Doing it all with legal GenAI

Doing it all — better and faster

Transforming the legal landscape with GenAI

Transformation is a broad term describing how organisations adapt their practices to achieve optimum success. It can be a sweeping, upending change, or it can be a methodical, systematic conversion. For legal professionals, using a fully integrated AI package is a powerful way to enhance workflow and reform their daily practices.

When technology is disruptive, as with AI, adapting to change isn’t optional. In today’s competitive legal environment, clients expect fast turnaround times, limited fees on routine tasks, and comprehensive work product. Generative AI (GenAI) can deliver on those expectations. As technology advances at an exponential rate, the benefits for early adopters continue to multiply. Conversely, those who delay adoption will find themselves increasingly behind.

Fear not

According to recent research by Thomson Reuters, 81% of professionals believe GenAI can be applied to their work, and 79% of leaders expect GenAI to drive substantial transformation over the next three years. But stories of AI mistakes and hallucinations can give pause to legal professionals who depend on precision in their work.

Trust comes in AI training and management. If you’re using platforms trained on the universe of Wikipedia content and forums like Reddit, you are right to have reservations. But if you’ve used products like Westlaw, you’ve already used AI that’s trained on industry-leading legal content, unmatched editorial enhancements, and over 150 years of legal industry expertise. The trust is in the training.

The introduction of ChatGPT has brought a fundamental shift in the things we comfortably ask AI to do. In the legal realm, that includes writing, rewriting, summarising documents, searching for clause language, or proofing modifications against an original. The most revolutionary change in workflow comes in allowing machines to assist in creating actual work product.

Consider these examples:

• Reviewing a 100-page document could take a legal professional between one to four hours, depending on the level of redaction. GenAI can do the same task, accurately and completely in about three minutes. That’s the kind of radical change that artificial intelligence can bring to a legal environment. 
• Extracting key obligations from 2,000 contracts could take 80 hours or more, with a human error rate of up to 20%. GenAI can retrieve critical information with about 4% accuracy with less than six hours of hands-on time.
• Lawyers offering alternative fee arrangements understand the difficulty in predicting the time required to complete even standard tasks. GenAI can accomplish common tasks like contract review predictably faster, so lawyers can give their clients a more accurate spend estimate.

Regardless of the skill, efficiency, and best efforts of the humans involved, GenAI can do these tasks faster. It’s like completing advanced mathematic equations by hand versus using a calculator. AI never tires, it never gets bored, and it never gets interrupted.

An integrated legal package

Legal work is detailed and precise, and interruptions in flow can cause delays and errors. If you’ve ever jumped from Word to client documents, to regulatory filings, to a search tool, you probably wish for a more integrated flow. The essential parts of a lawyer’s work, including research, drafting documents, understanding existing law, and reviewing and summarising are most efficient within an integrated platform. CoCounsel by Thomson Reuters is an example. CoCounsel is the GenAI suite that powers the most advanced versions of Westlaw UK and Practical Law UK, as well as the advanced GenAI assistant for lawyers and other professionals.

A legal AI assistant

Legal assistants are invaluable team members who take on routine legal tasks, manage schedules and calendars, and provide a go-to point of contact for internal and external clients. Their work frees up time for higher-paid lawyers and provides clients with accessibility. Legal AI tools, harnessing the power of GenAI, can free up time for both lawyers and assistants, making team efficiency even greater.

A GenAI-based legal assistant can automate essential work with groundbreaking thoroughness and speed. It can increase the quality of work by reading, analysing, and summarising documents at a postgraduate level. Given natural-language commands, a legal AI assistant like CoCounsel can accomplish foundational legal tasks, including:

• Reviewing a document. Ask complex questions about a batch of documents or contracts and get nuanced answers with citations.
• Comparing documents. Rapidly identify similarities and differences between documents, including whether one agreement or settlement is more favourable to a given party.
• Summarising a document or documents. Create succinct summaries of complicated documents for easy understanding.
• Preparing for a case or trial. Identify pertinent topics and questions to prepare evidence.
• Searching a database. Quickly find relevant documents from a large database.
• Checking contract policy compliance. Flag non-compliant language and provide automated redlines.
• Drafting correspondence. Customised letters and emails can be created for your review and approval.
• Creating a timeline. Create a timeline and automatically assemble chronologies of events described in your documents.

Using a legal AI assistant is like having a paralegal at the ready to take time consuming but critical tasks off your plate.

Legal research

Just as online legal research evolved to replace printed law books, using GenAI within your online research is now the benchmark for efficient legal work. Research can start with a well-trained and well-managed AI information platform, combined with expert content like that found in Westlaw Edge UK with CoCounsel. This powerfully elevates your research with more pinpoint precision, accuracy, and reliability.

Jumpstart your legal research. Using an everyday language prompt, GenAI can help you discover important case attributes, enabling you to search, filter, and browse more efficiently. You can run a search gathering all the potentially relevant cases and then filter your results by legal issue, fact pattern, outcome, and more.

The power of GenAI in legal research is in doing things that could never have been done before. More accurate results in lightning-fast speeds? The answer is yes, when your GenAI tools are built on trusted content and architecture.