By embedding Legora across its forensic workflows, Grant Thornton has augmented how its team navigates large volumes of data, enabling investigators to spend more time on the judgment-intensive analysis that defines exceptional client work.

With Legora, Grant Thornton:

• Enhanced manual, sequential document review with AI-assisted analysis across email, contract, and multi-language data sets

• Built translation capabilities for foreign-language documents directly into forensic workflows, removing reliance on third-party providers

• Added an additional layer of quality assurance on top of its existing review process, helping to surface inconsistencies and contradictions more quickly and clearly

• Freed its team to focus earlier on judgment-led inquiry, deepening the quality and robustness of insights delivered to clients

The challenge: scale, speed, and the demand for rigor

Forensic and investigation work has always been data-intensive. But for Kathryn Karssiens, Director in Grant Thornton UK’s Forensic and Investigation Services team, the challenge has shifted considerably over the course of her career. “The volume of data that I'm seeing now versus back then is massive. It's such a big change,” she explains. “Data sets have become more international and timelines have become tighter.”

In practice, this has created a compounding set of pressures. Large volumes of documents – such as emails, contracts and financial records – needed to be reviewed quickly and accurately, often across languages, and always to the standard that high-stakes forensic work demands. 

Before Legora, much of the foundational work was delivered through manual, people-led processes, built on the firm’s expertise. Foreign-language documents drew on colleagues with the right language skills or trusted external translators – ensuring quality, but requiring time to coordinate. Email reviews were conducted carefully, document by document, with manual categorization and summarization, while contract comparisons involved detailed side-by-side analysis. 

“It was still a thorough process,” Kathryn says, “but it was time-intensive and fairly dependent on who was available.”The result was that a significant portion of every project was spent simply getting oriented: understanding what data existed, what mattered, and where to focus. That effort was essential, but it limited the time that could be spent on the more valuable work of interpreting findings, applying judgment and shaping client outcomes.

From pilot to practice 

Kathryn arranged a demonstration of Legora with a few colleagues. “Everyone that used it could immediately see how it would take the heavy lifting out of the process,” she recalls. Following a pilot phase that ran across several teams within the forensic practice, Legora was adopted more broadly.

Translation became one of the most significant use cases early on. Rather than coordinating internal resources or engaging third parties, the team now runs multi-language document sets through Legora directly, handling a range of languages and feeding reliable outputs straight into the review process. 

On one project, the team needed to translate a set of Welsh-language documents as part of a broader review. Previously, this would have involved drawing on colleagues with the right language expertise, getting them set up on the project, and absorbing the delay. With Legora, the team was able to generate an initial translation more quickly, before carrying out a quality check to validate accuracy and context. This meant they could move faster into the analysis phase, while maintaining the same high standards of review. 

Across multiple projects since, the team has used Legora to translate documents from a variety of languages into English, with outputs reviewed as part of the overall quality assurance process – consistently supporting a more efficient workflow.

For email analysis (where a structured e-discovery setup is not required), the team uses Legora to generate structured summaries in a tabular format, producing a matrix that captures sender, recipient, date, and a concise summary of each email's content. “That can be really useful, particularly at the start of a case when we're trying to get to grips with all the information very quickly,” Kathryn says.

Contract review is handled the same way. Where the team previously worked through different versions of a document side by side, manually tracking changes, Legora now processes those variations and surfaces the differences directly.

An extra layer of quality assurance

The team has also integrated Legora into its broader quality assurance process. Forensic work at Grant Thornton already follows a rigorous, multi-reviewer QC approach, with Legora now sitting alongside this as an additional layer – providing an extra set of eyes to support, but never replace, human review. “What we found is that it has been very good at helping to surface inconsistencies,” Kathryn explains, “especially in long reports where maintaining absolute consistency is critical.” 

In one instance, Legora quickly flagged a date in a report that was inconsistent with the documented timeline, highlighting that the event being referenced could not have occurred at the time stated. In forensic work, where the accuracy of a timeline can be central to the conclusions drawn and the credibility of the entire report, that kind of error carries real weight. 

Legora's ability to cross-reference in this way, drawing on the knowledge embedded in the report itself, adds a layer of accuracy assurance that complements and supports human review.

The result: sharper and more robust analysis

The most important shift Kathryn identifies is not only in the speed of delivery, but in the quality of what the team can now do with its time: providing sharper, more robust analysis to clients.

“We don't start from zero in the same way anymore,” she explains. “Before, a lot of the time we spent on any project was just getting familiar with the data – working out what's there, what matters, where we need to focus. Now we can get to that initial orientation much quicker, and it means we're able to be more targeted earlier on.”

That shift creates real capacity for deeper work. “It's less about speed in itself and more about what that time creates the space for,” Kathryn says. “We can go into more depth on each project. We can explore different lines of inquiry. We can spend more time validating our conclusions and really sense-checking what we're seeing. We can now focus more on the parts of our work that require judgment.”

For a practice where every output goes through rigorous QC and clients are relying on defensible conclusions, that additional depth translates directly into stronger work.

What has changed is how efficiently the team reaches the point where that analysis can begin, and how much capacity remains for careful, judgment-led inquiry. 

“We're able to spend less time on some of the more repetitive or administrative aspects of our work and more time on interpreting what we're seeing and actually thinking about what it means,” Kathryn explains. With the team applying critical thinking and reviewing Legora's outputs carefully, she sees the tool as something that enhances professional expertise rather than substituting for it.

Developing the next generation of forensic professionals

As junior team members take on more judgment-based work earlier in their careers, the expectation is that the depth of expertise across the practice will grow over time, and with it, the quality delivered to clients. The shift toward judgment-based skills earlier in a career, Kathryn believes, will increasingly support faster progression across the profession.

For Kathryn, this is where the real value of Legora lies: in raising the standard of what the team is able to deliver. "It's all about augmenting what our people do so that they can work faster, smarter, and deliver even higher quality to clients. Legora is a fantastic tool to give our people that extra edge to help them do their best work."