Why Agentic AI in eDiscovery is strengthening, not replacing, legal judgment.

Many eDiscovery AI tools are designed to respond to a specific instruction: summarize a document, classify content or answer a question. Agentic AI does something different: it helps coordinate work towards a broader goal.  That does not remove people from the process. It changes where their attention is most valuable.  Human involvement shifts from constant orchestration toward strategic oversight and targeted quality control.

This blog is the first of a two-part series. 

This first blog explains why agentic AI matters for eDiscovery, how it differs from individual prompts, and why legal judgment remains central. The second blog will look at where that model can be applied across specific eDiscovery workflows

Let’s take a look.

What is Agentic AI?

The agentic foundation is a system-level architecture rather than a single model. If achieving the goal requires creating content, generative AI can handle that task within the broader workflow, while the agentic system orchestrates the work on the user’s behalf. This ability to chain actions in response to one request enables a more connected path to a defined result.

The practical shift is from prompt-response assistance to goal-directed work. Agentic AI shifts the model from passive, prompt-driven assistance toward a more proactive, goal-driven workflow. An AI agent can interpret a high-level objective, perceive the relevant environment and data, plan a sequence of actions, act across available tools, and adjust when conditions or findings change.

Why eDiscovery AI is suited to agentic workflow

A legal professional often begins with a broader objective, not a single isolated task. An agentic system can then help determine the steps required, work across available data and tools, evaluate the results and adjust the workflow as needed. This chaining capability is central to the agentic model.

Agentic eDiscovery AI can help connect these steps by:

• working toward a defined legal or investigative objective
• coordinating multiple actions rather than waiting for individual instructions
• adapting the analysis as new facts emerge
• monitoring progress and identifying gaps
• recording actions and decisions for review and audit, and
• escalating issues that require human judgment.

The result is not simply more automation. It is a more continuous workflow in which the technology can perceive the relevant environment and information, plan a sequence of actions and act across tools while handling errors, exceptions or changing conditions.  This moves the process from repeated prompting and manual handoffs toward a more streamlined workflow organized around the matter’s objective.

Strengthening, not replacing, legal judgment

That does not mean that Agentic AI eliminates the need for attorney judgment. It does the opposite! 

The legal professional remains central to the process. The user sets the objective, determines the relevant data, defines or refines the criteria, reviews the results and makes the final legal determination.

Agentic AI does not eliminate human judgment; it concentrates that judgment on strategic decisions, exceptions and targeted quality control rather than requiring people to orchestrate every individual step. The agent helps apply that direction across the data and move the workflow forward.  It strengthens that judgment by providing context, surfacing exceptions, validating patterns and creating a recordable trail of the work performed.

Legal teams continue to determine what the objective should be, which data is relevant, what criteria apply and what action should be taken. The agent helps carry those decisions across a complex workflow with greater speed and consistency.  A legal team may still use analytics, clustering, threading, classification and generative AI. The difference is that an agent can help determine when and how those capabilities should be applied, connect their outputs and move the workflow forward.

A first look at OpenText eDiscovery Aviator Agents

Imagine having an AI research assistant that can comb through vast quantities of data, identify and extract key information, provide that data to a large language model, and deliver a comprehensive report detailing what the data reveals about any given topic. 

OpenText™ eDiscovery Aviator™ Agents brings this agent-guided model into eDiscovery software.  Aviator Agents extends that shift by enabling legal teams to talk to their data in plain language, set a direction, and use AI assistants to help plan and execute connected tasks.  Users can select the relevant data, ask follow-up questions, adjust criteria and refine the results as new facts emerge.  Unlike chatbots that are only able to deliver a single response to a question, Aviator Agents automate complex eDiscovery processes with a single command. It combines three related capabilities:

• conversational prompting with document sets to refine questions without starting over
• intelligent search and discoverability to connect people, events, themes and relationships
• intelligent automation to summarize, tag, classify and generate defined outputs

The value is not that AI takes over the legal workflow. The value is that it can help carry the user’s direction across selected data, connected tools and repeatable steps while keeping lawyers focused on scope, judgment and validation. If applied correctly, eDiscovery AI Agents will allow legal teams to spend more time defining scope and criteria, evaluating risk and strategy, reviewing exceptions and anomalies, validating high-impact findings, and making strategic informed case decisions. 

The next step: agents applied to real eDiscovery challenges

The value of agentic AI becomes clearest when it is applied to specific legal workflows—showing how advanced legal tech solutions can reduce human-in-the-loop orchestration while preserving human judgment.

It sounds complex.  It sounds like you need to be a data scientist, but you don’t. 

In the next blog, we examine where this agent-guided model can be applied across specific eDiscovery workflows and regulatory requests.

Explore OpenText legal tech solutions to learn more about how we help enterprise customers and law firms make smarter legal decisions with AI powered eDiscovery software and best-in-class services.

Read how OpenText eDiscovery Aviator’s Rapid Exploration also helps leverage GenAI to transform early case assessment before document review begins.