Artificial Intelligence in Legal Technology: Automation of Legal Research and Contract Review

Artificial Intelligence in Legal Technology: Automation of Legal Research and Contract Review

Manual procedures, a large amount of paperwork, and time-consuming research have long been the foundation of the legal sector. Lawyers and legal experts often dedicate many hours to reading contracts, studying case law, and ensuring that their clients are in conformity with the law. Nonetheless, the legal profession is undergoing a transformation as a result of the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI), which is making the sector more efficient, cost-effective, and accessible to a wider range of people.

Automation of legal research and assessment of contracts are two of the most significant uses of artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of legal technology. The manner in which organizations, law firms, and legal departments do business is being transformed as a result of these developments.

The Growth of Artificial Intelligence in Legal Technology

Due to its capacity to rapidly and precisely interpret enormous quantities of unstructured data, such as contracts, case law, and legislation, artificial intelligence has become more popular in the legal industry. Artificial intelligence systems are able to comprehend legal jargon, pinpoint the most important facts, and deliver insights that can be put into action due to the capabilities of machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and sophisticated analytics.

The fact that artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools always evolve by learning from new information and data, which makes them more and more helpful as time goes on, sets them apart from conventional legal software.

Artificial intelligence in the review of contracts
What Exactly Does AI Contract Review Entail?

Artificial intelligence (AI) contract review, which employs natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) algorithms, is used to automatically assess legal agreements, detect potential hazards, highlight important sections, and guarantee that rules are being followed.

The following are some of the key features of artificial intelligence (AI) contract review:

• Clause Identification: Automatically pulls crucial terms such as termination, confidentiality, liability, and arbitration.
• Risk Detection: Highlights phrases that are of high risk or are uncommon for evaluation by an attorney.
• Compliance checking guarantees that contracts are in accordance with both the internal rules of the company and the exterior requirements of the government.
• Comparison and Standardization: This feature compares contracts against templates and standards that are commonly used in the business.
• Automating repetitive tasks helps to reduce the amount of time spent on manual document examination.

Advantages

• More rapid completion of contract discussions.
• The reduction of legal risks by precise analysis
• Substantial reductions in expenses for companies and legal firms
• Liberating attorneys from mundane activities and allowing them to concentrate on making strategic decisions.

Artificial Intelligence in Legal Research Automation
What Does It Mean to Automate the Legal Research Process?

When Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used to automate legal research, the process entails utilizing AI to filter through case law, legislation, regulations, and legal commentary in order to offer attorneys with information that is relevant, accurate, and up-to-date.

Essential Characteristics

• Case Law Search: Precedents that are pertinent to a particular case are rapidly discovered using artificial intelligence (AI).
• Predictive analytics is a technique that uses past verdicts to forecast the results of future cases.
• Semantic search is a kind of search that relies on understanding the context and meaning of queries rather than relying on keyword matching.
• Summarization is the process of condensing long decisions and documents into briefs that are short.
• Cross-Jurisdictional Research: This kind of research involves the analysis of legal information across many jurisdictions at the same time.

Advantages

• Conserves hours of time that would otherwise be spent on laborious research.
• Reduces the amount of human mistake, which results in greater accuracy.
• Offers attorneys a more in-depth understanding that may be used to develop more effective litigation tactics.
• By lowering the cost of legal research, it improves people’s ability to get justice.

Examples of Artificial Intelligence in Legal Technology as They Exist in the Real World

• Kira Systems specializes in contract analysis that is driven by artificial intelligence for mergers, acquisitions, and business transactions.
• LawGeex offers automated contract evaluation services for commercial agreements, with a high degree of accuracy.
• ROSS Intelligence, which was based on IBM Watson, provided artificial intelligence (AI)-powered legal research services until the year 2021. In doing so, it paved the ground for the development of current legal research tools.
• Luminance: Employs artificial intelligence in order to examine contracts, pinpoint potential dangers, and expedite the process of doing due diligence.
• Casetext (CoCounsel): This tool makes use of big language models in order to automate legal research, authoring, and document review.

Difficulties that arise from the use of artificial intelligence in legal technology

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to bring about significant change, but it also presents a number of challenges:

• Data Privacy: Sensitive information about clients must be secured.
• Bias in Artificial Intelligence Models: Results that are skewed may be caused by training data of poor quality.
• Worries about Accuracy: Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to misread legal wording that is complicated or unclear.
• Resistance to Adoption: There are legal professionals who continue to be dubious when it comes to depending on technology for making legal decisions.
• Uncertainty in Regulation: The legal profession mandates that artificial intelligence (AI) technologies adhere to high ethical norms.

The Future of Artificial Intelligence in Legal Technology

There will be even greater levels of artificial intelligence (AI) integration in the legal technology industry moving forward:

• Workflows that are Completely Automated: From the initial writing of contracts to the completion of compliance checks
• Litigation support that is powered by artificial intelligence (AI): instruments that are able to anticipate the outcomes of cases with an ever-increasing degree of precision.
• Smart contracts are agreements that are enabled by blockchain technology that self-execute under artificial intelligence supervision.
• Platforms for Global Legal Research: Artificial intelligence platforms that give updates in real-time across several jurisdictions.
• Collaboration between attorneys and AI: Artificial intelligence will enhance the job of attorneys, rather than replace them, by allowing them to concentrate on activities that are of high importance.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the legal business by automating repetitive, time-consuming operations such as contract analysis and legal research. Lawyers and companies may decrease the amount of time they spend, lower their expenses, limit risks, and enhance their decision-making processes by using artificial intelligence.

The use of artificial intelligence in legal technology is happening at an increasingly rapid pace, despite the fact that there are still obstacles to be overcome in terms of privacy, prejudice, and trust. The legal profession of the future will be more efficient, data-driven, and client-focused, according to what we may expect. This will be made possible by the partnership of human competence and artificial intelligence.