5 Ways To Utilize AI For Legal Documents In 2024

Content

• AI Legal Document Generation
• AI Legal Document Review
• AI Legal Document Analysis
• AI Legal Document Comparison
• AI Legal Document Summaries
• What are the benefits of using AI tools for legal documents?
• What are the best practices for using AI for legal documents?
• Ensure data privacy and security
• Integrate AI with existing systems
• Legal oversight
• Conclusion

Legal industry professionals spend a lot of time drafting, reviewing, and analyzing documents. These administrative tasks divert effort and resources away from higher-value legal activities. Productivity suffers, particularly when professions rely on traditional and manual methods to carry out these processes. 

Lawyers are searching for methods beyond automation to make their jobs easier. They don’t want to put in hours creating briefs, contracts, or agreements when they could be focusing on high-value functions. It is one of the reasons why AI is gaining traction in the legal sector. You can’t expect artificial intelligence to make sharp decisions like lawyers. Nonetheless, they help experts make even complex and drawn-out legal documents simpler to draft, review, and analyze.

1. AI Legal Document Generation

The primary, hefty task in the legal sector is drafting compliant content. Creating a document from scratch requires a lot of labor, administrative work, and research. Moreover, the legal content has to stay compliant with changing laws, organizational standards, and business practices. Legal personnel don’t always have the resources and time to devote to this.

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools utilize machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to produce legal documents automatically. Lawyers can use prompts and queries to generate contracts, leases, briefs, and wills. These tools learn from human feedback to create drafts within seconds. It can assist in enhancing any legal document's language, structure, and clarity. AI can suggest or rewrite clauses, determine compliance, and ensure competency.

Therefore, anyone can use AI-generated content to self-serve contracts. It saves time and ensures consistency and accuracy in document generation. Businesses or legal teams can generate countless legal agreements in minutes without compromising quality or legality.

2. AI Legal Document Review

Lengthy and complex documents are an unavoidable part of the legal sector. Also, organizations often depend on third-party contracts to carry out business transactions. Legal experts must carefully evaluate the content in these situations to look for risks, unfavorable language, or non-compliance. Manually reviewing documents can be time-consuming and tedious for legal personnel. 

AI review tools utilize machine learning algorithms to analyze legal documents and identify provisions, clauses, and potential issues. They can significantly reduce the time and effort businesses put into reviewing large volumes of contracts or agreements. AI legal document review can quickly identify any mistakes or discrepancies that arise from manual procedures. 

3. AI Legal Document Analysis

Legal documents hold a wealth of information for concerned parties. But given their length and intricacies, individuals or businesses aren’t always well-versed in what goes on with all their contracts, agreements, or briefs. As a result, individuals may overlook pertinent information or inferences that could aid them in making wise choices down the road. That is why document analysis is a top priority in the legal sector.

AI tools, regardless of size or document type, can extract insights, trends, and patterns within minutes. They use legal text language, context, and structure to predict outcomes. So, companies can do due diligence even when dealing with large amounts of content. AI contract analytics provides lawyers and legal professionals with valuable insights in a fraction of the time it would take to do it manually.

4. AI Legal Document Comparison

Legal professionals deal with an absurd amount of paperwork at any given time. Comparing multiple versions of legal documents to identify changes and discrepancies can eat up their valuable time and resources. Furthermore, when going through the content by hand, errors are likely and things get lost. In such cases, AI-powered tools can simplify the process by automatically comparing documents and highlighting differences.

They can save valuable time and reduce the risk of human error. It allows attorneys to quickly compare contracts from third parties with their standard templates. Consequently, they can refrain from accepting unfavorable conditions when dealing with vendors, partners, or suppliers. It also assists legal practitioners in assessing their progress from the initial draft following negotiations. They can track revisions and ensure accuracy in content.

5. AI Legal Document Summaries

Making sense of legal documents in a single reading can be a challenge for anyone. However, lawyers and attorneys require the information within minutes to take prompt action. AI-powered tools provide a quick overview of complex legal texts. saving time and effort for legal professionals. These summaries can help lawyers identify key points and crucial information at a glance.

AI summaries save time and effort, enabling faster decision-making. Additionally, they can ensure consistency in document analysis and reduce the risk of human error. Automating the summarization process allows legal professionals to focus on more strategic tasks. It enhances overall productivity, even with large volumes of legal documents.

What are the benefits of using AI tools for legal documents?

Quickly grasping the essence of a document is a necessity in the legal sector. It provides lawyers, legal counsel, and organizations with a competitive edge in the business world. They can make informed decisions and streamline their workflows. Some other benefits of using AI tools for legal documents include: 

Increased efficiency and productivity

AI tools can automate repetitive tasks such as document review, contract analysis, and due diligence, saving time and effort for legal professionals. By reducing manual labor, AI streamlines processes and allows legal teams to focus on higher-value tasks.

Enhanced accuracy and compliance

AI tools are designed to analyze vast amounts of data quickly and accurately, minimizing the risk of human error in legal document management. By leveraging AI algorithms, legal professionals can ensure compliance with regulations, identify potential risks, and make informed decisions based on accurate insights from the data.

Cost-effectiveness

By automating document review and analysis, AI tools help legal firms reduce operational costs associated with manual labor. Legal professionals can handle a larger volume of documents in less time, leading to cost savings for clients and improved profitability for the firm.

Improved decision-making

AI tools provide legal professionals with valuable insights and predictive analytics that can aid in decision-making processes. By extracting key information from legal documents, AI tools help identify patterns, trends, and potential risks, empowering legal teams to make informed decisions that align with their clients' goals.

What are the best practices for using AI for legal documents?

While AI, ML, and NLP are natural progressions in legal work, they do pose some concerns. Legal documents are notorious for their complex and intricate language. The use of technical terms, jargon, and specific terminology can pose a significant challenge for AI algorithms. That is why professionals must do their due diligence while adopting AI to streamline legal processes.

• Ensure data privacy and security

One of the primary concerns when using AI for legal documents is data privacy and security. Legal documents often contain sensitive and confidential information that must be protected at all costs. AI systems require access to vast amounts of data to learn and improve their performance, raising potential risks of data breaches or unauthorized access. Legal firms must ensure that their AI tools comply with strict data protection regulations to safeguard client information.

Or they can make use of Dock 365’s advanced AI capabilities. It is an all-in-one contract management platform built within your existing Microsoft 365 environment. So all the processes and data stay within your SharePoint account. Businesses and lawyers don’t have to trust third-party sites with sensitive information even while using AI tools. Dock enables users to draft, review, and analyze contracts using OpenAI within Microsoft’s secure storage.

• Integrate AI with existing systems

Another challenge of using AI for legal documents is the need to switch between different platforms and tools. Legal professionals may use multiple AI applications for various tasks, such as contract drafting, negotiations, and performance management. Switching between these platforms can be time-consuming and disruptive, leading to inefficiencies in workflow. Thus, AI tool integration capability with existing systems is a top priority for legal professionals.

Dock 365 offers a one-stop solution to streamline the contract lifecycle, from intake to negotiation to signing. Moreover, the platform comes with AI capabilities, enabling legal professionals to utilize it for document generation, review, and analysis. Thus, there’s no need for users to switch between multiple platforms to perform legal tasks. 

• Legal oversight

AI systems are designed to assist legal professionals in analyzing and processing large volumes of documents quickly and accurately. However, the lack of human oversight of AI-generated results can result in non-compliance and litigation. Dock 365 contract management software comes with AI capabilities and ensures legal oversight throughout the process.

The automated review and approval workflows route AI results to relevant legal counsel. They can verify the accuracy of the results and make any necessary corrections or adjustments to ensure that the legal documents are error-free. Also, they can establish AI-generated results that meet all the necessary regulations and standards.

Conclusion

As AI continues to evolve and improve, legal professionals need to embrace this technology and incorporate it into their workflows. It can review, analyze, and summarize vast amounts of data quickly and accurately. This can significantly reduce the contract lifecycle, freeing up valuable resources for more strategic and high-level tasks. Moreover, AI can help to identify potential risks and inconsistencies in contracts. 

However, it's crucial to remember that while AI can enhance the efficiency and accuracy of legal work, it is not a replacement for human expertise. That is why Dock 365 provides AI legal assistants with room for oversight. Schedule a demo today to see our contract management software in action.

You can read more about Dock’s AI capabilities here.