Rethinking Legal AI for Litigators

When AI tools first started appearing at law firms, the conversation often centered on transactional work: contract review, redlines, clause generation. HDRB&B Partner Joseph W. Torre noticed that framing early on and knew it missed something important.

“I think when August first came to the firm, a lot of the focus was on transactional work,” Joe says. “But I found it very useful for civil and criminal litigation.”

That turns out to be a significant distinction. Joe is a seasoned trial lawyer and former Bergen County Assistant Prosecutor, where he successfully prosecuted numerous complex, high-profile cases. He served as Chief of Intelligence and Counterterrorism, directed multi-jurisdictional investigations in coordination with the New Jersey and New York FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces, and earned the FBI Director Award for his work with the Bureau. He joined HDRB&B to bring that same meticulous preparation and strategic instinct to complex commercial and business litigation.

And in that world, the challenges look very different from an NDA stack.

The Problem: Time Spent on the Wrong Things

Commercial litigation is document-intensive. A single case can involve thousands of invoices, contracts, correspondence, and filings, each of which may be relevant to a specific claim, date range, or party. Before August, organizing and extracting information from that volume of material was exactly the kind of time-consuming, low-judgment work that nobody wants to bill, or be billed for.

“You're trying to outline and sync the dates of, in some cases, thousands of communications, invoices, documents, photographs, agreements, etc.,” Joe says. "That's going to take hours. It is tedious work that doesn’t require a legal analytical mind."

The same problem showed up in drafting. Writing a first draft of a complaint, a discovery response, or an internal case memo: structuring the document, pulling in prior language, formatting everything correctly, is work that has to happen before the real legal thinking can begin. It's setup work. And it was consuming a meaningful chunk of every attorney's day.

How Joe Uses August

High-Volume Document Review

In commercial litigation, Joe regularly uploads hundreds or thousands of case documents into August and uses it to zero in on exactly what matters.

"I can say, identify every document that references John Doe between these two dates," he explains. "And then I'm able to click the link, compile all those documents in one PDF, and download it.”

The direct citations are the key feature. Rather than receiving a summary and then hunting for the underlying source, August links directly to the document, eliminating a layer of manual work and giving Joe the confidence that he's looking at the actual record, not a paraphrase of it.

Drafting That Jumps Straight to the Legal Work

August has changed the starting point for nearly every assignment Joe drafts. For discovery responses, August takes the incoming demands and produces a structured Word document, formatted the way Joe wants it, with each request laid out and ready for a response.

"Rather than re-type every single request, it jumpstarts that process so that the billable time is focused on the analytical work," Joe says.

“Your billable time is strictly focused on the analytical work, and that's what your client is paying for.”

The same applies to complaints, answers, and internal case memos. Joe uploads sample documents, specifies the formatting and style he wants, and gets a working draft that reflects his preferences from the first output. He still edits, but he's editing from a strong starting point rather than building from scratch.

“I've already saved so much time getting to that point,” he says. "Now I can really focus on exactly what I need to accomplish."

Strategic Thought Partner

Beyond document work, Joe has found August genuinely useful for legal strategy, and that's the use case he finds most interesting to talk about.

"It's very helpful as a starting point in analyzing a potential case," he says.

"I'm using it to establish a procedural path for cases in terms of what needs to be done, as well as the options in getting there" he says. "Rather than putting that together myself, I can start with August and then confirm with court rules and case law to solidify an accurate and effective approach to a new matter or issue.”

Expanding Into New Practice Areas

One of the less obvious benefits Joe has found: August has given him the confidence to take on work outside his core specialties.

"I've been able to diversify my practice," he says. "And August has given me the confidence to do that."

He points to a recent example: a trademark and copyright licensing agreement for a client.

While he had some familiarity with IP law, August helped him structure the agreement, surface the key issues for his client, and draft proposed language, accelerating the research and analysis that would otherwise have taken much longer to do manually.

The same has been true in litigation itself, where cases often require mastering non-legal subject matter quickly. A recent non-compete matter drew him into the specifics of how advertising agencies operate, Department of Buildings regulations in New York, and advertising permits and licenses.

"August was able to provide a very strong framework for those non-legal areas, where I could take that as a starting point and continue my research," he says. "It's very effective for summarizing and analyzing non-legal-related inquiries."

Beyond the Attorneys: Adoption Across the Firm

Joe's experience is one part of a larger story at HDRB&B. August isn't just being used in practice groups, it's being used across the firm's business and administrative teams as well.

Erica Rivera, HDRB&B's CFO, is a particularly enthusiastic user, and more than that, an internal champion.

"Comprehension is a prerequisite for criticism."
— Erica Rivera, CFO, Hartmann Doherty Rosa Berman & Bulbulia LLP

What stands out about Erica isn't just that she finds August useful in her own work. It's that she's taken it upon herself to bring skeptical colleagues along, showing people what the tool actually does, one conversation at a time. That's how meaningful adoption happens: someone in the trenches saying, let me show you.

This is the pattern August sees at leading firms: adoption that cuts across practice groups and business functions, because the underlying capability, thinking clearly and working faster, is useful to everyone, not just attorneys.

The Bigger Picture

Joe's framing of August is practical and precise: it doesn't replace judgment, it protects it.

"The value of an attorney is in judgment, strategy, direction," he says. "August helps facilitate that process or helps accelerate getting there."

The result is a shift in where lawyers' time actually goes. Less setup. Less formatting. Less hunting through documents. More analysis. More strategy. More of the work that clients are actually paying for, and that attorneys actually went to law school to do.

For a firm like HDRB&B, which prides itself on sophisticated legal work delivered efficiently, that trade-off is exactly right.

About

Joseph W. Torre is a Partner in HDRB&B’s Litigation Department. A seasoned trial lawyer and former Bergen County Assistant Prosecutor, Joe has successfully prosecuted numerous complex, high-profile cases. He served as Chief of Intelligence and Counterterrorism, directed multi-jurisdictional investigations in coordination with the New Jersey and New York FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces, and earned the FBI Director Award for his work with the Bureau.

HDRB&B is one of a growing number of leading law firms, including Hughes Hubbard and others, using August across both their practice and business teams. August is legal AI built for everyone at the firm, not just the attorneys.