8am IQ Discovery Assistant

Discovery Assistant is a built-in, image-to-text OCR (optical character recognition) capability in 8am MyCase available in the Advanced tier. It uses computer vision and machine learning to automatically convert all of your files, including scans, handwritten documents, and image-based files into searchable, structured text with no additional tools or manual steps required.

Law firms handle a high volume of scanned and image-based documents that standard search tools can't read. When files aren't searchable, critical case information stays buried, search results are incomplete, and 8am IQ has less context to work with. Discovery Assistant solves this by making scanned and image-based documents readable and searchable in MyCase.

Discovery Assistant works with the following file formats:

Discovery Assistant is available to all MyCase Advanced customers. Discovery Assistant doesn't just work on documents going forward. It will also retroactively process documents from your eligible open cases, so your firm can benefit from searchable documents across active matters. Retroactive processing will be completed for all eligible cases by July 1.

To be included in retroactive document processing, a case must meet both of the following conditions:

Cases that are closed or have not been touched in the past 12 months will not have their documents automatically converted into searchable text. Any new documents uploaded to qualifying cases will be processed automatically on upload.

Discovery Assistant includes the following limits:

Documents are typically ready for search and IQ within a few moments of upload. Complex or lengthy files may take slightly longer. Usage reporting will be available in a future update.

Discovery Assistant is designed to preserve the meaning of your documents, not just the characters on the page. Rather than measuring accuracy at the character level alone, Discovery Assistant evaluates whether the meaning and intent of the original text has been correctly captured, not just whether every character was transcribed perfectly. This evaluation is known as semantic similarity scoring. This means that minor character-level variations, like a slightly misread letter or number, don't diminish the usability of the output if the meaning of the text remains intact.

To illustrate: a sentence like "The plaintiff filed a motion on January 15th" and "The plaintiff filed a motion on January l5th" contain a few character-level differences, but carry the same legal meaning. Discovery Assistant recognizes these as functionally equivalent, returning a high similarity score and keeping your document fully usable.

It's worth noting that character accuracy and document usability don't always move together. A document with a handful of minor character-level transcription differences can still be highly usable if the meaning of the text is preserved, which is exactly what semantic similarity scoring is designed to capture.

Results will vary depending on document type, condition, scan quality, and complexity.

Discovery Assistant is a built-in, automated, image-to-text OCR capability available in the 8am MyCase Advanced tier. To turn off 8am IQ Discovery Assistant, 8am MyCase customers in this tier can submit a request to our Support team at [email protected]. Note that it is not possible to reverse the OCR process for active MyCase documents (in eligible formats) that have already been processed. All other 8am IQ features may be disabled on a firm-wide basis. Admin users who do not wish to allow users to access other 8am IQ features, such as Case Assistant or Writing Assistant, can turn off 8am IQ in Firm Settings.

Once Discovery Assistant processes a document, it becomes fully searchable within MyCase. This means: