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Drafting quickly and confidently in-house
With 69% of general counsel facing substantial cost pressure, efficiency and cost control are top priorities for legal teams. The most recent State of the Corporate Legal Department report from Thomson Reuters also found that risk management and enabling strategy are as important to businesses as ever.
Legal departments must protect and grow the business in a complex environment to meet these challenges while managing or reducing costs.
One obvious place to look for efficiencies is drafting, where lawyers spend 40% to 60% of their time. This statistic comes from a survey of Thomson Reuters customers, which also found that 96% of those surveyed also believe their drafting tools aren’t efficient enough.
Addressing drafting inefficiencies creates valuable time for the team to focus on strategic business outcomes. Legal teams can work more efficiently and produce better legal documents by using CoCounsel Drafting. This tool combines the power of generative AI with Practical Law's expert-created contract templates and clauses. In fact, users report that they can cut their drafting time by up to 50%. That provides a significant amount of time to provide more strategic counsel to the business and ensure the work product is flawless.
Why is legal drafting so time-consuming?
Providing a flawless contract or other legal document requires strategic thinking, good communication with all parties, and meticulous attention to detail.
Traditional methods of legal drafting have lawyers begin the process with a framework. You probably use existing work product as a rough draft of the contract. Then, you find and incorporate details from term sheets, legal research, modified clause language, or specific business needs into the draft document.
From there, you focus on operative clauses and identify any rights, permission, or ownership that emerge from the agreement. Throughout the process, you work with potential risks in mind and use clear, unambiguous language.
Each of these steps requires precision and time. With experience, lawyers develop shortcuts and instincts. But for newer attorneys or those new to your company, this process is particularly fraught. They haven’t developed knowledge of the institution’s way of doing things and an innate sense of the nuances of matters and circumstances.
Legal teams try to address these challenges with resources and guidelines. For instance, they might develop detailed guidelines on structuring legal documents or banks of preferred clause language. It’s common to subscribe to a know-how tool to ensure the team stays current with market trends and practices.
Once the document is drafted, you need to make sure it is written clearly and the legal language is precise. Having a colleague read through the draft can also help catch ambiguous points. This can be a time-consuming, back-and-forth process, but it is better than having your business partner or the other party to the contract trip over an imprecise phrase.
When the language is crisp, you must proofread closely to minimize errors. Word processing tools can catch some typos but may miss nuanced issues. For instance, you’ll want to double-check all names, numbers, and dates to ensure they are correct. A word-processing editor won’t catch these, nor can it easily help you confirm consistent formatting, including capitalization of any terms you define. Be sure the hyphenation follows preferences from an authority like Black’s Law Dictionary.
How AI-powered legal drafting works
These steps will always be crucial, but they don’t have to take so much time. GenAI tools power legal professionals through the drafting stage with speed and greater efficiency. A tool like CoCounsel Drafting helps you generate accurate and thorough drafts much faster than traditional methods. It puts legal information, suggested language and clauses, and editing tools right at your fingertips — all within Microsoft Word.
Some of the specific tasks you can use AI-powered drafting tools for include:
- Find a previous, related document
- Create contract drafting consistency with legal playbooks
- Compare and redline
- Find, create, and modify clauses
- Spot errors and refine and review formatting
With the time you save using an AI-powered legal drafting tool, you and your colleagues can devote more time to providing strategic counsel to the business.
Implement AI-powered drafting for the whole department
You and your team can use a tool like CoCounsel Drafting to help you create, edit, and review legal documents.
Creating. Finding previous, related documents and legal playbooks will help you generate a template document for each matter. You can get a faster start and be confident you won’t have to backtrack because the template doesn’t fit your matter. Junior lawyers often struggle to align drafts with industry standards and departmental guidelines. They typically need a senior lawyer to review their work to ensure everything’s in order. CoCounsel can help you maintain consistency as you write, reducing the time colleagues need to review each other’s work.
The ClauseFinder feature makes key clauses easily accessible in one place in Microsoft Word. You can quickly and confidently access gold-standard clauses for your contracts and agreements from Practical Law, SEC agreements, and your own repository of internal documents. With these capabilities, you’ll reduce the time you spend on manual comparisons and minimize concerns over an errant change slipping through.
Editing. CoCounsel’s ability to spot errors and refine and review formatting will save you a tremendous amount of time as you finalize your document. One common pitfall in the editing phase is recognizing the need to note a reference in a document you read previously. An AI-powered drafting tool will help you quickly access and reference this document from your viewing history. This capability saves you from digging through files or running manual database scans to find the reference.
GenAI tools that employ natural language make this situation far easier. Now, you can easily retrieve information from whichever source you need, whether from one of their earlier drafts or a colleague’s document on file.
Reviewing. CoCounsel Drafting is helpful when reviewing agreements drafted on third-party paper, too. You can speed up your response time by using AI to compare third-party contracts to your own playbooks. You can quickly spot missing clauses, pinpoint deviations from your standard contract templates, and automate redlining.
Legal professionals are cautious of GenAI “hallucinations” — inaccurate or nonsensical responses to prompts. The last thing you want to do is present a business partner or external party with a draft filled with errors or invented language.
One way to reduce the risk of hallucinations is to choose AI tools that use the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach, which offers better guarantees that a query response will come from only verified, trusted legal content. Your tool should also have a robust way to detect and mitigate factual or usage errors in the draft. CoCounsel Drafting meets these requirements.
AI-powered legal drafting in action
Let’s see this process in action. Imagine that you’ve been asked to draft an employment agreement between a manufacturer and its new distributor. First, you’d use your AI-powered drafting tool to find the best starting template for the contract. It would give you a number of templates for distribution agreements and ask you to choose the most relevant one. From there, the system automatically generates a new contract for you to fill out.
If you’re using CoCounsel, you could have it scan various databases, searching for up-to-date clauses and terminology. You can also use a chat-based GenAI assistant to answer essential questions that crop up while drafting, such as:
- Which of our requests will require permission from the other party?
- What is the ownership status of any material created?
- If either party in the contract grants rights to the other, how will these be exercised?
As you generate the initial draft, CoCounsel helps you finesse it, noting where the language might be unclear or if you have outdated clauses or phrases.
From there, you can maintain visibility into changes from business partners and redlines from the other party, ensuring that you are satisfied they continue to comply with your department’s standards.
Cut drafting time by up to 50%
J.J. Ball is a legal counsel at Systemiq and a user of CoCounsel Drafting. “There is substantial time saving when using CoCounsel Drafting,” he said. “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.” That is quite significant for his department.
Customers like Ball report that using CoCounsel Drafting reduces the time they spend on drafting by up to 50%. They use their additional time to work on strategic issues for the business. This availability can help the team address other priorities for the department, such as risk management, compliance, and enabling the company’s growth strategy.
With cost control continuing to be a priority for most legal departments, CoCounsel Drafting can help with spend management, too. You may be able to keep more work in-house, leading to cost savings and getting through matters faster.
For example, consider a legal team that outsources all nondisclosure agreement (NDA) work to an external law firm at an annual cost of $50,000 on a fixed fee basis. This team could save 75% of this cost if they automated the NDA and handled the work in-house instead. Legal playbooks and other features within CoCounsel Drafting can significantly enable this shift.
The future belongs to lawyers who use AI
While AI won’t replace lawyers, AI-enabled lawyers may outpace those who don’t use it over time. That’s because automating the more manual or mundane elements of legal practice will change the game so significantly. AI-enabled lawyers can reduce their drafting time by up to 50%. Lawyers spending 60% of their time drafting could get nearly a third of each workday back. These lawyers will have more hours each day to provide strategic counsel, work with business partners, and handle more work in-house rather than outsourcing it.
Lawyers who don’t embrace AI may struggle to meet their department’s productivity metrics. They may burn out trying to match the output of colleagues working with more nimble tools. They may be unable to keep up with changes to market trends and deliver unacceptable work product.
If you’re eager to incorporate GenAI into your practice, you’ll immediately experience dramatic benefits from CoCounsel Drafting. Even reluctant adopters will very likely be impressed with the efficiencies they see while experimenting with the tool’s different capabilities. CoCounsel Drafting is an excellent way to get a feel for how GenAI can support your practice.
As your legal team adopts CoCounsel Drafting, you will see significant efficiency gains. Your documents will be more consistent as you can easily access playbooks and gold-standard clauses. You and your colleagues will likely grow in confidence in the guidance and output it provides, and you’ll start to find other ways to spend your work time rather than triple-checking your drafts for typos — double-checking will do! — or comparing your version to the other party’s version manually.
The benefits extend beyond drafting. You’ll have time to innovate in other areas of the department. You’ll more tightly align your activities to the business’s goals. You’ll devote more time discussing strategy and legal implications with your business partners. You might find ways to reduce your external spend or stay current on compliance issues that are likely to affect your organization.
When you introduce AI-powered legal drafting into your practice, you may just find that you can’t work without it. You may wonder how you managed the rote work of editing and redlining for so long — and you may see quite clearly why technology can’t replace you. Your input is essential for good output; your expertise and wisdom are necessary for a quality final product. When you spend less time searching for clauses, you’ll realize you’re giving more time to the steps that require your expertise. That’s a win for you, your team, and your business.
Take the next step today. Explore how CoCounsel Drafting can help you save time and deliver great results for your organization.
A trusted generative AI assistant that’s with you every step of the way