Interview with David Gaskey, co-founder of Altumatim
Editorial Dept.
Tell the Best Story and Win
Signal-to-noise ratio comes from the world of analog recording. If you’ve ever listened to a cassette, you may have heard the sound of hiss (noise) along with the music (signal).
In discovery, the “signal,” the music, consists of the small bits of information that are relevant to your case, which are often hidden in a sea of other information—the noise. The relevant information that supports your story is the signal and ultimately will be the evidence presented at trial. There is a lot of noise burying that signal. For example, a document review could start from a mountain of several hundred-thousand documents, emails and files.
The challenge is to winnow that down to the ten best exhibits to present as evidence at trial.
Altumatim® Elevated Discovery™, a new AI technology-enabled discovery software takes the concept of finding the signal in the noise to another level of fidelity—by building story into the core of the software’s analysis. As one of Altumatim’s cofounders, veteran IP litigator
David Gaskey explains.
Everything can be understood through story. Life occurs in story form. We think in terms of story. In thirty years, I’ve never had a client come into my office and give me a list of keywords or indexes—they tell me their story. Storytelling is a big thing right now in the discovery world, and legal tech in general. People are waking up to the reality that story is the best way to do things.
David’s deep legal and technical experience includes working with complex technologies, such as cell phone communications where signal-to-noise ratio is also critical, and litigating cases at the trial and appellate levels. He recently was on a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court where he and his team successfully persuaded the court that part of the patent statute violated the appointments clause of the Constitution.
David’s co-founder, Vasudeva Mahavishnu (Vasu), is an expert in the field of data and computer science. During his previous work in computational genomics, h he applied complex computer models to cancer research.
As Altumatim's chief technology officer, Vasu brings a creative passion to the development of the product, interface design and its usability. He leverages his deep experience with complex data, gene mapping, and building probabilistic data models for protein interactions in humans, to the application of the big data challenges of discovery. Altumatim uses artificial intelligence and patent-pending technology to quickly churn through massive amounts of unstructured document data and information and uses story to structure it as a compelling case, building holistically, as David explains,
The core principle behind the way we designed Altumatim is, whoever tells the best story wins. I smile every time I think how that old maxim was the inspiration that led us to something so new and innovative. Instead of looking at what software was out there and trying to improve on that, we started with the proverbial clean slate and took a completely different approach—and it's cutting-edge stuff. An executive from a global eDiscovery organization recently told me that we have finally shown how generative AI and large language model technology truly fit into the process.
Altumatim is an investigative co-pilot that learns from the user. It can begin at early case assessment and can fly with the litigation team throughout a continuous case assessment as a strategic advisor who has a perfect memory of the contents of the dataset and shows where information fits with the story. It can react to new information that it has been fed and instantly weave that information into the case. With unfavorable new information (and who has not experienced this deep into proceedings), Altumatim’s story-based approach will surface suggestions from the entire set of case data to mitigate and distinguish—and can drastically speed up the process of making lemonade out of the lemons. As David explains,
Nobody else’s product finds things for you based on your story – or your opponent's. That’s the unique approach we took, and we enabled it by pushing the most advanced technologies to their limits. You tell your story to Altumatim, and it finds the information that fits with the narrative. Our system allows you to work from a timeline, themes, or characters and you can explore relationships and connections between the different parts of your story. It fits organically into the way attorneys already work and allows them to see the story within the data from multiple perspectives.
With extractable, actionable information that’s been indexed for use by Altumatim’s artificial intelligence, the software is capable of lending assistance for many related tasks throughout the course of an investigation or litigation. Altumatim's latest offering, called Autonomous ReviewTM, is an AI-driven document review for production. It drastically reduces the time and expense associated with relying on human review. Conducting a typical review in most large cases would require an entire team of people, take at least two months and be a significant portion of the overall cost of the litigation. Autonomous Review makes responsive and privileged calls on the same amount of data in time measured in hours, yielding results that are more accurate and defensible than any previous process. It also automates generating the privilege log and reports how document-specific decisions were made along the way.
Altumatim even levels the playing field for the small and mid-sized law firm to compete head-to-head with the tools used currently by Big Law without requiring a big law budget. The small and midmarket firms are squarely within Altumatim’s go-to-market strategy. A smaller firm can now handle a tidal wave of data produced by the other side that might otherwise be overwhelming and weave a compelling story without missing details that an under-resourced firm would be worried about.
Applications of Altumatim in other areas such as due diligence in the mergers and acquisitions context have already been contemplated. Segmented and specialized industry verticals, such as insurance and pharmaceuticals, may also be in the future for Altumatim as Vasu and David have already realized how it can be tuned to the specific needs of people working with such data sets.
Starting from our story basis makes this possible. Unlike other vendors jumping on the bandwagon to simply add Chat GPT to their offering as a separate toy on the side, we carefully integrate everything in a way that focuses on delivering results that are actionable and that can be tied into everything else you’re doing.
Altumatim scales. Although it is built to handle the exploding volumes of litigation and discovery data that are only getting larger every year, it can also work with a very small sample of less than one hundred documents or files. It does not require a vast training set like some models do.
Speed to accurate, actionable information is at a premium in assessing strategy and the value of tools used at your disposal. Results delivered with speed and accuracy are at Altumatim’s core—and its cost makes it a valuable, game-changing new player on the field.
Sponsored by Cash Butler and R3 Legal Operations
Learn more about Altumatim here, or get in touch with David and Vasu at sales@altumatim.com