Canadian law firm McCarthy Tétrault is using Altorney’s MARC document intelligence platform to analyze complex legal documents, adding another example of AI moving into the time-intensive review processes that underpin litigation, investigations, and other legal work.
The firm is deploying MARC across litigation, investigations, antitrust, tax, and data breach matters. The platform is designed to identify relevant information within large document populations while providing an explanation for its classifications.
McCarthy Tétrault currently uses MARC for relevance and privilege review, issue coding, and the identification of personal and confidential information. The firm has more than 800 lawyers and operates across Canada, as well as in New York and London, according to the company.
For legal teams, document review can involve processing large volumes of information before lawyers can focus on the issues requiring deeper legal analysis. MARC is designed to move part of that analysis earlier in the workflow.
The platform can classify documents according to relevance, responsiveness, privilege, personal information, trade secrets, and other categories defined for a specific matter. It also provides a rationale for its coding decisions, allowing lawyers to assess the results rather than relying solely on an automated classification.
“We are using MARC for relevance and privilege review, issue coding, identification of personal and confidential information across general litigation, investigations, and data breach matters,” said Susan Wortzman, a partner at McCarthy Tétrault and president of the firm’s e-discovery division, MT>3.
Wortzman said the teams are also working on bespoke workflows for complex matters and that MARC provides detailed rationale for its coding decisions.
The platform can operate before documents enter a review platform or on data already hosted in an existing review system. This gives legal teams the option of filtering information earlier in the process or using MARC for quality-control workflows later in the review.
Data handling is another consideration for legal organizations adopting AI tools. MARC can be deployed in a client’s cloud, a client-controlled data center, or Altorney’s secure hosted environment.
According to Altorney, McCarthy Tétrault has kept data within its own private environment while using the platform.
The deployment reflects Altorney’s positioning of MARC as a tool intended to support lawyers rather than replace legal judgment.
“We built MARC to give legal teams better intelligence wherever their data resides,” said Shimmy Messing, CEO and co-founder of Altorney. “Our goal is not to replace legal judgment; it is to give exceptional legal teams a faster, more explainable foundation for applying it.”
Founded in 2021, Altorney develops technology for legal teams working with complex data. MARC is designed for use across litigation, investigations, transactions, compliance, privacy requests, and data breach response.
