Madsen v. Beacon Roofing had already gone to trial once, and the plaintiffs lost. The first jury found a commercial truck driver zero percent liable for the death of a child in a crosswalk.

At the retrial, the defense's experts leaned on published studies to back their opinions. Shannon Wise's team at Claggett & Sykes, one of the country's premier plaintiff firms, uploaded those studies into Eve and asked a simple question: do the opinions actually match what the studies say?

In one critical instance, they didn't. An expert had testified that the most visible colors on a roadway were orange or lime green. The study said otherwise. The most visible combination was black and yellow.

Black and yellow were exactly the colors the child had been wearing.

"Being able to get into the nitty-gritty and say, ‘no, it's on page 763’ — that really lends credibility to us as plaintiff's attorneys. And it showed he was a liar," Shannon says. 

The jury deliberated for three hours and returned an $81 million verdict, the largest jury-awarded trial verdict in Utah history.

Starting with a medical records problem

The team almost didn’t get Eve in the courtroom. For years, Shannon had asked her managing partner for one specific thing: a closed AI system that could compare two sets of medical records.

In medical malpractice, she routinely works with thousands of pages. Her set might run 3,000, the defense's 4,000, with no realistic way to know what was different between them. Usually she just worked from whichever set was larger and hoped she wasn't missing anything.

The firm's buying process was rigorous. "We did a lot of research on the type of AI that we wanted to use, and that was right for our firm,” Shannon explains. “It was very important that it was a closed system that wasn't going to hurt our clients or cases or the way we do things.”

They went with Eve for those medical record comparisons. "That was the only thing I really wanted Eve for," she says, "not realizing how amazing it actually is and everything else it could do."

“Just ask Eve”

Today, the whole firm uses Eve daily, and each team has a designated champion who trains everyone else. The record-comparison task was just the start.

Screening potential medical malpractice cases used to mean losing a week. "We could spend a whole week just going through somebody's medical records to see if there's even anything there," Shannon says. That review now takes about an hour. 

What Shannon keeps coming back to is that she isn't boxed in by a fixed menu of features. Instead, as she repeats, “you can just ask Eve.”

On one current case, Shannon asked Eve to build a detailed timeline of a surgery patient's vitals against every alarm and intervention in the operating room. "I have this great chart that would have taken a day to make, and Eve did it in a minute," she says.

For a recent deposition, she fed Eve a transcript from a similar case and similar nurse witness eight years earlier and asked Eve to create an outline. Shannon got back a comprehensive outline, organized into different sections as Shannon does, and even surfaced questions she wouldn't have thought to ask. 

"I can ask Eve medical questions, types of injuries, policies," she continues. "It really helps you gain the knowledge you need to litigate your case."

A tool that goes to trial

Most legal software stops at the courthouse door; case management and discovery tools aren't built to help while you're on your feet in front of a jury. “Having a tool that can help at trial is so rare,” Shannon notes. 

When firm founder and lead trial attorney Sean Claggett had a question about the file during Madsen, she told him to just ask Eve. He logged in for the first time to do so. "It blew my mind," he says. He used it every day for the rest of the trial.

Hunting for one specific document buried in the file used to be one of Shannon's most stressful moments. "Before, you're pulling in associates, a paralegal, your entire staff to find a document, wasting everybody's time. Now you just ask Eve, wait a minute, and there it is," she says.

The bigger unlock was in the prep. Witnesses had been deposed six years earlier, and Shannon used Eve to keep their testimony consistent and to find threads no one had pulled on. Building an outline for the deceased child's best friend, she asked Eve if there was anything else she should cover. It flagged something the boy's mother had said in her own deposition about what her son’s friend would know. "That helped us elicit some of the most powerful testimony," Shannon says.

That preparation paid off twice. It gave them command in the room. Even without putting the study that debunked the defense expert in front of the jury, Shannon says, "they knew that we knew what we were talking about." And it gave time back: "Eve turned our 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. nights into 11 p.m. nights when we were prepping, because it made it so much easier to digest everything."

"You don't have Eve? That sucks for you."

"Eve is a game changer in terms of knowledge and time," Shannon says. "We're saving time, saving money because we can take on more. Everybody's more efficient and has more work-life balance, because Eve can do it."

She's happy to spread the word. When she co-counsels with attorneys who haven't seen it, the demo is short: they wonder aloud whether something's possible, she says "let's ask Eve," and a minute later they're asking what that was. 

Her pitch to any trial attorney who'll listen is even shorter. "Oh, you don't have Eve? That sucks for you."

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