Time pressure, accuracy risk, version control, AI-specific pitfalls, and their solutions for legal teams
Original publish date: July 11, 2024
Highlights
- Lawyers spend 40-60% of their time drafting documents, often taking over 15 minutes to find a starting point.
- AI tools can reduce drafting time by 25-50% while improving clause consistency and document accuracy.
- Legal professionals must manage AI risks including hallucinations, confidentiality concerns, and jurisdiction-specific compliance gaps.
Legal drafting is an organized method of writing a legal document created by identifying facts and laws and applying them to draft a document that is relevant and accurate. It’s both an art or a science.
All lawyers know that the legal document they are drafting must be comprehensive but not encumbered with extraneous language, and always fit for purpose. Yet, despite spending as much as 40% to 60% of their time drafting documents, according to research by Thomson Reuters, they still spent in excess of 15 minutes identifying a good starting point for their draft.
So, what keeps lawyers from working more efficiently and effectively when they draft legal documents? Let’s review the real challenges and promising solutions.
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Drafting can be time-consuming and inefficient
Drafting is a multifaceted process
Opportunities AI creates for legal drafting
Getting on board with new technology
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AI-powered legal drafting: The definitive guide for legal professionals
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Drafting can be time-consuming and inefficient
No surprise here — time is a constraining factor for most legal professionals, as lawyers spend between 40% and 60% of their time drafting legal documents and reviewing contracts. Drafting has been a pain point and necessary evil of legal work that, until recently, hasn’t had the breakthroughs or technological leaps forward that have been needed, or that AI could deliver on.
Think about it: Is there anything you spend 40-60% of your time doing in your workday? What if you could delegate many of those tasks to legal AI tools and get on to the next important, more strategic work vs. slogging through cumbersome tasks?
Accuracy concerns
There’s no latitude when it comes to the accuracy of legal documents. A draft of a legal document needs to be comprehensive, but not encumbered with extraneous language, and customized to a specific task. At the same time, it should be consistent with other related documents. Even a minor error can have major effects. Slight inaccuracies can cast doubt on an entire document, meaning a contract could be considered void. Legal professionals need to ensure their documents are 100% accurate, up-to-date, and compliant.
Consistency and formatting are also imperative. Some documents need to comply with specific formats or content requirements to be valid. Both corporations and law firms often require consistency within their work product.
Drafting is a multifaceted process
Drafting documents is cumbersome for a number of reasons, including the variety of inputs, variation in legal requirements, countless revisions, and competing priorities. Version control and collaboration are essential — and can be a headache.
Legal documents aren’t, and shouldn’t be, drafted in a vacuum. That means there are multiple sets of eyes on a document and multiple versions to manage. Wrangling feedback from numerous sources, while maintaining a coordinated draft can be a double whammy of time and accuracy issues.
Finding a starting point
Nothing is more frustrating than starting from scratch on a document when a similar one exists somewhere in an organization’s vast knowledge base. Finding the most pertinent and most current document to use as a starting point is essential. Similarly, searching for the right legal precedent as a reference goes beyond just saving time and gets directly to the heart of a matter.
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Access white paper ↗Opportunities AI creates for legal drafting
Legal professionals won’t be surprised to hear that AI is a promising option for relieving many of these drafting ineffeciences. AI has been called transformational in business, entertainment, education, politics, and personal applications.
Below are six ways lawyers can use AI to draft effective documents.
Faster first drafts
Based on customer data, CoCounsel Legal can help reduce drafting time by 25% to 50% .
Improved clause consistency
AI tools can help improve clause consistency by flagging missing standard clauses, including indemnification, limitation of liability, and governing law, before a document goes to review. The result: fewer round-trip revision cycles.
Lower barrier for associates
Junior attorneys and paralegals can produce a competent first draft using AI-assisted tools, freeing senior attorneys to focus on negotiation strategy and client counsel.
Document automation at scale
AI can improve the process of generating leases, intake agreements, template wills, and other high-volume practices. AI drafting can enable batch production of first drafts that would otherwise require dedicated paralegal hours.
Delegating non-expert tasks
Lawyers know that the less time they spend on tasks that don’t require their legal expertise, the more they can spend on strategic goals and delivering greater value to their clients and organizations. And it’s not just lawyers who struggle with time constraints.
Paralegals and legal assistants, who often support multiple lawyers, can relegate tasks like legal research, document review, and contract analysis to AI. When legwork tasks are handled with technology along with the thoughtful overview of professionals, everyone’s workday becomes more predictable and satisfying.
Digging deeper without the rabbit holes
Sometimes, lawyers’ expertise and intuition tell them to dig deeper when preparing legal documents. Whether they’re searching for a document, a clause, or a precedent, finding the right information quickly can be difficult.
Legal professionals can uncover what’s needed without the pull of random corners of the internet that can draw time and attention away. New AI tools can also bring disparate legal resources under one system — keeping lawyers from jumping from one platform to another.
Risks of AI in legal drafting
Even as AI offers powerful solutions for legal drafting problems, users need to manage the risks. In the age of AI, lawyers have to be careful to maintain professional ethical standards while enjoying the benefits of incorporating these new tools into their workflow. The first step is understanding how AI-powered legal drafting works and what, exactly, the risks are.
Hallucination and citation errors
AI models can generate plausible-sounding but incorrect facts. In legal contexts, AI hallucinations can include incorrect case citations, statute numbers, or legal principles.
Lawyers must provide human oversight, verifying every AI-generated citation with trusted primary sources — Westlaw, court records, or official databases — before filing any documents or advising clients.
Confidentiality and data privacy
Legal professionals should be aware of how using AI can affect their duty of confidentiality. Inputting client information, privileged communications, or proprietary contract terms into a third-party AI tool may expose confidential data. Lawyers must confirm that their AI drafting tool operates under a documented data privacy policy that prohibits training on client data.
The risk of violating client confidentiality is high when using a general-purpose AI tool. CoCounsel Legal, on the other hand, contains built-in safeguards designed specifically for the legal profession. These protections include keeping client data contained in secure, dedicated environments, discarding prompts, controlling who has access to which information, and creating audit trails.
Over-reliance and reduced attorney judgment
A lawyer’s professional judgment cannot be subcontracted out to an AI tool. Lawyers must review all AI-generated or AI-assisted drafts and are held responsible for any errors or inaccuracies that the tool created. The ethical obligation of competence (ABA Model Rule 1.1) applies to AI-assisted work just as much as it does to all other legal work.
Accepting AI output without substantive review, particularly on jurisdiction-specific clauses or novel legal questions, may pose unacceptable and unnecessary risks. Lawyers should be aware of how ABA Model Rule 1.1 and AI intersect, and take the proper precautions.
Jurisdiction-specific compliance gaps
AI models trained on broad legal datasets may not reflect recent statutory changes, local court rules, or jurisdiction-specific formatting requirements. Drafters should treat AI output as a starting point, not a final draft, particularly for regulatory filings, family law instruments, and real estate documents.
Getting on board with new technology
Regardless of whether drafting legal documents is the most- or least-favorite task in a lawyer’s daily schedule, it makes up a substantial portion of it. Just as the internet changed legal workflow in the late 20th century, the advancement of AI in the legal industry streamlines tasks and can improve outcomes while mitigating potential risks by working with AI systems designed for legal professionals and other fiduciary work.
Since risks can never be eliminated completely, it’s part of your ethical obligation as a lawyer to always apply human oversight and your legal judgment to any AI-generated drafts before moving on to a final version.
For legal professionals in law firms, corporate legal departments, or government agencies, how you choose to leverage AI can be a competitive advantage, but as AI is poised to transform how legal work gets done, having a strategy will soon be table stakes.
Access the definitive guide to AI-powered legal drafting to get more practical drafting guidance when using AI or learn more about CoCounsel Legal.
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