AI Legal Assistants: Transforming the Practice of Law

Generative AI is popping up in every industry, but do legal AI assistants have a place in your workflow? For a growing number of legal professionals, the answer is yes. In our 2024 State of AI in Legal Report, 74% of respondents said they already use AI for legal work. Some CLMs have built-in AI tools for lawyers, but AI legal assistants are the next wave for legal pros to consider.

This guide explores what AI legal assistants are, how to use them, and what you need to consider before diving in.

AI legal assistants are tools that use artificial intelligence (AI) to augment and delegate legal professionals’ work, like drafting a contract or finding variations between document versions.

Typically, AI legal assistants can help with tasks like:

• Redlining contacts
• Reviewing documents
• Drafting contracts
• Generating amendments, emails, and internal communications
• Researching and summarizing new policies and regulations
• Fact-checking documents

Some CLMs have generative AI tools built into the platform, and AI legal assistants usually have an interface where you can input your query or task. For example, you could ask an AI legal assistant, “What were all the variations of limitation liability that we negotiated in the past six months?” and it would cross reference your contract repository to find the answer.

AI legal assistants vs. existing research tools

While both AI legal assistants and existing research tools can help during discovery, the mechanics and time requirements vary. Let’s say you want to understand recent rulings on non-compete clauses before creating a new employment contract. With traditional research tools, you could use filters to find relevant cases, read through the decisions, and aggregate what you learned. Or, you could use a prompt in an AI legal assistant to skip right to analysis, potentially saving you hours.

Here’s an example research prompt you could feed into a legal AI assistant:

“Provide a comprehensive analysis of recent federal court decisions regarding the enforceability of non-compete clauses in employment contracts within the tech industry. Focus on rulings from the past two years, identify any emerging trends or shifts in judicial interpretation, and summarize the key factors courts are considering when evaluating these cases. Also, highlight any circuit splits or areas where the law seems to be in flux.”

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To understand how legal AI assistants work, you need to know the basic mechanics of generative AI. For starters, “generative AI” is an umbrella term that includes technology like:

• Machine learning: The process AI programs use to “learn” from data to improve the program’s performance (without someone having to reprogram it manually!). Think of it as the AI program studying and doing homework to improve its model.
• Natural language processing: The focus on interactions between humans and computers so AI models can learn and understand how we communicate. You can thank NLP for being able to write a prompt into a generative AI tool instead of writing the algorithm yourself.

What separates an AI legal assistant from any other conversational AI tool are its ties to your contract repository and legal databases. Since the model only learns from relevant and vetted materials, it can learn more accurately and quickly.

Here’s a basic rundown of how you use a legal AI assistant:

1. Enter a legal prompt into the AI legal assistant
2. The tool translates your prompt into structured steps for it to complete
3. The AI legal assistant answers the prompt
4. Chat log historical context helps interpret follow-up prompts

Since AI mimics the human brain in some ways, it can complete tasks like summarizing information, recognizing patterns, and creating new content. Here’s how legal professionals can use those capabilities and more in their work.

1. Legal research and case law evaluation

AI assistant tools can help you quickly find, summarize, and review legal information. For example, you could compile relevant case law and compare regulation trends.

2. Document drafting

Using AI legal assistants to create the first draft of a clause, contract, email, memo, or summary lets you focus on the important edits and details while saving time.

3. Contract review and summaries

When you use legal AI to compare contracts to your preferred clauses and risk profile, you can quickly generate redlines and flag areas of concern. Legal AI assistants can also summarize information, which is useful when you want to explain changes or specific clauses to non-legal stakeholders.

4. Due diligence

Using a legal AI assistant to review a large set of documents extracts important information, flags risks, and compares versions of documents to find inconsistencies so you can accomplish more in less time.

5. Predictive analytics and forecasting

Some AI legal assistants let you compare outcomes from past cases to determine the likelihood of an outcome or examine the historical decision-making of judges or opposing attorneys.

The reception of AI in the legal industry is generally positive—our research found that 71% of legal professionals trust AI. Plus, 92% of legal professionals who use AI tools say it’s improved their work.

However, adoption isn’t without challenges. 10% of legal organizations have outright banned AI tools for lawyers and Thomson Reuters research found that concerns about inaccurate responses, data security, ethics, and more plague more than half of professional service providers.

Here are common benefits and hurdles of implementing AI into legal work.

AI legal assistant benefits

• Time and cost efficiency. AI legal assistants can turn hours of document review into minutes of prompting. Completing AI-assisted tasks faster means you can focus on the most impactful projects and handle more workload with the same team size. Gartner predicts that large language models (LLMs) will boost legal department productivity by at least 10% to 20% over the next two to five years.
• Improved accuracy in research. Letting AI assistants help you research reduces human error or accidentally overlooking important information.
• Accessibility of legal services. If lawyers can complete mundane tasks in less time to focus on impactful work, the cost of legal services could become more accessible
• Enhanced consistency in legal work. Fast and simple document reviews ensure your team uses consistent language throughout documents, flags issues with citations or structure, and finds deviations between versions.
• Accessibility of legal information. Not only can AI legal assistants make information more accessible through faster research, but they can also summarize information for non-legal stakeholders to understand.
• Competitive advantage. According to our research, 71% of respondents’ organizations plan to invest in enterprise AI tools within the next 12 months for widespread use within their companies. Investment potential is stronger in in-house settings (84% of in-house teams plan to invest in AI, versus 58% in law firm settings), which gives law firms that implement AI an even greater chance of standing out from peers who lag.

AI legal assistant concerns

• Errors and data inaccuracy. The most common concern professional service providers have about AI is inaccurate responses. While you can’t wholly avoid hallucinations—when a model creates content that isn’t based on real data, like a fake ‘fact’ or made up citation—you can minimize them.
  • How to mitigate it: AI tools for lawyers are generally more reliable than general-purpose ones for legal tasks, and you can have skilled team members review outputs.
• Data privacy and security. Understanding and trusting how tools handle your confidential data is always important, but there’s an extra level of scrutiny needed when AI is involved.
  • How to mitigate it: It’s important to ask questions about legal AI assistant data policies before using them, particularly around data compliance accreditations, included data security features, training datasets, and permissions management.
• Legislation. AI is still a new and evolving landscape, which means legislation is developing. Topics currently being explored by legislators include data privacy, combatting discrimination, and unauthorized practice of law.
  • How to mitigate it: You need to be proactive about understanding the latest updates, like the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act, President Biden’s Executive Order, and potential state-level legislation.
• Bias and ethics. Any biases present in data used to train AI legal assistants could impact future decision-making or exacerbate biases over time. There are also ethical concerns about accountability and liability of outputs, plus issues like client confidentiality.
  • How to mitigate it: A combination of reviewing inputs for bias and maintaining diverse oversight of AI outputs can help.
• Implementation and training. Getting organizations on board with AI legal assistants poses training challenges, plus potential hurdles in creating a willingness to change and accept new technology.
  • How to mitigate it: Rod Friedmann, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Legal & Compliance practice, recommends learning from law firms and technology partners that have AI experience. He shared that they “can provide valuable insights into the practical benefits and limitations of these tools, as well as strategies to gain adoption.”

How might AI change legal job roles, skills, and services? We have a few predictions.

Prediction: AI could improve work satisfaction.
What if you could hand off tedious tasks and focus on the projects that drew you to the profession in the first place? 28% of legal professionals believe AI could help them the most by handling mundane or manual work. As a result, 57% of lawyers who feel at least some work dissatisfaction said using AI could alleviate it.

Prediction: Job skills and responsibilities will evolve.
Legal AI assistant tools usher in a need for new skill sets, including prompting, workflow management, and an awareness of evolving tech and legislation. In the same way that legal operations have emerged as a new role and skillset, AI management could, too.

There may be a growing discrepancy between training in different legal environments. Thomson Reuters research found that corporate legal departments were more likely to have GenAI training for staff than law firms. Taking the initiative to learn everything you can about legal AI—from its uses and implementation to its limitations and risks—could make you an invaluable asset to your team.

Prediction: Billing models could change.
Doing mundane or repetitive tasks quicker could cut into billable hours, which means firms may switch to a different pricing method. 39% of law firms believe that GenAI usage will make alternative fee arrangements more prevalent.

However, the same Thomson Reuters research found that 58% of legal professionals don’t think that GenAI will impact the rates they charge clients, so there’s no need to panic about AI running you out of business.

A majority of respondents to our State of AI survey said they currently use AI tools in their individual work, and investment is rising—90% of legal professionals who used AI tools in 2023 planned to use them more this year. Plus, 71% of respondents’ organizations plan to invest in enterprise AI tools for lawyers within the next 12 months for widespread use within their companies.

How could legal AI expand in the future? One area to watch is self-executing and self-enforcing contracts. These would be contracts that automatically execute and enforce their terms and conditions based on predefined rules and triggers, such as the achievement of performance milestones or the occurrence of specific events.