Filevine and Zilliz Cloud: Transforming Legal Case Management with Vector Search
3 billion vectors
Managed across millions of documents
Semantic Search Architecture
Connecting concepts across documents even when exact terminology differs.
60-80%
Time saved on consuming, digesting, and identifying relevant data points
Enterprise-Grade Security
Zilliz's SOC 2 Type 2 certification provided the confidence necessary for handling sensitive legal information.
We have the full end-to-end data... law as a timeline. We have the incident, the start, everything that's happening, and the conclusion of the case. There's an enormous amount of power in having that all within the work system.
Brianna Connelly
About Filevine
Filevine is transforming the legal industry as a leading legal work platform, helping law firms and in-house legal teams to operate with greater speed, clarity, and precision. Trusted by thousands of legal professionals across the United States and beyond, Filevine brings together case management, document generation, client communication, analytics, and task automation into a single, seamless platform. Built for flexibility, it supports a wide range of legal practices—from personal injury to complex corporate litigation—enabling teams to reduce administrative overhead and stay focused on high-value work. With an emphasis on usability and the realities of legal work, Filevine has become a trusted partner for legal teams looking to modernize and scale their operations.
The Challenge: Drowning in a Sea of Unstructured Data
Legal cases generate massive volumes of unstructured information. For Filevine's clients, a single matter might include:
Thousands of documents, including court filings, pleadings, and orders
Extensive client communications spanning emails, texts, and recorded conversations
Complex medical records, often hundreds of pages per patient
Deposition transcripts and expert witness statements
Historical case files and precedent documents
Managing this flood of data created significant challenges:
Knowledge Retrieval Bottlenecks: Attorneys spent 60-80% of their time manually searching for key information, slowing workflows and increasing costs.
Incomplete Information Access: Critical facts and connections were often missed, risking weakened arguments and missed opportunities.
Context-Specific Requirements: Legal documentation spans highly specialized domains (medical, legal, financial), requiring a nuanced understanding beyond what general-purpose solutions could deliver.
Stringent Compliance Mandates: As a platform handling HIPAA-protected information and highly sensitive data, any solution also needed to meet rigorous security and privacy standards.
Nathan Morris, Filevine's co-founder, described their ultimate goal as achieving a "true consciousness of data"—bringing together complete information sets that could be easily accessed and contextually understood by legal professionals.
The Solution: Implementing Zilliz Cloud for Vector Search
After evaluating multiple vector database options, Filevine selected Zilliz Cloud as the foundation for their AI transformation initiative. The implementation centered around four groundbreaking features:
Chat with Your Case: An intuitive natural language interface allowing attorneys to ask questions about their cases and receive immediate, accurate answers drawn from the complete universe of case documents.
AI Fields: Automatic extraction of specific information from documents to populate custom fields within the Filevine platform, eliminating manual data entry.
Demands AI: Intelligent generation of legal demand letters using comprehensive case information extracted from all relevant documents.
Deposition Co-pilot: Real-time AI assistance during depositions, providing attorneys with instant access to case information when they need it most.
How Zilliz Cloud Powers the Filevine System
Zilliz Cloud serves as the critical infrastructure enabling Filevine's AI capabilities through several key mechanisms:
Custom Embedding Processing: Filevine developed specialized embedding models trained on legal and medical terminology. The resulting embeddings are stored and indexed in Zilliz’s vector database, enabling precise understanding of domain-specific language during semantic search.
Massive Scale Management: The solution currently manages over 3 billion vectors across hundreds of millions of documents—and is architected to scale seamlessly to 40 billion vectors as demand grows. Zilliz Cloud’s performance and stability at this scale were critical for Filevine’s rollout across its full customer base, ensuring responsive AI capabilities even under heavy workloads.
Semantic Search Architecture: Rather than relying on keyword matching, Zilliz enables true semantic understanding, connecting concepts across documents even when exact terminology differs.
Security-First Design: Zilliz's client-managed keys and enterprise-grade security features ensure all data remains protected in compliance with HIPAA and other regulatory requirements.
Brianna Connelly, Filevine's AI Team Lead, highlighted the power of this approach: "We have the full end-to-end data... law as a timeline. We have the incident, the start, everything that's happening, and the conclusion of the case. There's an enormous amount of power in having that all within the work system."
Why Filevine Chose Zilliz Cloud
Filevine's selection process was rigorous, with Zilliz Cloud distinguishing itself through several critical advantages:
Superior Performance: In head-to-head testing—particularly at the scale of 3 billion vectors and targeting 40 billion— Zilliz demonstrated significantly faster retrieval speeds compared to alternatives like Qdrant, particularly when handling the billions of vectors required for Filevine's implementation.
Enterprise-Grade Security: Zilliz's SOC 2 Type 2 certification and comprehensive security controls provided the confidence necessary for handling sensitive legal information.
Open-Source Foundation: Built on Milvus, Zilliz benefits from the innovation and rapid development cycle of an active open-source community while providing the reliability of enterprise support.
Proven at Scale: Zilliz's adoption by major enterprises including PayPal, Salesforce, and Cohesity demonstrated its capacity to handle mission-critical applications at massive scale.
Implementation Simplicity: The Filevine team found Zilliz significantly easier to implement compared to alternatives, accelerating their development timeline and reducing technical overhead.
Transformative Benefits and Value
The integration of Zilliz Cloud into Filevine's platform has delivered remarkable results:
Dramatic Efficiency Gains: Attorneys now access relevant case information in seconds rather than hours, with AI eliminating "60-80% of the time spent on consuming, digesting, and identifying relevant data points," according to Nathan Morris.
Enhanced Decision Quality: By ensuring complete information access, the system helps attorneys make better-informed strategic decisions based on the full context of each case.
Comprehensive Information Capture: The AI system identifies connections and details that might be missed in manual review, creating more thorough case preparation.
Improved Client Experience: Faster response times and more complete information allow attorneys to provide superior service during what are often stressful situations for clients.
Competitive Advantage: Firms using Filevine's AI capabilities gain a significant edge in case preparation efficiency and effectiveness.
As Brianna Connelly noted, "As a client of a law firm, at some point clients will demand that their law firms use AI because it's going to make them a better attorney to have the curation done versus some of the practices now where they just don't have complete info."
Future Plans
Building on their successful implementation of Zilliz Cloud, Filevine continues to expand their AI capabilities with plans that include:
Expanded AI Access: Rolling out AI features to more clients through tailored AI package offerings
Advanced Reasoning: Enhancing the system with more sophisticated agentic workflows and reasoning capabilities
Multimodal Analysis: Extending capabilities beyond text to incorporate image, audio, and video understanding
Workflow Integration: Embedding AI assistance throughout the complete legal workflow
Conclusion: A New Paradigm for Legal Work
Filevine's implementation of Zilliz Cloud vector database technology represents a fundamental transformation in how legal professionals interact with information. By solving the challenge of extracting value from massive unstructured data sets while maintaining security and compliance, Filevine has created a new paradigm for legal case management.
The partnership between Filevine and Zilliz illustrates how vector search technology can be leveraged to create practical AI applications that enhance human capabilities rather than replace them, making legal professionals more effective, efficient, and accurate in their work.
As Nathan Morris summarized: "We have achieved a true consciousness of data... bringing the data together in the way that an individual doing their job needs to see it."
We have achieved a true consciousness of data... bringing the data together in the way that an individual doing their job needs to see it.
Nathan Morris