the problems, I'm not going to tell anybody anything new. It's a huge, huge asset to anybody practicing law or doing writing like I do, but it's also just full of uh landmines, uh tripwires, um, tiger traps. I don't know. What do you what do you want me to say? With me to discuss this is Cristin Traylor. I'm looking down because I've got a I can't memorize her title. She's with Relativity, but she's got a great title. It's a paragraph. Let's just face it. She is senior director of AI transformation and law firm strategy. So there you go. Wasn't that long, I guess, at Relativity. And she focuses on the legal technology needs of law firms, helps organizations think through the practical, defensible use of AI in high-stakes workflows. There you go. So before joining Relativity, she was discovery counsel at a major law firm uh in litigation. So she oversaw teams providing discovery support and strategic guidance to clients. She's active in the broader legal technology community, including women in eDiscovery, eDRM, and the Sedona Conference. So with that, it's my pleasure to speak with her. It's uh first time on the podcast, Cristin Traylor of Relativity. I hope you enjoy it.

Cristin Traylor’s Path To AI

Tom Hagy 2:25

So let's let's just jump into it. I've already introduced the subject and I've introduced you generally, but uh why don't we talk a little bit more? Why don't you fill us in a little bit more about your role and your perspective? Because you've got a title that suggests that you really work at the intersection of legal practice, technology, and business strategy. So tell us how you how you got into this. Is this what you wanted to do when you were a little girl? Tell us about that.

Cristin 2:52

Sure. So, no, I actually started out at a large law firm. I litigated, uh, did business and securities litigation, white-collar crime investigations, did a lot of e-discovery, was discovery counsel for 20 years, managed a document review center, worked at the intersection of technology and legal, and just really love the technology side as well as the legal side. And when I had this opportunity to come work at relativity where I could really pull those things together, I kind of jumped at it and was able to kind of be a lot more creative in kind of what I do. And honestly, AI has really changed everything, generative AI specifically in the last few years when that kind of came on the scene. It got even more exciting because every day is something new and kind of found that, you know, what was really needed was to kind of help the industry understand, you know, how generative AI is going to change workflows and how you talk to opposing counsel or the court or you know, what kind of ESI protocols you negotiate, as well as kind of what are we building internally at Relativity for our customers to help them be more efficient and get more insights out of their data. So my role is like as you notice, very widespread, but it's a lot of fun as well as you know, something that really keeps me on my toes because I'm always learning something new because the technology is always changing.

Tom Hagy 4:23

Yeah, it sure is. There's something new every day. And certainly in the market, I'm watching the market closely and I'm tracking the acquisitions and deals going on, and it's you know not unheard of to see something of some $10 billion uh arrangement. A lot of it now has to do with building the infrastructure to support it. And you know, you see good news that, oh, this is all happening really, really well. This is changing people's lives. It is an exciting area. I use it quite a bit. I will use it, like I said, even on this podcast, this is a an AI podcast platform. This will help fix our audio, it will create some clips for us. Um it'll create a transcript, it'll write blog posts. It's crazy. You know, of course, of course, as I preach and as you know, you have to go over everything. You know, you don't just let anything fly out there. But we we

What Relativity Actually Does

Tom Hagy 5:10

can get into that. So just briefly, so for people, I think most people know who relativity is. And so just briefly, what is the company kind of known for?

Cristin 5:18

Yeah, so we are an AI platform for legal data intelligence. So what does that mean? Uh you know, we're used in litigation, investigation use cases, data breach response, second request, third-party subpoena, FOIA requests, you know, all sorts of things. If you have a lot of data and you need to analyze it, sometimes you need to review and produce it in the e-discovery context. Sometimes you need to figure out, you know, if you've got an internal problem that you need to solve, just really anything that you can think about that you might want to do with lots and lots of data, or even just small amounts of data, but really being able to kind of use AI to analyze it in a uh defensible way.

Tom Hagy 5:58

Yeah. And some folks, when I work with one partner, they're very nervous about because they're seeing things you know every other week about some hallucination or something, and somebody gets dinged for that. But there's a lot of conversation about AI making legal work faster. As a writer, a legal writer, it's making my work faster. But I've been an editor for 40 years, and I just treat it like it's a draft that a younger, very intelligent, very fast person has created, and um, I get a kick out of it, frankly. So it's like having a little team of writers that I can scold when they're wrong. But speed's only part of it. So a lot of law firm leaders really want to know uh is where does AI create genuine strategic advantage rather than just, you know, we're gonna do things faster and more efficient.

Speed To Insight Over Speed

Cristin 6:41

Right. And I think like there's a piece of that, you know, faster efficiency. It's actually speed to insight, right? So think about you have all of this data. And if you were to, you know, manually go through it or, you know, even use some other tools to narrow it, you still are spending a lot of time to get to those really important documents that are gonna help inform your case strategy, you know, matter decisions, whether you need to terminate somebody or disclose something to the government, right? Getting to that information faster is really important because those insights are what help you as a lawyer or as a legal professional sort of figure out what needs to be done in a case. So yeah, yes, the efficiency, the faster, the cost savings, all of that is very important. But to me, it's actually getting those insights faster so you can make decisions faster and make smarter decisions based on data that you may have missed, right? There may have been some insights or some facts or something that would have been missed by a human, but that the AI is able to surface it and surface it quickly, which makes a difference.

Tom Hagy 7:50

Yeah, it does. When we talked before, one of the things that I thought was a real advantage too is just chronology building. That just seems like a very tedious kind of task. Um, and then other things, deposition prep and things like that. So talk about those very practical things the way people are using it.

Timelines Summaries And Dep Prep

Cristin 8:07

Sure. Yeah, it's not just sort of reviewing documents to produce, it's also being able to take the important documents, right? Now you've got these insights, you've gotten them quickly. What are you going to do with them, right? So you need to be able to organize them in a way that makes sense so you can use it to create chronologies, timelines, witness summaries, uh, deposition outlines, a list of questions uh for witnesses, a privilege review. I mean, there's so many things that you can do with AI now that just kind of speed up that process. Again, it's not like this is the the end all be all. As you said, we've got to check the work, right? But it's some of it will give you a really good first draft to work with. So then again, you're focusing on that higher level strategic legal work as opposed to like you said, creating a timeline, you know, that was a very manual process before. Doesn't need to be now with with AI, things like that. So I think, you know, being able to interrogate your data and get, again, ask some questions, get some insights, figure out are there people that you might need to talk to that you didn't realize you needed to talk to? Are there data sources that are missing, right? Or do you need to go collect something else? What else is out there? I think it's just really giving you, again, that additional insights that you might not have gotten before or took a really long time to get to.

Tom Hagy 9:29

In law, then you've got all this institutional knowledge. Lawyers have been practicing for 30, 40, 50 years. They've got all this institutional knowledge. So how do you preserve that in your AI system?

Cristin 9:40

Yeah, and I think that is actually the most important things that lawyers have is that professional judgment. And so what it does, you know, AI, like you said, it it kind of gets some of that rote work out of the way, it gets you that starting off point, but you still need to add your professional judgment. And that's where lawyers can bring a lot of value, right? Okay, so the AI helped you get to these insights and organize them and put them in a nice timeline. Um, but now you need to look at that and say, okay, here's where I need to focus. Here's all of my institutionality, all of the things that I have learned over these past many, many years that I know about the law and how things work. And now this is where I apply that and figure out, okay, here's what we need to do. Here's the course of action to take. So AI does not take away the need for lawyers or legal professionals. It just really heightens what they can do and helps them kind of actually be able to see things that maybe they weren't able to see before. But again, they need to make those calls. They still need to give their advice on what to do. I wouldn't let the AI give the advice.

Professional Judgment Still Matters

Tom Hagy 10:47

Right. Well, I guess that goes to the next point around governance and setting up rules. So talk about that. How should law firms think about setting rules for AI so they avoid those kind of problems, you know, getting the full advantage of AI, but mitigating those risks?

Cristin 11:02

Yeah.

Governance Permissions And Data Boundaries

Cristin 11:03

So I think it's really important for law firms to take a look holistically. What are our lawyers and legal professionals doing? What are the workflows they're doing? Where does AI make sense? And what AI makes sense, right? What type of platform? Um where do we want them doing their work? Do we want them doing it in a platform that is defensible, that has permissions uh that you can issue, that can separate by client and client matter number? What is the governance of the system or the platform that they're using? Because that makes a big difference, especially in law firms. If you think about it, everything has to be done, you know, client matter numbers, we have to keep clients uh separate, their data separate from each other. So you don't want it all commingled. Um, so you have to really think about kind of what are these systems? How do they work? Are they training on your data? Are they retaining your data? Is one person in the firm going to have access to another person in the firm's data? Like, how is that all working? And kind of really make sure you understand that before you just roll out a whole bunch of AI systems. And then think about, right, if you have one of these governed defensible systems, can you use the AI within that system instead of moving data all around, which we know is a big issue of risk. The data could be degraded, things could get moved in the wrong place, you could miss something, that sort of thing. So kind of making sure you understand that and then laying out, okay, here is how we're going to govern this. Here are the use cases. You can use this AI platform for these use cases, you can use this AI platform for these use cases. Um, and then of course, training and making sure people understand uh what that really means, because everybody sync says, okay, AI is great and it can help me. And so now all of a sudden someone's putting something into a publicly available version of an LLM, right? And so now it's out there and you've uh disclosed some sensitive client data because people they were thinking, oh, this is a much easier way to do this. So again, that training and making sure people understand the repercussions of what they're doing.

Shadow AI And Training Gaps

Tom Hagy 13:09

I'm not actually familiar with this AM, 8 AM company, but they said governance isn't keeping up. Roughly half of firms still have no formal AI training, policy or training. It sounds like a lot of firms have to catch up on the training side.

Cristin 13:23

I think any firm that doesn't have this sort of policy governance training program is behind at this point because the the problem is, is then we've got the shadow AI problem where people are gonna use it, right? So if you don't give people the tools that they can use in a safe manner, then they're gonna use something else, right? And that's where the problem comes in. So that's why it's really important to understand, hey, where is my data sitting? And can I use the AI in that platform instead of moving it all over the place, which can be dangerous.

Tom Hagy 13:55

Shadow AI. Is that is that a term of art now?

Cristin 13:58

It is now. It's it's one of the it'll probably be one of those new terms that gets added to the dictionary. But yeah, shadow AI is a bit.

Tom Hagy 14:04

I just hope so. Okay, good.

Client Pressure On Cost And Turnaround

Tom Hagy 14:06

Well, let's move to clients because I've heard this from lawyers too now. Uh clients are assuming, okay, well, lawyers, law firms can do everything much more efficiently. They don't even need to have all these associates, maybe. Yeah, I'm exaggerating. But they expect faster turnaround and a lower cost. So what are you hearing about client expectations?

Cristin 14:26

Yeah, I think the push is coming everywhere. So if you think about it, the clients think about corporations, they're getting pushed from their stakeholders, from their board of directors, from their right, everybody's saying, like, okay, you need to cut costs, right? And so then they're going to their law firms and saying, okay, use AI to um provide more efficiencies and uh bring those costs down, right? So it's kind of flowing through. And so um they are expecting it, but I think where they're expecting it again are on those tasks that don't require that higher level, you know, legal judgment. And so something like document review, where you can use a tool like Air for Review or Air for Privilege to quickly kind of get through the documents and triage them to the right people to look at for the second level review and get those insights, like they're gonna expect that their law firms are using that type of technology to bring those costs down in that way. Now, that doesn't mean that all of the costs get compressed because we still have the need for QC and validation and not just blindly relying on the AI. So it's a different level of work that people are doing. But yeah, I'd say that people are expecting to see that value, those cost savings. And and we've seen it in the field where people are using tools to review, especially like first passed review to cut costs by 50%, 70%, 40%, right? And so can those costs be then passed on to the client for that task for that first level review, but then of course there's the rest of it that still needs to be done that the law firm still needs to use their higher level, you know, strategic value.

Tom Hagy 16:09

Yeah. Yeah, I gotcha. I mean, at some point I I realize the discovery process, that's not legal advice necessarily. Well, I mean, it is, it gets into it, but I don't know. I always feel like how many hours anybody spends on something, I don't know if there's a better solution, but I always thought the hourly rate was kind of nuts because you know you've got a lawyer, like again, somebody with 40, 50 years experience, you're getting the benefit of that. You know, five minutes from them can like you know, can change quite a bit. So I feel their pain uh that you know they're being able to pressure because a lot of companies obviously are using AI and saving a lot of money, I'm sure. Insurance companies analyzing claims and analyzing uh people, and certainly you know they're saying, Oh, we're doing it, why can't you? I suppose. I

New Offerings And Smaller Firm Wins

Tom Hagy 16:55

see the firms kind of in the middle there, but it also seems too that maybe it opens up other opportunities for law firms to do other kinds of work or other kinds of service offerings. Have you seen any of that?

Cristin 17:07

For one, if you can free up your time so you can actually do more, right? So for those matters where maybe before you couldn't take on any more work without hiring more people, or there was a piece of the litigation or the the investigation of the matter where you just didn't have time to do this piece of it. And now with AI, you can do those. So that it kind of opens up those possibilities as well, as well as doing like even maybe work that you weren't doing before. So one AMLA 10 law firm recently was able to start doing DSARs in a very quick, efficient way where before it wouldn't have made sense, right? To kind of do those, or it was not a helpful way for them to give advice. And now, like using this technology and using AI, they are able to do those. And so again, being able to do just different types of work or again to solve some of those problems that maybe were too thorny to solve before, right? The data was too messy, we couldn't get to it, we couldn't figure out how to deal with it. It was gonna cost millions of dollars to have people look at them. Now it's like, okay, wait a minute, we can use AI to solve this problem. And we couldn't do that before. So I think it does open up a lot of possibilities for those firms that are very innovative and can kind of look around and say, okay, what weren't we doing before? Why weren't we doing it? And is there a way for us to do it now using AI?

Tom Hagy 18:37

It seems too that with the increased efficiency, that this will particularly help smaller firms who don't have the same resources and staff size. So how do you see this helping smaller firms?

Cristin 18:50

Yeah, it's definitely the great equalizer, right? If they have access to the the right tools, um, they can do so much more without adding headcount. And think about it, even in the way of, you know, in discovery, if you're on the plaintiff's side and somebody gives you a data dump, right? That's no longer a problem. It's like, okay, fine, let me just run it through AI. And so now I've sorted out the junk and I can really focus on what matters, right? So it I think it does make a difference of what you can get done and how you can get through it. And think about the new AI native law firms, right? So we have uh lawyers who are really focused on using AI for everything. And so they're able to do a lot with again, not a huge set of overhead or a large number of headcount because AI is really allowing them to get a lot more done. And again, it's a lot of that starting off point, right? So um you don't need maybe a junior associate to draft the first draft of the brief, but you're still gonna go through and take the AI brief and you have to look at all the cases and look at the analysis and put in your own thoughts. And so you can do that maybe without as many people.

Tom Hagy 20:04

Yeah. Just from experience, because I was a legal writer for many, many years where you get a 150-page opinion on deadline, and uh that takes time, you know, to do it right because not only you have to understand it, but then you have to write about it. So I've used AI to, in seconds, get the high points, but what I like about it is it's not going outside that document, so it's not gonna hallucinate. And so I'm just like strictly look at this document, and then it also shows me where it got everything. And so it's like I don't have to worry that uh it's making stuff up. So uh I would think that would be great for that's gonna save people a lot of time, I think.

Grounding Validation And Hallucination Risk

Cristin 20:41

Yeah, I think it's key that grounding of the AI in specific documents. We do that with Air for Review and Air for Privilege and our AFK strategy. So find a citation in the document to ground it, right? It has to find some text in the document that it's basing its prediction or its extraction on so that you have something that you can verify and look at. That's a really important point when you're talking about using AI because people start to think all they hear about are the hallucinated cases. Um, but it's very different when you're talking about it in the e-discovery context because you can actually point it to, no, just look at this document and then find something in this document to ground itself. You have to really think about what are those use cases, right? Are you writing a brief that you're going to present to the court? Are you using AI to maybe get some summaries to help you advise your client on some early case insights? Like what is the use case? What is the risk? And what are you using that data for, right? Because there is like an argument out there that if you verify everything that the AI is doing, that it may take you longer than it would had you not used the AI. If you're spending, I think there's something to be said for really understanding okay, what is the AI doing? How am I validating this? How am I doing QC? And what am I? using it for? Am I using it to help me with my understanding of the case or the matter? Or am I presenting something to the other side or to the court? And so there's different types of validation that needs to be done in each scenario.

Developing Talent In An AI World

Tom Hagy 22:17

Right. Well the last thing we alluded to this earlier too is about developing talent at firms. So you're bringing associates in now. So I mentioned the thing about just training writers say that you want to learn you want to be a good writer first and an editor, but if you're always relying on AI, I don't know. So in the law it's even perhaps more complicated. So how do you see AI affecting the development of new talent? And what do you think firm leaders should be doing to make sure they are bringing up that next generation?

Cristin 22:47

Yeah, I think it's a different type of development that needs to be done. And sort of pretending that AI doesn't exist, I don't personally I don't think that's the way to go, right? Just saying like pretend it's not there and we're going to show you how to do this the old way, the manual way, right? I don't think that's the way to do it. I think the way to do it is to explain the systems, explain their pros, their cons, the risks, what they might get right, what they might get wrong, and then help them understand again how to QC, how to validate, how to add their legal judgment, how to go look up the case and actually read it and then see if the AI says what it's saying about it, right? I think there's a way to train them in that way so that they can use it. I just don't think we're going to go back to people writing things from scratch. So let's just use what we have, the technology and make sure people can use it in a safe and defensible manner.

Tom Hagy 23:41

Yeah. I don't know how I feel yet about writing from scratch, you know, because I look at writing differently I am legal writing all the time. I did have a freelancer who was just starting hadn't done a lot of writing before. And she was using AI quite a bit. But you could tell that maybe she didn't have the experience because some of the stuff was just coming over. First of all the wording AI is funny. I'll ask it to give me a draft of something about a case and it'll say in a landmark case I'm like okay well I tell it don't use adjectives please because that takes judgment and then it maybe and you're very smart AI. I'll talk to it like a person. And it's a she in my house. My wife is calling it a she now because she's using my wife is my business partner, I should say. But uh she's using it quite a bit. But it'll come back with things like that. So I'm trying to train it like never use adjectives. Just let me do that.

Cristin 24:31

Yeah no there's definitely some tells and some things that you start to learn and you know the other new term out there AI slop, you know, people just doing that. And so again if you don't know how to write to begin with right like you said and if you get something you you should be able to look at it and say this is where I need to make some changes. This is not very good. I need to pull this out this is where I need to add something take it away right a good writer will know that. Somebody who's not they're not going to be able to do it. Yeah.

Tom Hagy 25:01

Yeah. And also I guess you can draft something and then ask AI to critique it. I mean there's all sorts of ways and that way you save the embarrassment of having your curmudgeonly editor which is what I had uh throw it back at you. This is terrible. Redo I'm I never had well no I did. But they uh they kind of beat that out of you. But anyway this is this is fascinating. So tell me just finally you seem excited about this. You seem like you you like what you do. So why are you enjoying this profession?

Cristin 25:29

Yeah I think because well one it's constantly changing but we're able to do things that when I was in practice would have taken me so long to get done and those rote things those manual tasks that maybe as a younger associate nobody liked to do for document review which was this process where you had hundreds of attorneys in a room and they were clicking buttons and it's like no we can now use technology the way it was supposed to be it should be used, right? And so that to me is the exciting part to be able to use technology to really make lawyers' lives better and help them really focus on what the case is about, right? That's what lawyers like to do. And so that's why I'm excited because AI is really making that just fun uh for everyone and love that you know every day we're coming out with something new at relativity and able to use the technology to improve and kind of move the legal profession in a positive way.

Tom Hagy 26:31

Yeah. Well you use the word fun and I have to say as a writer and a researcher I have people saying oh my gosh you know it's terrible that people are going to be using it, misusing it. And I'm like, yeah, but I really like it. So all right. Kristen Trailer, thank you very much for talking with me today. I appreciate it.

Cristin 26:47

Thanks so much for having me.

Closing And How To Reach Us

Cristin 26:48 Tom Hagy 26:48

The Emerging Litigation Podcast is a production of critical legal content which owns the awesome brand HB Litigation. We create content that's critical on legal topics for law firms and legal service providers. That kind of content can be blogs, papers, they can be podcasts, webinars, and we have a good time doing it. And that's for HB Litigation well that's the name under which we publish interesting legal news items webinars articles articles all on emerging litigation topics. Once again I'm Tom Hakey with Critical Legal Content and HP Litigation participate. Give me a shout out my contact information