Speaking in a recent session as part of Lawyers Weekly Tech Innovate 2025, Mary Technology CEO and co-founder Daniel Lord-Doyle explored this growing challenge and delved into a new category of legal technology: the fact management system.

In the session, “A New Category of Legal Technology: Introducing the Fact Management System”, Lord-Doyle discussed how this emerging category can streamline legal workflows, reduce risk, and support better decision making.

While the phrase “fact chaos” may not be familiar, Lord-Doyle said that every practitioner will understand what it is.

“It, I suppose, begins when a matter begins, which is when you start receiving lots of documents to do with the matter. And they come in all shapes and sizes. But those documents are unstructured and difficult to access – because we’ve digitised documents, but not necessarily the facts inside of them. And so, it becomes someone’s job at the law firm to actually unpick that chaos. And it’s not just PDFs anymore because, of course, this chaos is growing as the number of documents increases, the number of forms of information,” he said.

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“So, messages, emails, PDFs, audio files, all of that comes in, and, ultimately, it has to be organised and sorted first. And then once you’ve done that, you can actually start trying to extract the facts. And this whole process takes an incredible amount of time and energy. And I suppose once you’ve done that, you can actually begin getting to the real legal work. And so, a fact management system is really trying to support lawyers and legal teams to get to the point where they can begin doing real legal work quicker.”

This problem can be prevalent for litigation teams with thousands of documents to review, as well as in specific cases, such as personal injury, according to Lord-Doyle.

“[People] hate doing this work. Lots of people don’t really like this because it’s administrative and clerical. A very simple example is [receiving] a 5,000-page set of medical notes. And 80 per cent of that might be irrelevant, but without a system like Mary, you’re actually going to have to go and read every single one of those pages, which you might still have to do. But, ultimately, we’re trying to point you much quicker towards the facts that are relevant to the matter,” he said.

“And these documents that are received as part of, say, a personal injury case or a family law matter, they often come in poorly named, with no metadata, in lots of different systems. And so, what we do to begin with is actually try and organise those documents, name them correctly, categorise and classify them, because when you’re extracting facts from a document, that fact wouldn’t be meaningful unless you understood the document first. And then once we’ve produced the fact, we actually have to do lots of work on helping that fact become accurate and meaningful.”

Not addressing the fact chaos can have dire consequences and far-reaching impacts, including critical legal work being delayed due to backlogs in document review, Lord-Doyle added.

“The impact of fact chaos is that, in some cases, we’ve seen clients who have a six-month backlog. And they might not be able to get around to the document review because each time, it takes them two, three weeks, a month to actually complete that process of understanding all of those documents. So that backlog is obviously tough for a law firm because they want to be able to see as many clients as possible and help as many people as possible,” he said.

“And ultimately, I think that comes down to the velocity with which you can actually resolve all of the facts so that you can begin doing real legal work, which is why clients are coming to you in the first place. They want advice or representation, and you can’t do that without fully understanding the matter. And I think that’s probably one of the big impacts, [which] is that you actually aren’t able to get to do real legal work without understanding the case.”

Fact management systems can assist with this by being integrated within a law firm’s existing systems and being an additional layer to a practice management system and document management system – but “intrinsically connected to those solutions”, according to Lord-Doyle.

“The ultimate workflow is a lawyer receives an email that says you have a new matter, and rather than them walk into their office and having to start handling that fact chaos, instead they see a dashboard that has every single relevant legal fact and insight in the most appropriate format so they can understand exactly what’s happened in this case, what are the facts that are relevant to the unique legal context of that matter in the best possible way.

“However, I don’t think we’re all the way. Where we want to be is that a law firm, a lawyer, will understand the documents that they want to create a chronology from or understand all of the facts from. They’ll upload that and they’ll tell us the area of law and give us key documents so that we can understand the context of that matter. And then they’ll put in thousands of pages, and then they’ll submit, and we’ll generate an accurate chronology of facts, extracting every single thing that might have any relevance, and then give them the tools to actually filter and sort those facts based on what’s really important to them, understanding the unique legal context of the case,” he said.

“So, we’ll know what that case is about, what’s important to the legal matter, and then give you the ability to sort for all of the highly relevant facts, which gets you to the point where you’d love to be as a lawyer as fast as possible so that you can begin doing real legal work.”

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