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AI-powered legal drafting: The future of work for legal professionals
Let’s face it — drafting legal documents involves a lot of brilliance and a lot of tedium. New technology tools promise to reduce the monotony with artificial intelligence (AI), giving legal professionals more time to focus on strategy, negotiations, and client and stakeholder relations. How do you know what to look for and which systems to trust? Once you choose a system, how do you ensure your colleagues use it?
This guide will:
- Explain AI-powered legal drafting and its benefits
- Suggest critical elements to look for in an AI-powered drafting tool
- Provide guidance on how to influence leadership to approve a new system
- Offer best practices for introducing a system to your organisation to ensure adoption
Legal professionals across sectors face incredible time pressure. If you charge by the hour, you need to show your clients that you’re efficiently using the hours. If you work on a flat-rate basis, you need to make those matters profitable. If you work in-house for a corporation, you probably need to handle an increasing workload with flat to declining budgets. AI holds great appeal, but many legal professionals want to tread carefully before entrusting their work product to an AI tool. This guide is here to help you understand AI-powered legal drafting and move forward with confidence.
The basics of AI-powered legal drafting
An overview of its definition and practical uses
AI-powered legal drafting tools guide you through document creation with credible information, suggested language and clauses, and editing tools right at your fingertips.
With an AI-driven drafting tool, lawyers can delegate substantive functions and get thorough, accurate results much more quickly than with traditional tools — much like delegating vital tasks to another person. These tools help at all phases of the drafting process, from document creation and review to finalisation.
Legal professionals working on documents such as contracts can use an AI drafting tool to:
- Find a previous, related document. Reach the right starting point quickly with generative AI (GenAI) and natural language search, rather than spending precious time searching for work product to reuse.
- Create contract drafting consistency with legal playbooks. Enforce your organisation’s guidelines so that junior lawyers can learn more quickly on their own, and more senior lawyers can spend more time advising on strategy and less time correcting language errors.
- Compare and redline contracts. Understand how documents differ from one another with deviation detection that compares documents like third-party contracts to playbook standards or compares different versions.
- Find, create, and modify clauses. Connect to current market standards to get your clauses just right and offer the flexibility to generate, edit, and refine contract terms and provisions.
- Refine and review formatting. Analyse to find common drafting errors like misaligned definitions, missing dates, erroneous cross-references, inconsistent language, and more.
What value does AI bring to legal drafting?
According to a Thomson Reuters research study, most lawyers spend 40% to 60% of their time drafting and reviewing documents. While much of this time involves strategy, too much time goes into busy work that leads to frustration. In fact, 96% of legal professionals report that they do not feel their drafting tools are efficient.
With the emergence of GenAI — and a growing knowledge of how to apply it to the legal space — legal professionals have new options to drive efficiencies across the end-to-end drafting process.
Better starting points. Finding the correct starting point while drafting is one of the most widely recognised pain points for both new and seasoned legal professionals. Many realise there is a certain art to choosing the right starting point that can affect the ease or difficulty of the entire drafting and negotiation process. Poor choices at the outset can lead to inefficiencies, client disappointment, and write-offs.
Better output. Compliance with laws and guidelines, adhering to customer expectations, aligning with internal guidance, and ensuring formatting consistencies are incredibly cumbersome. Using technology to navigate these tasks leaves more time for strategy and expertise, leading to better work product.
Key considerations: What to look for in a generative AI-powered legal drafting tool
What capabilities do you need?
Look at your organisation’s drafting practices and see where the biggest bottlenecks and frustrations lie. Then, evaluate AI-powered solutions against those priorities. Some of the most needed capabilities include:
- Finding a good starting point with model documents and templates
- Finding relevant clauses
- Drafting and modifying clause language
- Leveraging playbooks
- Comparing contracts with deviation detection
- Analysing documents for errors
- Converting text or image PDFs to Microsoft Word
What content is the AI pulling from?
Choose a GenAI tool that uses content you trust. Finding one that allows you to verify the accuracy of its responses is paramount, as the quality of the tool is only as good as the content it trains on.
Does the tool use your data to train the model?
When selecting a tool, it's crucial to understand its data management and model-training practices. Ensuring robust data privacy and security measures is essential to protect your sensitive information while benefiting from the tool’s AI-driven efficiencies that improve its performance over time.
Does the AI mitigate hallucinations and errors?
Generative AI tools use large-language models (LLM) that read the training data and predict the most likely next word when responding to your query. This approach can lead to errors and hallucinations, where the tool invents cases, clauses, and facts to fit the model. Choose a tool that employs a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach so users can be confident the model has only based its answer on verified data.
What are the tool’s security protocols when working with third-party GenAI vendors?
Verify that the provider uses the most advanced data security controls available. For instance, Thomson Reuters currently utilises cloud-based generative AI models from reputable providers. These models operate through a zero-retention API that gives our customers the most advanced data security controls the cloud provider makes available.
Making the case for an AI-powered legal drafting tool
Calculating return on investment
Any new expense requires a business case and a compelling financial justification. Many organisations use return on investment (ROI) to calculate the benefits of adopting new tools. This measure can help you quickly communicate value and compare your options.
The ROI formula is: (gain from investment – cost of investment) / cost of investment
There are tangible and intangible gains to calculate.
Direct benefits for your ROI calculation
When considering the ROI for new tools, time savings are a critical benefit. For instance, customers indicated that CoCounsel Drafting — the new professional-grade, AI-powered drafting solution designed specifically for legal professionals by Thomson Reuters — saves them between 25% to 50% of the time spent drafting documents.
Reduced write-downs on invoices for law firms. Corporate clients may be more willing to pay their complete invoices if they know their external law firms are using the most efficient tools possible and devoting more time to strategy.
Reduction of external spend for legal departments. Corporate legal departments may be able to keep more work in-house. Automation means you can bring some work that you traditionally outsourced back in, leading to cost savings and getting through matters faster.
For example, an in-house legal team outsources all non-disclosure agreement (NDA) work to an external law firm at an annual cost of £50,000 on a fixed-fee basis. The team estimates savings of 75% if they automate the NDA and perform the work in-house instead.
Indirect benefits of ROI calculation
Then, there are the intangible benefits of AI-powered drafting tools. These include:
- Reduced time on drafting
- Improved outcomes
- Better training and onboarding for new joiners
- Shorter time to respond to client or business requests
- Reduced risk of errors in contracts
Influencing principal stakeholders
Given the attention that GenAI is getting, you will likely receive many questions and attention with your AI-powered legal drafting implementation. Different stakeholders will have a variety of topics they will want clarified. Here are some to consider.
Legal professionals and leadership will want to know that the system you choose draws from trusted content, keeps client data secure, and can reduce or eliminate hallucinations and errors.
Legal operations and support staff will want to understand your expectations for adoption, how the solution will fit into the larger tech stack, integrate with enterprise solutions, and how scalable it is. They can help prioritise this initiative on the technology roadmap.
Clients and business partners will want to know their data is secure and is not being used to train the model for future use.
The finance team will want to understand the ROI, payback, and net present value of increasing spend on drafting tools.
Technology partners will have questions about security, data management, integrations, compatibility, upgrades, and maintenance.
Depending on your organisation’s cost or revenue model, you may have to answer questions about what fee earners will do with the time they’re saving. If your organisation charges by the hour, you’ll need to show that revenue is not at risk. Indeed, clients or stakeholders are likely to appreciate more time going into strategy than drafting, but you’ll want to include that in your considerations.
Getting started: Successful change management within a legal organisation
Changing how you draft your work product won’t just happen, even with the best tool on the market. You will need a strategic approach and buy-in from stakeholders.
One question you should answer early on is, “What does success look like?” Are you aiming to have everyone adopt AI-powered legal drafting, or are you simply making it available to employees to use as they see fit? You may decide to implement usage metrics to see how quickly your team is adopting the new tool. If hitting specific targets is vital to you and your organisation, you’ll want a thoughtful change management process to support the rollout.
There are four essential principles for the success of a change initiative:
1. Employees who see the point of the change — and agree with it — are more likely to get on board.
If individuals don’t believe in the overall purpose of the change, you will see conflict and inaction. Make goals explicit, reinforce them, and help people understand the role they play in achieving change.
2. Accompany the new behaviour with recognition and reward systems.
Articulate the change’s benefits for individuals so that change is more likely to happen. These rewards could be new skills, opportunities for advancement, and participation in strategic goals.
3. Prioritise the skills employees need to adapt to the change.
Invest time and resources into training employees in the right skills to adapt to the change. Without the competency required to maintain the new way of working, employees will inevitably default to what they did before.
4. Role models within the organisation also need to display the new behaviour.
Change champions are a must at every level. Recruit employees who “walk the talk” to act as role models. If employees see colleagues at their peer level achieving relatable success with the new system, they’re much more likely to adopt it.
The case for AI-powered legal drafting tools
AI-powered legal drafting tools can help your organisation automate the creation of documents and contracts. You and your colleagues can drastically reduce the amount of time you spend working out where to start and what language to use. With those time savings, you can spend more time on strategy, negotiation, and providing advice. You’ll be able to dramatically reduce the effort, time, and costs involved with drafting, which will help your team improve consistency and reduce risks while allowing employees to focus on higher-priority tasks.
With this guide, we’ve explored the definition and uses of AI-powered legal drafting tools, explored some of the issues you should consider when selecting such a tool, and provided guidance on making a case for the tool within your organisation. We’ve also included tips for successful change management to ensure your team sees the full benefits.
Introducing CoCounsel Drafting
CoCounsel Drafting from Thomson Reuters represents a significant advancement in AI-powered drafting technology. This expert-level, end-to-end drafting solution is designed specifically for legal professionals, enabling them to streamline the drafting process from start to finish directly within Microsoft Word. With CoCounsel Drafting, you can efficiently manage the drafting of documents and contracts, leveraging the following capabilities:
- Insightful document analysis. Begin with a deep understanding of your documents to ensure accuracy from the outset.
- Optimal starting points. Identify the most effective starting points for your drafting tasks.
- Trusted content integration. Utilise recommendations for contract language from Practical Law and your own contract repository.
- Legal playbooks. Revise and evaluate contracts against internal or Practical Law guidelines and identify discrepancies in clauses from third-party agreements.
- Seamless Microsoft Word integration. Enjoy a fluid drafting experience without the need to switch between applications.
By incorporating CoCounsel Drafting into their workflow, legal professionals can significantly reduce the time they spend drafting and reviewing documents, increase productivity, and maintain high standards of accuracy and quality — all while working within the familiar environment of Microsoft Word.
Reimagine drafting work with CoCounsel Drafting. It eliminates the pains that come with everyday drafting using secure generative AI capabilities trusted by legal professionals.
Revolutionise your work with CoCounsel Drafting today.
CoCounsel Drafting