How can AI help a law firm prepare a trial bundle?

AI can help a law firm prepare a trial bundle by reading the papers page by page, drafting an index, cross-referencing documents and pointing you at the page a given point appears on. It does not compile, paginate or file the finished bundle for you, and it does not decide what belongs in the bundle. Those judgements, and the checking, stay with the fee earner responsible for the matter.

What AI can usefully do at the bundle stage

Bundle work is mostly reading, sorting and checking, which is where a careful reading tool earns its place. Used well, AI can:

• Read a large set of documents and tell you what each one appears to be and roughly when it is dated.
• Draft a chronological or thematic index for you to correct and reorder.
• Find where a particular event, term or figure is mentioned across many documents, and name the page each mention sits on.
• Point out apparent gaps, for example a letter that refers to an enclosure you cannot locate.
• Flag any page it could not read, so you deal with it rather than discovering the problem in court.

Each of these saves time on the mechanical parts of the task. None of them removes your duty to look at the papers yourself.

What AI should not be trusted to do

A trial bundle carries real risk if it is wrong: the wrong version of a document, a missing page, an index that points at the wrong place. Keep the following firmly in human hands.

1. Deciding relevance and inclusion. What goes in a bundle is a matter of judgement about the issues and the directions given. That is legal reasoning, not sorting.
2. Final pagination and ordering. The bundle a court works from must be exactly what you intend. Treat any machine-generated order as a first draft.
3. Compliance with directions and court requirements. Format, indexing and lodging requirements vary and must be checked against what the court has actually ordered in your case.
4. Privilege and disclosure calls. Whether a document is privileged or should be disclosed is never a decision to delegate to a tool.

A good rule: AI can help you find and describe pages, but a qualified person decides what the bundle contains and confirms it is complete and correct.

Checking the work before it goes anywhere

The value of a page reference is that you can verify it in seconds. So verify it. When AI produces an index or a chronology:

• Open the pages it names and confirm each entry is what it claims to be.
• Check that every document you expect is present and that nothing is duplicated.
• Resolve every page the tool flagged as unreadable, because a page it could not read is a page nobody has read.
• Confirm dates and figures against the source document, not against the summary.

Build a short sign-off step into your process so that one named person confirms the bundle before it is finalised. Your existing file review and supervision arrangements should govern this, exactly as they do for any other work product.

Confidentiality and the practical setup

A bundle often contains the most sensitive material on a file: medical records, financial documents, witness evidence. Before you put any of it near an AI tool, be clear on where the papers are held and processed, whether your matter is kept apart from other firms' work, and whether anyone outside the matter team can see it. For a UK firm the sensible baseline is that data stays in the UK, is not used to train anything for anyone else, and is visible only to the people working on that matter.

The same discipline applies to access inside your own firm. Not everyone should see every bundle. Access should follow who is on the matter, not who is senior.

A workable process for a smaller firm

You do not need a large team to get this right. A four to fifty fee earner firm can run bundle preparation like this:

1. Gather the papers and load them into the tool as a single matter.
2. Ask for a draft index and chronology, and ask what each document appears to be.
3. Work through the draft against the pages, correcting descriptions and order.
4. Deal with every flagged or unreadable page.
5. Have a qualified person confirm relevance, completeness and privilege.
6. Compile, paginate and lodge the final bundle yourselves, in line with the court's directions.

The tool shortens steps one to four. Steps five and six are yours.

Where Alesis fits

Alesis reads a matter's papers page by page, so its citations point at pages, and any page it could not read is flagged rather than skipped. It answers questions about the matter from the matter's own papers and names the page each answer came from, and where the papers do not say, it says so. It prepares drafts for a qualified person to review and sign off; it does not file, serve or email anything, and it does not replace the fee earner who compiles and checks the bundle.