Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming an indispensable tool for many professionals across a wide range of industries. And its impact on the legal world and profession is no exception.

By automating many repetitive, mundane tasks and replacing outdated ways of working, legal teams can experience the power of generative AI (GenAI) tools that feel like trusted AI legal assistants.

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AI use cases

AI is a simulation of human intelligence by a machine, and that opens up a whole range of possibilities for the future. Generative AI can help with document processing and classification for a variety of topics, including due diligence, document and contract review, compliance, contract management, knowledge management, and deal analysis.

Automating these tasks using intelligent technology can deliver significant workflow benefits, particularly through improved efficiency and productivity, as well as increased accuracy.

The use of AI in law firms has evolved from a mere desire to an indispensable necessity. It is changing the way we do business, much like email did in the 1990s. As digital transformation progresses, AI will become ubiquitous and an indispensable assistant for virtually every lawyer and legal professional, freeing up time for higher-value tasks such as thinking and advising.

Zach Warren
Manager, Technology and Innovation, Thomson Reuters Institute

Search and summarize

Creating, reviewing and sending various documents makes up a large part of a lawyer’s daily tasks, which can be greatly improved by artificial intelligence. GenAI can interpret and summarize critical data in extensive legal documents, including contracts, court rulings and transcripts, faster than humans ever could.

And how do you do it? Search and find key information that may be scattered across thousands of documents. Then you can easily share the information throughout your organization.

Data and contract analysis

With the power of AI in your legal tech tools, you can quickly and seamlessly sort through files without having to manually review them. The assistance provided by legal-focused generative AI improves the performance of the law firm or department by making it easier for legal professionals to apply their higher-level expertise to the work at hand.

Accelerated legal research

GenAI speeds up legal research by reducing the time lawyers spend reviewing legal documents and summarizing content. These tools can produce an informative version of research, complete with citations from case law, in moments that would previously have taken them hours or days to complete.

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

Lawyers can then use their expertise to refine the results to ensure that the research findings are high quality, thorough and even more accurate.

Legal preparation

Want to find the best starting points with proven contract language and legal document templates? According to a study by Thomson Reuters, lawyers spend up to 56% of their time drafting documents, yet it takes them more than 15 minutes to find a good starting point for their draft.

Now you can transform the way you create documents with a secure, GenAI-enabled solution that’s built right into Microsoft Word, leveraging Practical Law and your own repository. Legal-focused GenAI can create clauses from scratch, change the existing wording of a contract, condense long clauses, and answer questions about their terms.

Optimized due diligence in mergers and acquisitions

Due diligence in mergers and acquisitions is a lengthy task that limits your time and ability to innovate and creatively solve problems.

Using AI tools to analyze and review documents saves time and allows you to focus on more valuable tasks. This boosts creativity and allows you to focus exclusively on the tasks that only a human can do – the work you were trained to do and are passionate about.

Improved knowledge management

GenAI can help legal teams stay organized and share information across cross-functional tools. Better and faster ways to store, index, identify, and distribute lawyers’ past work and collective expertise help law firms and departments solve legal and business problems more effectively.

Improved onboarding and learning

Demonstrate the value of your legal team by delivering better advice faster than ever before. GenAI’s legal-focused tools allow users to get up to speed quickly and without extensive training, whether they’re new to a firm or gaining knowledge in an unfamiliar area of ​​law.

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

Simple voice instructions to manage complexity

If you are unfamiliar with a particular area of ​​law, you may not know where to start or what language is best when searching for resources.

Generative AI tools that can be invoked with simple language queries enable users to get faster answers to complicated legal questions. Because natural language processing (NLP) is used to understand questions and generate meaningful human language, legal professionals can quickly organize information to develop successful arguments.

Ethical implications

The use of AI in legal work raises significant ethical concerns. Lawyers must ensure they fully understand the technology they use, as required by their duty to provide competent representation. This includes staying up to date with technological advances and understanding the benefits and risks of AI. This is critical, as failure to verify the accuracy of AI-generated content can lead to ethical violations.

Trust and accuracy

Repetitive and manual processes are typically prone to human error and can introduce an unnecessary element of risk. AI models developed and supported by experts under human supervision give you a competitive advantage by improving accuracy and thus reducing risk.

Additionally, a professional tool licensed to a specific institution or firm provides a far safer working ecosystem than a publicly available tool with few or no data controls. While legal professionals must always be cautious when using AI tools, professional GenAI for legal professionals allows them to enter a range of proprietary data with far less risk.

While many legal AI tools are based on publicly available data, GenAI tools specifically for legal purposes are trained on non-open legal data that is specifically for the legal field. Legal organizations should carefully consider which datasets are used to train the LLMs (large language models) used for work products. By understanding the quality and scope of the training data, they can be confident that their results are more trustworthy and accurate than those of other LLMs.

Originally published on August 30, 2023.