An average lawyer spends at least four hours a day writing and editing contracts and filling in contractors’ data. How to make their work more productive? Legal AI tools, based on natural language processing, image recognition, and generative models, can lift the burden of repetitive work off the lawyer’s shoulders.
Let’s zero in on specific examples and explore the world of AI applications in law.
AI in legal operations: The forefront of the industry
A recent report finds that AI improves the way the sector operates. Automated document review, analysis, and case management significantly reduce the time required for legal research and analysis.
According to Onit’s study, solicitors who just started using legal AI software instantly became 51.5% more productive, and senior lawyers equipped with AI spent 15% more time on skill-intensive activities. It is roughly estimated that a company can save a total of 33% of expenses related to contract processing.
What does this mean in practice? Take a midsize company with 55 lawyers who review an average of 9,526 contracts per year. With a 51.5% productivity increase, lawyers will process 4,906 more contracts. It’s like having 28 more lawyers on the team!
AI magic makes legal work extremely effective by assisting lawyers in the following areas:
- Predicting case outcomes
- Monitoring due diligence
- Creating documents
- Examining legal statistics
- Contract lifecycle management
- Intellectual property management
- Seamless billing.
Scrolling down the page, you will find the descriptions of some key tech products for these purposes.
Predicting case details and outcomes
AI software for lawyers can be used to predict the outcomes of court cases. The AI algorithm learns from past judgments, cases, and decisions reached by this or that judge.
With this software, you can also identify trends in case outcomes. You can check whether specific types of claims are usually successful at trial, or if a particular judge is more likely to rule against the plaintiff. This is useful for firms that have disputes with contractors and are trying to figure out if taking the case to court is money-wise. Let’s look at some products offered on the market.
One of the prominent examples is Timing Analytics by Lex Machina. It estimates the time when a case goes to trial before a specific judge in the US. It means the client can thoroughly prepare for litigation and avoid surprises.
Another tool is Premonition. It predicts how likely a lawyer is to succeed in a certain case. Premonition analyzes a lawyer’s win rate, average case duration, and case type. Its neural network is trained on a large litigation database owned by the company.
With such AI solutions, companies can easily forecast the impact of their legal actions. This leads to informed decisions and cost-effective business processes.
Contract lifecycle management
CLM software automates contract initiation, negotiation, ongoing management, and renewal. The software makes it easier to track compliance too. AI can bring meaningful entities from .doc or .pdf files to your company’s CLM tracking system for further processing. The backbone of the instrument is metadata — contractors’ names, dates, revenues, etc. AI collects this data and lets you quickly filter and search it. Some of the top players in the field are AXDRAFT and ContractWorks.
With AI-based CLM lawyers experience 51.5% productivity increase, which can roughly equal to having 28 more team members for a department of 55.
AXDRAFT’s CLM software streamlines contract processes, from initiation and negotiation to execution and renewal. The system records all required changes and updates, storing and tracking data in one place. It also automatically fills templates with relevant metadata entities, so there’s no need for extra typing.
Both AXDRAFT and another CLM software, ContractWorks, provide cloud-based scalable, searchable, and secure contract repositories for all ongoing and future contracts. The software seamlessly integrates into the supporting systems and is capable of digitizing scanned contracts and PDFs via OCR.
Due diligence
Every lawyer knows the importance of performing due diligence. It positively impacts long-term shareholder returns, as well as their revenue and reputation. But it’s also very time-consuming and tedious. To get meaningful results, lawyers need to investigate everything thoroughly. Yet spot checks are prone to human error.
If AI software for lawyers is in place, a pile of documents can be processed correctly in just a few minutes.
Kira Systems, one of the major industry players, offers software for an accurate and thorough due diligence contract review. The software finds relevant content in contracts and extracts it for analysis in searchable formats. Team members who must review the content multiple times can search for the extracted information linked to the original sources.
Due diligence is a crucial component of the deal flow, and AI automates the process for better efficiency.
Legal analytics
Legal analytics is a set of technologies to draw insights from large volumes of data. It helps businesses reduce risk, gain insight into their counterparty or vendor performance, and optimize internal processes with workflow analytics. Let’s consider some examples.
With Lex Machina’s custom analytics, one can easily find patterns and entities from past cases to learn about a certain judge and a decision they made in certain circumstances.
AXDRAFT’s software can help organizations analyze the value, performance, and efficiency of the contracts based on custom reports. It provides more visibility into the contract lifecycle so the company can manage its deals efficiently, from inception to renewal. It also reduces the contract cycle time, increasing revenue.
Document automation
Using software templates, you can create customized documents based on data input. Legal AI software will suggest the correct template. For example, if a law firm creates a real estate lease agreement with a template, all they need to do is fill in the tenant’s name, address, and phone number—and they’re all set.
PerfectNDA is a smart tool that quickly generates a pre-filled NDA. It asks you a few questions and then selects a template based on your company’s needs, filling it with appropriate data. This legal AI software also allows you to file documents and use integrated e-signatures to streamline the process even further.
QuickDocs automates the tedious work of creating NDAs, DPAs, SOC-2 requests, and more. AI aids in self-served processing, signing, and delivering finalized agreements to customers. You only have to feed the software with document templates to get a fully customized document.
Intellectual property
When writing or evaluating a patent, you must first explore what’s available out there. But how to find it? The patent and trademark search can be daunting. Browsing through websites and databases manually, you risk getting zero results. In fact, you might end up spending more time looking for patents than actually writing your own!
AI in legal operations handles this challenge. Smart algorithms search for similar patents through billions of global patent documents and associated articles. For instance, Trademark Clearance’s program speeds up the search for patents, registered products, and trademarks. The system is designed to analyze the results and rank them according to their relevance as identified by the algorithm.
Finally, Petition.ai can help you gain insights into the filing and granting of petitions. It calculates approval rates and turnaround time based on technology centers.
Electronic billing
Electronic billing platforms ensure that your bills are accurate and get paid faster. The AI algorithm automates invoice capture and processing in a few steps.
First, AI extracts key values from the invoice image. If the estimated accuracy level is lower than the threshold, it sends it to employees for manual check. The algorithm can also enter invoice information into the unified system automatically and classify the invoices by cost, business unit, or product category.
One of these tools is SimpleLegal e-billing software. It organizes and centralizes invoice review, so all the submitted documents are routed directly to the correct approver. Intelligent analytics provides critical insights into a client’s legal spending and saves money on budgeting.
Another example, InvoiceAI by Onit, runs on a neural network trained on the database of past invoices. It helps identify potentially non-compliant charges and analyzes invoices.
Electronic billing helps companies cut costs and creates a trusted relationship between businesses and clients.
To sum up
The most valued benefit of AI in legal practice is improved efficiency and reduced work time. You will always stay ahead of the curve with document automation, CLM systems, e-billing, and ensured due diligence.
Legal AI software optimizes processes and drives revenue growth. You can see for yourself by browsing through the case studies on the AXDRAFT website or booking a demo.
FAQ
Legal AI software makes it easier to predict case details and outcomes. It is also used for electronic billing, contract lifecycle management, due diligence, legal analytics, and intellectual property management.
Legal AI tools cut the number of time-consuming legal tasks. As this technology picks up the pace, the lawyers risk redundancy from AI. However, expert lawyers will be there to stay. Specific practice areas will lose relevance, though, as AI augments legal knowledge.
AI in law is an umbrella term for tools and solutions that leverage ML algorithms to automate routine processes and gain insights from big data. In particular, it is used for tracking contract compliance and renewal and expiry dates. It can also predict case outcomes or find patents.
AI for the legal industry makes lawyers more productive, improves client satisfaction, and helps avoid costly mistakes. However, it’s not ready yet to replace human judgment in the legal profession.