Disclosure: DROZlegal publishes this guide and builds the discovery_review and disclosure_review agents, and the litigation case-detail page's settlement-offers panel, described below as part of its practice-automation product for Ontario law firms. The eDiscovery cost figures cited are drawn directly from Everlaw's own published 2026 research, not ours. This article is general information about Ontario litigation workflow, not legal advice.
Two workflows, one collision point
Discovery review and settlement tracking usually live in separate places — a shared drive folder for productions, a spreadsheet or sticky note for offers — even though they're racing against the same clock on the same file.
A missed production deadline and a lapsed settlement window are both silent failures. Nothing crashes. No error message fires. The Friday production just doesn't go out, or the offer sits unanswered until it expires, and nobody notices until opposing counsel does.
That's the gap a single case record closes: discovery status, service records, and every open settlement offer sitting next to the same deadline clock — not a replacement for the lawyer's judgment on any of them, just one place where nothing quietly falls through. See the full Litigation module for how the rest of a case file is organized around it.
The discovery and disclosure pipeline, stage by stage
Every production or disclosure item that lands on a litigation file — civil or criminal — moves through the same five checkpoints before it becomes part of the record:
| Stage | What happens | Who or what does it | Where a lawyer signs off |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Intake | Productions and disclosure materials land in the case's Documents tab | Case file — one of eight tabs on the litigation case-detail page | — |
| 2. First-pass review | Relevance, privilege, or disclosure-category coding is proposed | discovery_review agent (civil) or disclosure_review agent (criminal) | Every proposal is reviewed before it's accepted into the file |
| 3. Disclosure classification | Crown disclosure is sorted under the Stinchcombe / McNeil / O'Connor taxonomy; each job is silo-scoped to a single case | disclosure_review agent, criminal matters only | Classification is a proposal, never a filed position |
| 4. Service tracking | What's been exchanged with the other side is logged against the file | The case's service-records tab | Lawyer confirms service occurred as recorded |
| 5. Deadline check | The relevant clock — e.g., Rule 30.03's 10-day affidavit-of-documents window — is checked against the case timeline | Deterministic, no-LLM deadline engine | Lawyer confirms anything novel the rule set hasn't already encoded |
Document review consistently accounts for more than 80% of total litigation spending — an estimated $42 billion a year, per the American Bar Association's own tracking. Source: Everlaw, "eDiscovery Costs in 2026," published/updated January 22, 2026.
Both review agents are manual-dispatch and propose-only — two of the 17 (of 22 registered) agents on the AI Agents roster that never act on their own, only draft a proposal for a lawyer to accept, edit, or reject.
If your practice is criminal defence specifically, the Stinchcombe / McNeil / O'Connor classification step above is worth its own deep dive — see our dedicated guide to AI-assisted disclosure review in Ontario criminal defence for how that taxonomy maps onto the disclosure_review agent's actual proposal workflow.
Settlement offers: tracked and surfaced, never finalized
The same case-detail page carries a dedicated offers tab, backed by DROZlegal's settlement-offer service. What it does, and what it deliberately never does:
| The offers panel does | What always stays a lawyer's call |
|---|---|
| Surfaces every open offer on the case, next to the same timeline used for deadline tracking | Accepting or rejecting an offer — settlement is one of DROZlegal's six permanent hard ceilings and always requires client authority |
| Keeps offer history visible alongside the undertakings and service-records tabs on the same case | Communicating a decision to opposing counsel — no agent sends outbound correspondence on its own |
| Gives the file one place to check an offer against a limitation date, instead of a side spreadsheet | Filing anything with the court — court filing is a separate, equally permanent ceiling |
That split is deliberate, not a current limitation waiting on more autonomy. Settlement acceptance requires the client's informed authority, not a confidence score — the panel's job is to make sure the offer and its deadline stay visible, not to make the call.
Why this stays a checklist, not an autopilot
Seventeen of DROZlegal's 22 registered agents are propose-only by design — discovery_review and disclosure_review among them — meaning a lawyer manually dispatches each job, and every output lands as a draft or a proposal reviewed before it becomes part of the file.
Two of the six permanent hard ceilings sit directly under the workflow this piece covers. Settlement requires client authority no matter how routine an offer looks. Court filing requires a lawyer's own submission, whether the underlying document came from a discovery review, a drafted pleading, or a form pulled from the registry. Neither ceiling moves as a firm earns more autonomy elsewhere — that's the point of calling it permanent, not the current setting.
For how the drafting side of the same file works — a Statement of Defence, a motion record — see our guide to AI document drafting for law firms. For the province's own 241-entry court-form registry and its deterministic deadline engine, see Law Firm Automation in Ontario: that piece covers drafting and filing infrastructure; this one covers what happens to a file's discovery and settlement side while that infrastructure runs underneath it. For the mechanics of the draft-to-file pipeline itself — form-registry matching, DOCX authoring, PDF conversion, and CaseLines packaging — see our companion guide to AI motion and factum drafting software for Ontario litigators. For what happens earlier still, the moment a claim is served on a client and the response deadline it starts, see our guide to AI service-of-process deadline tracking for Ontario litigators — the pleading extractor and service-deadline service behind this same case file's service-records tab. All four sit inside the same DROZlegal practice-automation platform.
Update, September 4, 2026. A new compliance layer now sits alongside the professional-conduct duties a discovery-review workflow already has to respect: starting January 2026, Legal Aid Ontario requires roster lawyers to annually confirm, through the Lawyer Self-Report, that they have read and comply with the LSO's generative-AI guidance — with non-payment or other roster-related consequences for improper AI use under the Legal Aid Services Rules. For a propose-only review agent whose output a lawyer still has to check before relying on it, that attestation is one more reason the manual-dispatch review step above stays mandatory, not optional. Source: Legal Aid Ontario, “2026 update to Lawyer Self-Report: AI compliance confirmation,” December 2025. See our explainer on the 2026 LAO Self-Report rule, and our tracker of fabricated-citation cases across Canadian courts for how fast this risk is growing.
Update, September 7, 2026. This page is one of five pieces our full litigation practice management software guide for Ontario ties together — a buyer's-guide-depth look at how deadline tracking, discovery, motion drafting, settlement trust accounting, and citation integrity fit together as one evaluation, plus a vendor-by-vendor comparison table.
Update, September 16, 2026. The Everlaw cost research cited above sits alongside a bigger enterprise eDiscovery platform Canadian litigation firms also evaluate: RelativityOne, which already lists Borden Ladner Gervais — Canada's largest firm — as a customer and names a Canada-Central hosting region in its own technical documentation. The real comparison question isn't residency, it's job scope: RelativityOne prices and scales for enterprise-volume document review, not the practice-automation spine covered on this page. See our full RelativityOne alternative comparison for Canadian law firms.