AI for Mass Tort & Class Action Lawyers: Scaling Case Discovery in 2026

Mass tort and class action practice in 2026 is an exercise in data-driven endurance. As corporate enterprise systems grow more complex, the volume of evidence in a single MDL (Multi-District Litigation) has exploded—with the average case now requiring the analysis of over 2.3 million documents. Historically, firms spent millions of dollars and thousands of paralegal hours manually investigating potential violations and qualifying plaintiffs.

Artificial intelligence has fundamentally re-architected this workflow by introducing Agentic Case Origination. Modern legal intelligence platforms no longer wait for a client to call; they autonomously sift through vast amounts of public news, financial filings, and regulatory disclosures to identify emerging patterns of harm before they become common knowledge.[1] For mass tort firms, this transition to proactive discovery is providing a 40-60% reduction in operational costs.

1. Darrow: The Leader in Legal Intelligence and Origination

Darrow has emerged as the definitive solution for case origination. Its proprietary AI technology and advanced anomaly detection algorithms identify potential legal violations by connecting the dots across disparate data sources.[1] Key features for mass tort practitioners include:

• Signals: An AI-curated stream of emerging risks, helping firms spot violations before they are publicized.[1]
• Case Memos: Structured legal briefs generated by AI that include claims, evidence, and projected damages.[1]
• Plaintiff Intake: A management tool that tracks claimant progress and ensures every case is matched with strong class representatives.[1]

2. Thomson Reuters CoCounsel: Strategic Fact Investigation

Once a case is originated, the next bottleneck is investigative due diligence. As noted in our full review, CoCounsel Core provides agentic "Deep Research" that can process up to 5,000 documents per job. In mass torts, CoCounsel identifies "hot" documents, extracts complex fact chronologies, and drafts witness outlines grounded in verified document truth.

3. Filevine: Mass Tort Matter Management

Managing a class of 10,000 plaintiffs is an operational impossibility without specialized software. Filevine is a cloud-based work management platform that excels at this scale. Its AI assistant, **Ask Filevine**, allows attorneys to run natural language queries across tens of thousands of PDFs—such as "Summarize the medical history for every plaintiff in the Zantac class"—delivering results in seconds.

Ethical Challenges: Privilege and the "Rakoff" Ruling

Under ABA Model Rule 5.3, lawyers have a non-negotiable duty to supervise AI assistance. This is especially critical in light of a February 2026 written opinion by Judge Rakoff, which clarified that AI-generated summaries are not protected by attorney-client privilege in the same manner as human work. Mass tort teams must ensure that a human-in-the-loop verifies every AI output before it is utilized in discovery or expert reports.

Final Verdict: Scaling Through Agentic Workflows

In 2026, the transition from "Assistant AI" to "Agentic AI" is complete. For small and mid-sized mass tort firms, these tools represent the "superpowers" required to compete with institutional BigLaw conglomerates while delivering the high-value strategic advocacy that wins cases.