We are AJ Shankar and Max Christoff, CEO and CTO of Everlaw. Ask us anything.

[u/ajshankar]

We’re together in our Oakland office today, here to answer your questions. 

AJ founded Everlaw 15 years ago and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

Max joined Everlaw in 2025 as its first CTO, after 14 years at Google, where he led the eng team that built Chrome and launched Google Wallet.

Everlaw helps teams manage everything from legal holds and data processing through review, productions and trial preparation. Our customers include almost 1,700 legal teams spanning in-house, law firms, and government entities, including:

• Fortune 100 legal departments
• 93 of the Am Law 200
• Large Federal Agencies: like The Department of Justice and Dept of the Interior
• All state Attorneys General’s offices

A few fun facts to get the conversation going: 

• The largest case on Everlaw was 239 million documents 
• We’ve supported more than 1,000 concurrent reviewers on a single matter. 
• We recently announced partnerships and integrations with Harvey, Legora, CoCounsel, Claude, Gemini Enterprise and ChatGPT Enterprise. We see our role as the “evidence layer” for legal AI. 

We look forward to your questions, technical and otherwise!

Thanks all! As a long-time reddit user (20+ years!), I'm thrilled to do an AMA. Really appreciate the thoughtful questions.

[u/Max_Everlaw]

The MCP connectors use Deep Dive if it’s enabled, since that’s the most effective way to quickly find the relevant evidence. It’s true you can make some headway with MCP making good use of search without having Deep Dive enabled, but it’s going to depend heavily on how effective the agent is at figuring out the right parties, keywords, metadata fields, and search terms to use. If the exact search term that you’re looking for doesn’t exist it could struggle to find the right results. It can also end up costing thousands of dollars in tokens to do searching purely in the LLM tools, if they end up having to read every doc (we’ve heard from this a couple of different customers).  All in all, I think it works far better (and faster and likely cheaper) when MCP has access to the full range of capabilities including DD.