Inside a Live Trial: Winston Taylor Puts Real-Time Case Intelligence at Litigators' Fingertips with Assist

How did they do it?

• Equipped trial team with real time generative AI capabilities, allowing litigators to question case documents, testimony, and evidence in plain language and get cited answers in seconds
• Compressed work that once consumed hours of manual searching into real-time insight during live testimony
• Built a repeatable, prompt-driven trial-support workflow the firm will standardize across matters

Trials are won and lost in seconds. A witness says something on the stand that does not square with the record, and the trial team has a narrow window to find the proof, frame the question, and act before the moment passes.

For years, that pressure ran headlong into a hard limit: the sheer scale of the modern case record. Discovery materials, deposition transcripts, expert reports, exhibits, and daily trial transcripts can span millions of pages and thousands of hours of testimony. Traditional litigation technology lets teams search across all of it, but searching is only the first step. Someone still must read the results, connect them, and surface the answer. During live proceedings, where decisions are measured in seconds, that gap between search and insight can be the difference between a defining cross-examination and a lost opportunity.

Winston Taylor set out to close that gap. Through Relativity's Advanced Access program, where the firm collaborates with Relativity to test and shape emerging capabilities around the real needs of practitioners, Winston Taylor brought Assist into one of the most demanding environments in all of law: a high-profile trial, in real time.

Putting AI in the hands of the litigators themselves

The most important decision Winston Taylor made was not which tool to use. It was who would use it.

In conventional trial-support workflows, attorneys stay a step removed from the technology. They describe what they need, and a support professional translates it into searches, runs them, and reports back. That layer adds time the trial day rarely allows.

Winston Taylor flipped that model. The firm centralized the data corpus for the matter, including discovery documents, deposition transcripts, narrative discovery responses, and trial exhibits, into Relativity aiR, then put Assist directly in front of the trial team, including the litigators trying the case.

Instead of constructing search strings under pressure, the team asked direct, plain-language questions and got narrative answers in seconds — every one of them grounded in the source materials and supported by citations back to the underlying documents.

From hours to seconds, when it matters most

The impact showed up in the moments that decide cases.

Picture a witness testifying that they had never visited a particular location. In a traditional workflow, confirming what the record actually said could mean minutes or longer of frantic searching across transcripts, emails, and exhibits, often while the examination moved on without the team. With Assist, the trial team could simply ask what the record showed about that witness and that location. Within seconds, Assist surfaced the relevant prior testimony, documents, and exhibits, summarized what it found, and pointed to the exact source, giving the litigator the proof needed to shape the next question.

That capability did more than save time. It changed what the trial team could do with the record. Real-time fact-checking, faster identification of impeachment material, and instant grounding of strategic calls in the evidence became part of how the team worked, not a luxury reserved for the overnight prep session. Tasks that once pulled multiple people away from higher-value work were handled in seconds, freeing attorneys to spend their judgment where it mattered most.

“What makes this work impactful is not just the technology itself, but how it's deployed. We combined Assist with purpose-built proprietary Winston Taylor workflows to create a real-time, collaborative environment where attorneys can interact with the entire case record in a more intuitive and efficient way.”
Bobby Malhotra, Partner, AI Governance and Regulatory Compliance and Chair, eDiscovery and Information Governance Practice, Winston Taylor

A repeatable workflow, not a one-time experiment

What made the initiative durable was the discipline around it. Winston Taylor paired the technology with its own purpose-built workflows, including custom prompt libraries, integration methods, and trial-support protocols refined through real use. The result was not a clever demonstration but an operational, repeatable way of working — one the firm's litigation teams continue to evaluate and expect to adopt as a standard approach to trial.

Because the workflow surfaces evidence inside Relativity aiR, the environment where the data already lives, the team kept everything traceable and defensible, with citations supporting every answer. That governance gave the litigators confidence to rely on what they were seeing in the heat of the moment.

“One of the biggest benefits of Assist was the peace of mind. It let us quickly check the record from another angle and confirm there was nothing we overlooked in the tens of thousands of pages of testimony and exhibits.”
Elayna Napoli, Litigation Associate, Winston Taylor

Now Winston Taylor is extending the same playbook beyond trial, to depositions, evidentiary hearings, motion practice, investigations, and other high-intensity moments where rapid factual analysis could materially impact the outcome.