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Artificial Intelligence

What an AI legal assistant can do for your transactional work

· 5 minute read

· 5 minute read

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For transactional attorneys, the devil is often in the details. A deal will hinge on information buried in a digital deal room. A company can have hidden liabilities in its vault of contracts. The pressure to find and understand all the relevant information in a matter is immense, and the time pressures are considerable.  

Traditionally the only way to meet the challenge was with brute strength, powering through document review and data analysis to surface the insights you needed to craft your strategy and represent your client or organization.  

The technology around legal AI is emerging as a reliable and transformative tool to help lawyers in all practice areas streamline their work and create more time to craft strategy and work with clients and colleagues. They can also lead to better outcomes as they help reduce errors and identify ways to improve work product and work with clients and colleagues 

An AI legal assistant is a system that helps legal professionals reliably delegate tasks using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). CoCounsel Core, the genAI assistant from Thomson Reuters, handles a wide range of legal tasks in a single, user-friendly interface. This article will look at how GenAI assistants like CoCounsel can help transform transactional practices. A future article will explore the benefits for litigation practices.  

Motion graphic of TR website messaging on laptop screen— Transforming tomorrow's/today's work with AI

GenAI assistant for transactional law

Transactional attorneys are often sifting through mountains of data looking for issues, patterns, and anomalies. CoCounsel helps with document review and analysis, contract drafting and management, and entity formation and compliance across transactional practice areas. There are some key tasks transactional attorneys look to CoCounsel for. These include:  

Identify risk and ensure compliance 

CoCounsel cross-references policies with contracts to find relevant clauses, language, and risks. It even redlines contracts to bring them into compliance with your policies. You can ask CoCounsel complex questions about a batch of documents and receive nuanced answers complete with citations. This helps you identify your risks and look for opportunities to improve compliance.  

CoCounsel can search a set of contracts for relevant clauses. For instance, we had CoCounsel review 1,732 pages of contracts to determine compliance and redline them as necessary. In general, manual contract review is prone to a human error rate of 10% to 20%. Using CoCounsel reduced the hands-on time for the attorney to less than 6 hours and retrieved the information with better than 96% accuracy. 

Automate contract review 

CoCounsel analyzes vast amounts of contracts to pull out critical information, such as terms, dates, and deliverables.” 

Summarize complex legal documents 

Interpret and condense critical data faster than humanly possible – without missing key details. This can help with your own understanding of documents, but it can also help you explain relevant materials to your client or colleagues and brief them on your strategy based on the elements of the documents. For instance, you can have CoCounsel summarize new FTC rules to quickly inform stakeholders about changes that affect their business.

Transactional attorneys also use CoCounsel to expedite due diligence, re-paper contracts, evaluate potential liability, and easily find contractual precedent. 

 

Expediate deals and cut costs

Legal AI tools and assistants have a wide range of uses for transactional attorneys. Getting the work done faster and with less human error will ultimately benefit the organization or client at the center of the matter. It also has benefits for you as the attorney. You can cut the tedium that sometimes comes along with transactional practice and spend more time on true lawyering – finding the insights, crafting a strategy, counseling clients, and negotiating terms.  

Over time, you’ll find that you’re able to enable higher growth by providing faster, higher-value service with CoCounsel. And you might enjoy your work even more. 

As a junior associate doing M&A contract due diligence, I remember spending so much time in the data room doing manually exactly what CoCounsel can do in minutes. Really amazing stuff!” – Samantha Seaton, Knowledge Management Counsel, Fisher Phillips. 

Transform your transactional work

Legal AI technology can work with you like a thought partner, associate, or paralegal might, to help you refine your thinking and get precise answers from vast bodies of data and information. They can help you cut hours off important legal tasks without sacrificing quality. In fact, they can improve the quality of analysis by reducing error rates over human work.  

Improving your efficiency and reducing your error rates creates more time for you to focus on the more complex, high-value tasks that your colleagues and clients prize.  

Ready to transform your transactional practice with AI? Explore how CoCounsel can transform your legal work.  

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