Automated legal document evaluation is becoming a reality in the workplace, not just a pipe dream. But even though it could take a lot of time, reviewing legal documents is crucial to developing a solid case plan and successfully getting ready for trial. AI is changing the legal practice scene by providing previously unheard-of capabilities for creating, examining, and evaluating legal documents.
This change promises to improve the correctness of legal work in addition to increasing efficiency. Everything you need to know about AI for legal document review will be covered in this post, from the fundamentals of the technology to the best ways to use it in your company ethically and efficiently.
AI Legal Document Review: What is it?
Artificial intelligence is used in legal document assessment to swiftly evaluate, classify, and pinpoint important information in legal documents. While ML makes sure that computers learn and get better over time, NLP enables AI to comprehend and interpret human language. In the end, artificial intelligence (AI) for legal document review may help you create a strong, well-supported case while saving you time.
It can automate the analysis of legal documents, improve your eDiscovery process, locate pertinent case law or legal opinions fast, evaluate large legal databases in minutes, and more. GPT-3 and GPT-4, which are versions of ChatGPT, are examples of Large Language Models (LLMs) that exhibit the biggest advances in artificial intelligence in recent years.
The Best Ways to Use AI for Reviewing Legal Documents
Although AI has several significant advantages for expediting the analysis of legal documents, it also has special hazards and ethical issues, just like any other AI solution for attorneys. To persuade team members who might be reluctant to embrace new technology, highlight the advantages of AI tools like Spellbook.
1. Dependability and Safety
The quality of training data raises reliability issues when using AI to legal decisions. Inaccurate assessments or biased judgments resulting from flawed or biased facts may jeopardize legal decision-making. Spellbook uses several crucial techniques to overcome these issues:
* Excellent training data: Spellbook trains its AI using a variety of precise legal facts from actual cases.
* Legal benchmarks that can be customized: Lawyers can choose pre-approved terms from a customizable library, define particular standards for document assessment, and compare documents to industry benchmarks.
* Human oversight: Although Spellbook speeds up processes like contract review, human users are always in charge of ultimate approval. The user interface is designed to make human-first approval simple.
2. Make sure someone is always reviewing the work:
One of the most crucial things to keep in mind while using AI to the legal field is this: Human monitoring is always necessary to ensure accuracy and dependability, regardless of how sophisticated AI technology becomes. This entails constantly going over the outcomes and verifying the source material and citations for legal document review in order to identify any mistakes or subtleties that AI might miss.
3. Improving Your Review Methods
Advanced AI imitates human legal analysis, going beyond keyword-based search. Tools like entity recognition and summarization, in addition to NLP and ML, improve the efficacy of searches. Users may easily find and add legal precedents, recommend changes that comply with the document’s legal requirements, and more, thanks to predictive search tools and information extraction.
Legal document Review types using AI
Generative AI and technology-aided review (TAR) are the two main forms of AI used in legal document review.
1. Review with technology assistance (TAR)
At the moment, the most popular subset of AI technologies for reviewing legal documents is technology-assisted review. To assist attorneys save time, TAR employs software and machine learning to assess, evaluate, and rank a vast number of documents. When utilizing TAR, for instance, a lawyer could mark documents in a sample set as either relevant or irrelevant. Although TAR can assist attorneys with expediting the document review process, which can lower the expense and duration of manual review, it is not without restrictions.
2. Artificial Intelligence
Social media posts, text messages, papers, and other kinds of data can all be processed, analyzed, and reviewed by generative AI systems. Additionally, it can help with document creation, provide a more thorough analysis of the text, and produce summaries. Human oversight is crucial when utilizing generative AI in legal contexts since it is also susceptible to AI hallucinations, which can provide believable but unsubstantiated or erroneous outputs.
AI in a Real-World Legal Document Example
1. Luminance: Luminance reads and comprehends legal documents using sophisticated machine learning and natural language processing. It greatly accelerates due diligence, compliance checks, and contract analysis by assisting law firms and internal legal teams in rapidly reviewing, analyzing, and extracting important information from contracts and other legal texts.
2. Harvey AI is a comprehensive AI legal platform designed to support the workflows of legal practitioners. Although it isn’t especially geared at reviewing legal documents, Harvey can assist in producing data-driven insights, suggestions, and forecasts.
3. Kira Systems: Kira finds, extracts, and evaluates important terms and information from contracts and other legal documents using machine learning. It is frequently used to help legal practitioners increase accuracy and decrease manual labor in due diligence, contract review, and compliance tasks.
The Most Used AI Instruments
General-purpose technologies like ChatGPT are frequently the first step in integrating AI in the legal industry. Lawyers who only use general-purpose tools, however, might not be able to take advantage of the unique features that law-specific AI software offers.
1. The Spellbook
Spellbook is excellent at document review chores; it makes recommendations for essential modifications, clarifies unclear phrases, and suggests improvements. Legal practitioners can prepare and evaluate contracts with unmatched efficiency and accuracy thanks to Spellbook Legal’s unique combination of features, which include interaction with Microsoft Word and sophisticated language models like GPT-4.
2. Harvey AI
Harvey AI analyzes previous case files and legal precedents to assist in legal decision-making. It uses generative AI to help lawyers with legal research, contract analysis, issue detection, drafting, and complicated legal question answering. Harvey AI increases accuracy and productivity while freeing up lawyers to concentrate on higher-value legal work by automating time-consuming chores. For improved contextual accuracy, it may be adjusted using a firm’s templates and documents and is based on extensive language models designed for legal applications.
3. The CoCounsel at Casetext
Casetext’s CoCounsel is capable of rapidly summarizing the content of vast amounts of text. The purpose of this application is to revolutionize the way legal practitioners prepare for depositions, evaluate documents, analyze contracts, and create timelines. Users can enter legal concerns and jurisdiction-specific details in Casetext’s CoCounsel to get comprehensive responses with citations in a matter of seconds. By delivering exceptional work at superhuman speed, Casetext hopes to help attorneys and law firms better serve their clients and expand their businesses.
How can AI review legal documents aid in case preparation?
AI can help with some of the most labor-intensive aspects of case preparation, such as expediting the examination of legal papers and accurately and quickly processing vast amounts of data.
1. Create and draft papers: Generative AI technologies are able to examine pre-existing documents, identify trends, and utilize that data to produce preliminary versions of legal documents such as answers, pleadings, and statements of facts. AI makes it easier for attorneys to get started and frees up time for revisions by producing preliminary documents rapidly.
2. Translation: AI translation systems make it easier to work with papers in different languages by translating legal documents fast and effectively. This lowers communication barriers and saves time and money compared to manual translation.
3. Create case narratives: By examining case files and papers, extracting pertinent information, and arranging it into an understandable story, artificial intelligence (AI) can help with case narrative creation. This speeds up the process by which attorneys develop their case arguments and get ready for trials (and, in case you were unaware, Clio Duo also creates timelines from legal documents).
Final Thoughts
To sum up, artificial intelligence (AI) for legal document review is revolutionizing the way attorneys handle document creation, contract analysis, and case preparation. Spellbook, Harvey AI, and CoCounsel are examples of products that use cutting-edge technology like NLP, ML, and generative AI to simplify difficult processes, improve accuracy, and save time.
Even while AI increases productivity and insight, human oversight is still necessary to guarantee results that are morally sound, precise, and sensitive to context. Businesses that appropriately use AI will have a major competitive advantage as the legal sector continues to embrace technological advancements, providing quicker and more dependable legal services while freeing up professionals to concentrate on advocacy and strategic decision-making.
