Highlights
- AI-powered drafting tools can cut legal document creation time significantly while reducing manual, repetitive tasks for busy attorneys.
- Choosing the right AI drafting tool means evaluating accuracy, confidentiality, security, and capabilities before adopting it.
- CoCounsel Legal users report cutting drafting time by up to 50%, freeing lawyers for more strategic work.
AI could very well transform the way corporate legal teams serve their organizations. Powerful legal tools can reduce the time it takes to deliver important work product and support busy lawyers in their strategic thinking and quality control.
One critical area of transformation for legal practitioners is using AI for legal drafting. According to Thomson Reuters customers, most lawyers spend 40 to 60 percent of their time drafting documents, and most want a better way: 96% of legal professionals report that their drafting tools are not efficient.
AI can help in-house lawyers spend more time on strategy, advising the business, and shifting work in house. They can spend less time finding the perfect template, switching between tools for model language, editing for missing information and formatting, or completing other manual drafting tasks.
Still, you need to be sure you are using tools you can trust. Let’s look at how and why in-house attorneys are using AI-powered drafting and how they choose the right tools.
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The basics of AI-powered legal drafting
What value does AI bring to legal drafting?
Choosing an AI-powered drafting tool
Making the case for an AI-powered legal drafting tool
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The basics of AI-powered legal drafting
You can use AI-powered drafting tools to guide you through document creation with legal information, suggested language and clauses, and editing tools right at your fingertips. That means you can delegate substantive tasks and get thorough, accurate results much more quickly. You can use them to:
- Find a previous related document to get started more quickly
- Create contract drafting consistency with legal playbooks
- Compare and redline different versions of contracts to understand how they differ from one another
- Find, create, and modify clauses based on current market standard language
- Refine copy, spot errors and inconsistencies, and review formatting
Drafting is a part of all aspects of in-house legal work, from creating sale of goods agreements to licensing your company’s intellectual property to writing employment agreements.
What value does AI bring to legal drafting?
AI-powered drafting tools can help in-house counsel save significant time. For instance, users of CoCounsel Legal from Thomson Reuters have found that it enables them to cut drafting time by up to 50%.
“There is substantial time savings when using CoCounsel Drafting,” says J.J. Ball, legal counsel at Systemiq. “When we are operating on an average turnaround time of three to four business days for a response, we can cut that down to one to two business days by utilizing the tool to get drafting work done.”
Beyond the time savings, AI-powered legal drafting tools can help reduce errors and maintain consistency in legal language across your organization.
Choosing an AI-powered drafting tool
You may have reservations about trusting your legal work product to a generative AI tool. An online search for AI-powered legal drafting tools will return dozens of options, some purpose built for law, others glorified chat bots.
There are criteria you can look for to get quality output to support your team and protect the integrity of your work. Here are some elements to consider when selecting an AI-powered legal drafting tool:
- Accuracy: Legal AI assistants are only as good as the content they train on. Choose a tool that draws from content you trust and be sure you can verify the accuracy of its responses yourself.
- Confidentiality: Select a tool that does not permit third party AI models to retain or train on customer data.
- Security: Verify that the provider uses the most advanced data security controls possible, like Microsoft Azure North American-based servers and zero-retention APIs.
- Capabilities: Consider your team’s greatest drafting bottlenecks and evaluate AI-powered drafting tools against those needs. We talked about some common capabilities above.
Making the case for an AI-powered legal drafting tool
Adopting any new tool takes some effort. Here are some tangible measures to consider as you make the case for new technology:
Time and cost savings by individual document: users of CoCounsel Legal from Thomson Reuters have found that it enables them to cut drafting time by up to 50%.
Reduction of external legal spend for legal departments: You may be able to keep more work in-house, leading to cost savings and getting through matters faster.
For example, an in-house legal team outsources all nondisclosure agreement (NDA) work to an external law firm at an annual cost of $50,000 on a fixed fee basis. The in-house legal team estimates savings of 75 percent if they automated the NDA and did the work in-house instead.
