Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform providing on-demand infrastructure, storage, database, analytics, machine learning, and security services on a pay-as-you-go basis. AWS is used both as underlying infrastructure for third-party legal technology products and directly by legal teams through its own applications.

Key features and functions include:

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
An object storage service used for storing and retrieving data, including data lakes, backups, and archives. It underpins document storage for many legal technology products built on AWS infrastructure.

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
Provides on-demand, scalable virtual computing capacity, allowing applications to be developed and deployed without dedicated hardware. Many practice management and eDiscovery platforms run on EC2.

Amazon Textract
A machine learning service that extracts text, handwriting, and structured data (including tables and forms) from scanned documents. It is used for automating extraction from documents such as contracts, court filings, and intake forms.

Amazon Comprehend
A natural language processing service that identifies entities, key phrases, and sentiment within unstructured text, and can identify and redact personally identifiable information (PII). It is applied to tasks such as extracting terms from contracts and legal filings.

Amazon Bedrock
A fully managed service providing access to foundation models from multiple AI providers through a single API, used to build and scale generative AI applications, including legal-specific tools, without managing underlying infrastructure.

Amazon Quick
An AI assistant, formerly branded Amazon Q, that performs research, generates documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, and automates workflows using connections to third-party business applications.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
A service for controlling access to AWS resources and data, allowing organizations to restrict file and system access to authorized personnel.