User Guides

Emma — the AI Assistant

Emma is Sentinel's built‑in AI assistant. She helps you find documents, answer questions about a matter, analyze communications, navigate the app, code and tag documents, and review sessions — by text or by voice. Emma is powered by Anthropic's Claude (currently Claude Sonnet 4.6) and is grounded in your matter's evidence rather than the open web.

Where to find Emma

Privileged Chat / Research — the main place to converse with Emma. With a matter selected, you get a workspace with the chat, a document viewer, and a Sources panel. See Search & Research.
The Home omnibox — type a question or command to start with Emma.
In context — Emma can act inside the Document Review workspace and reference the matter you're currently in.

What Emma can do

Emma works through a set of tools. Grouped by what they accomplish:

Find documents — keyword, semantic, hybrid, and visual search across the matter; find a specific document by filename, email subject, or Bates number; open a document to read it.
Answer questions about the matter — summarize the matter, pull the case timeline, surface detected issues, and answer content questions grounded in retrieved documents.
Analyze communications — who communicated with whom, email threads and the messages within them, communication patterns, and anomalies.
Work the court docket (litigation) — find filings like the operative complaint, motions, and orders by type or query.
Review actions — advance documents, mark responsiveness, toggle flags, apply and remove tags (including bulk tagging by criteria), and set review filters in place.
Sessions — list a matter's depositions/interviews/meetings, read or filter a transcript, get a session summary, search across all transcripts, and review what the ambient system surfaced during a session.
Navigate and teach — take you to a destination in the app, or launch an interactive walkthrough that both navigates and teaches a feature when you ask "how does X work."
Capture work — propose a finding for you to accept, and save a chat to the matter's case files so the conversation is retained and searchable later.

There is no separate manual "notes" feature — asking Emma to save the chat is how you retain a conversation for later reference.

Text and voice

Text — type questions and commands; Emma replies in clean prose with clickable citations, and can take actions through her tools.
Voice — speak to Emma in real time. Voice sessions are conversational (you talk, Emma responds aloud) and are useful hands‑free, such as during review or session prep.

Citations and guardrails

Emma is built for defensible legal work, so her output is constrained:

Citation grounding. The only way Emma may reference a document is with a citation token (e.g. [cite:c1]) that a tool actually returned during the conversation. These tokens map to real documents and render as clickable chips that open the document.
Mechanical verification. After Emma composes a response, it is checked against the documents that were actually retrieved. If the response references a document, filename, or Bates number that wasn't returned by a tool, the response is blocked rather than shown. This prevents fabricated citations from contaminating work product.
No padding from memory. When retrieval returns little or nothing, Emma says so plainly and stops, instead of filling the answer with general knowledge — even for famous public datasets she might "recognize."
Matter‑scoped access. Emma can only see matters you have access to. Ask about a matter you aren't assigned to and she can't retrieve it.
Per‑conversation budget. Each Emma conversation runs within a cost budget, a guardrail against runaway usage.

Tips for working with Emma

Be specific about the matter and the scope: "In the Acme case, find emails between the CFO and outside counsel about the August financing."
To reference a document by its name or Bates number, just say so — Emma will look it up by its label rather than searching inside documents.
Ask "how does feature work" to get an interactive walkthrough instead of a wall of text.
Open the Sources panel to verify Emma's citations as you go.

Emma is the general assistant. Sentinel also has feature‑specific AI:

A read‑only Motion Agent that helps with motion work and citation verification — see Motions.
Ambient intelligence that surfaces leads live during sessions — see Sessions & Transcription.
AI document summaries and timeline extraction — see Timelines & Summaries.