A new legal services company has developed an artificial intelligence program to support lawyers during time-consuming and costly research.

iNof8 Legal is a project of attorneys Dameon Allensworth and Kyle Sweet. They said trends show legal departments are scaling back in size and budget, but not in workload. That could mean spending hundreds of hours poring over documents to comply with a discovery request or going line-by-line through contracts to make sure they include all the necessary language.

Allensworth said law firms can turn to basic technologies for routine work like spreadsheets, or outsource the work to teams of young lawyers, which is still expensive.

One of the technologies used by iNof8 Legal, however, is electronic discovery software powered by continuous active learning. Based on a set of parameters consistently weighted by an algorithm, the program can take hundreds of thousands of documents and identify ones that are most responsive to a request.