Enterprise search finds the file. You have to defend what is in it.
Glean searches across the apps your company runs on. A forensic engineering firm needs something narrower: an answer from one case file, cited to the page, that tells you when your documents do not support it.
Four things a forensic workflow needs that general search does not
Not a feature war. These are the places where a tool built for company-wide search behaves differently than a tool built for a file you will be questioned about.
Provenance is the whole question
Glean is built to help an employee find something across Slack, Drive and Jira. That is a real problem, and it is not this one. Your question is narrower and harder: what does this case file say, and can I show where the answer came from eighteen months from now, out loud.
An answer that tells you it isn’t there beats one that guesses
Enterprise search is measured on coverage, always return something useful. A forensic workflow inverts that. A confident answer with no source behind it is the failure mode that does damage, so the system says it cannot find it instead.
The corpus is a case, not a company
Scoping matters here in a way it does not in general enterprise search. You need answers about one matter, from the documents belonging to that matter, without material from another client bleeding in.
The archive is the firm’s edge
Thirty years of defended conclusions is the asset. It stays in your own tenant, and we do not train on it. As one principal put it: my report archive is my edge, and it cannot end up training a tool my competitors use.
Capability comparison
| What a forensics firm needs | knowledgeXpert | Glean | General-purpose AI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Every answer cited to a source page | |||
| Tells you when the answer is not in your sources | |||
| Corpus scoped to one case file | |||
| Answers from a document archive, not connected apps | |||
| Retrieval of the code edition in force on a past date | |||
| Multi-step evidence assembly over a case file | |||
| Priced for a firm under twenty people | |||
| Does not train on your archive |
Feature support as of 2026, verify current capabilities with each vendor.
The honest limits
No software makes a report survive review. Methodology and judgment do that, and both are yours. What software can do is make the basis for every statement easy to produce on demand, which is a documentation problem rather than an engineering one.
We also do not host or reason over standards you have purchased. The defensible claim is the narrow one: it reads your documents and cites your page. If you load the code edition that governed on the date of loss, it will cite that edition. It will not tell you what a standard says from memory.
And it does not write the report. It shows you what your own record says. The opinion stays yours.
Common questions
Is Glean a bad product?
No. It is a strong enterprise search product solving a different problem, helping employees find things spread across the apps a company runs on. If that is your problem, it is a reasonable choice. It is not built around the question a forensic engineer has to answer under questioning, which is where an answer came from and whether the basis holds.
We already pay for a general-purpose AI tool. Why add anything?
Mostly because of scoping and abstention. A general tool will answer from whatever it has, including material outside your file, and it will answer even when your documents do not support one. For a workflow where every statement has to trace to your own record, those two behaviors are the problem rather than a limitation.
How current is this comparison?
It reflects publicly available information as of 2026, and every vendor in this space ships quickly. Verify current capabilities with each vendor before you decide. We would rather you check than take our table on faith, which is the same standard we hold our own answers to.
Try the comparison on your own file.
Bring one case file and a question you already know the answer to. Thirty minutes, and you will see where every line came from.