E‑discovery experts flag AI as new risk and opportunity in litigation

This practitioner‑level analysis of AI in e‑discovery is a good barometer of how fast generative tools are penetrating the legal trenches. The authors describe a world where counsel are already experimenting with AI to sort, summarise and review huge troves of documents, but where every gain in speed comes with new questions about reliability, privilege waivers, auditability and sanctions if things go wrong. In other words, AI is now embedded in the evidentiary pipeline that courts rely on to find facts. ([reuters.com](https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/navigating-evolving-world-e-discovery-information-governance-artificial--pracin-2026-01-05/))

For the race to AGI, that matters because litigation workflows are a canonical “high‑stakes” deployment domain. If the bar for explainability, chain‑of‑custody and human oversight rises in this context—as it almost certainly will—those standards will bleed into adjacent high‑risk uses like financial crime investigations, healthcare audits and regulatory enforcement. Vendors that can supply systems with built‑in logging, provenance tracking and tunable levels of automation will be better placed than generic chatbots dropped into legal teams. Conversely, early missteps—like hallucinated citations or undisclosed AI review—could trigger court backlashes that slow adoption far beyond law. Watching how the US e‑discovery bar digests AI is, in effect, watching a test case for where professional responsibility norms will draw the line on automated reasoning tools.