Overview of legal-focused generative AI tools

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming an essential tool for many professionals across various industry sectors, and its impact on law and the legal profession is no different.

By automating numerous repetitive, mundane tasks and replacing outdated ways of working, legal teams can experience the power of generative AI (GenAI) tools that feel like reliable AI legal assistants.

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AI use cases

 

AI is a simulation of human intelligence by a machine, and this opens up a whole future of possibilities. Generative AI can assist with document processing and classification for a wide range of matters, including due diligence, document and contract review, compliance, contract management, knowledge management and deal analysis.

By automating these tasks using intelligent technology, significant workflow benefits can be achieved, particularly with improved efficiency and productivity as well as greater accuracy.

The use of AI at law firms has transitioned from a mere desire to an essential requirement. It is changing the way we do business, much the same way as email did in the 1990s. As digital transformation continues to advance, AI will become ubiquitous and an indispensable assistant to practically every attorney and legal professional, freeing up time for tasks that add greater value such as thinking and advising.

Legal generative AI is supposed to augment what a lawyer does. It’s not going to do legal reasoning, not going to door case strategy. What it’s supposed to do is do repeatable rote tasks much more quickly and efficiently.

Zach Warren
Manager, Technology and Innovation, Thomson Reuters Institute

 

 

Search and summarize

Creating, reviewing and sending various documents forms a large part of an attorney’s daily tasks that can be drastically improved with artificial intelligence. GenAI can interpret and summarize critical data in dense legal documents, including contracts, court opinions, and transcripts, faster than humanly possible.

How is it done? Search and pinpoint key information that could be scattered across thousands of documents then easily share information across your organization.

Data and contract analysis

With the power of AI in your legal tech tools, you can sort files rapidly and seamlessly without needing to manually examine them. The range of assistance offered by legal-focused generative AI improves the legal firm’s or department’s output by facilitating the legal professional’s ability to apply their higher-level expertise to the work at hand.

 

Accelerated legal research

GenAI provides a jumpstart on legal research by reducing the time legal professionals must spend sifting through legal documents and summarizing content. These tools can produce in moments an informative version of research complete with citations for case law that would have previously taken hours or days.

 

For any of the tasks that lawyers do on a regular basis or that administrative professionals supporting the legal industry do on a regular basis, this technology allows them to do those things faster and to create a starting point much earlier in the process.

Zena Applebaum
Global VP, Product Marketing for Research Products for Thomson Reuters

 

 

Lawyers can then apply their expertise to refining the results to ensure that the research output is high quality, thorough, and even more accurate.

 

Legal drafting

Need to find the best starting points with trusted contract language and legal document templates? According to Thomson Reuters research, lawyers can spend up to 56% of their time drafting documents, they still take more than 15 minutes just to find a good starting point for their draft.

Now you can transform how you draft documents with a secure, GenAI-enabled solution integrated directly into Microsoft Word that leverages Practical Law and your own repository. Legal-focused GenAI can draft clauses from scratch, modify existing language of a contract, summarize lengthy clauses, and answer questions about their terms.

 

Streamlined M&A due diligence

M&A due diligence is a tedious task that limits your time and ability to innovate and creatively problem-solve.

Using AI tools for analysis and review of documents saves time and allows you to focus on more valuable pursuits, which facilitates enhanced creativity and allows you to focus exclusively on the tasks that only a person can handle – the job you were trained to do and the job you are passionate about.

 

 

Improved knowledge management

GenAI can help legal teams stay organized and share information via cross-functional tools. Better and faster methods of saving, indexing, identifying, and disseminating lawyers’ prior work and collective expertise helps legal firms and departments solve legal and business problems more effectively.

 

Enhanced onboarding and learning

Demonstrate the value of your legal team by delivering better advice faster than ever before. Legal-focused GenAI tools help users get up to speed quickly without extensive training, whether they are new to a firm or gaining knowledge about an unfamiliar area of law.

These tools also help users learn new skills in a hands-on way as they work, reducing the need for as many formalized skill-development interventions, saving time and money.

Plain-language prompting to navigate complexity

Those unfamiliar with a given area of law may struggle to know where to start or which language is most applicable in searching for resources.

Generative AI tools that can be prompted using plain-language queries allow users to access faster answers to complicated legal questions. Since NLP (Natural Language Processing) is used to understand questions and generate meaningful human language, legal professionals can rapidly organize information to help develop successful arguments.

Ethical implications

Using AI in legal work raises significant ethical concerns. Attorneys must ensure they fully understand the technology they use, as required by their duty to provide competent representation, which includes staying updated on technological advancements and understanding the benefits and risks of AI. This is crucial because failing to verify the accuracy of AI-generated content could lead to ethical violations.

Trust and accuracy

Repetitive and manual processes and are typically prone to human error and can introduce an unnecessary element of risk. AI models developed and backed by expert human oversight give you a competitive edge by improving accuracy and thus reducing risk.

Additionally, a professional tool licensed to a particular institution or firm provides a far more secure work ecosystem than a public-facing tool with few or no data controls. While legal professionals must always use caution regarding what data they use with AI tools, they can input a range of proprietary data with far less risk with professional-grade GenAI for legal professionals.

Whereas many legal AI tools rely on the publicly available data, legal-specific GenAI tools are trained on non-open legal data specific to the legal domain. Legal organizations should perform due diligence to find out which data sets are used to train the LLM (large language models) used for work-product. By understanding the quality and scope of the training data, they can be confident that their output will be more trustworthy and accurate than other LLMs.

 

Originally published August 30, 2023.