Lawyers tend to be the butt of jokes about not being human, so perhaps it’s no surprise that AI has been widely embraced in the legal world. Is it going to replace lawyers? Not yet, but AI is automating a lot of the backroom and behind the scenes work of lawyers, from receptions to research and redlining contracts.

Here are 10 tips for lawyers who want to use AI.

Research Assistance

Research is fundamental to legal work: digging into databases to find precedents, filings, and judgements. Harvey.ai can help: this uses Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on huge legal databases like EDGAR and US Case Law.

In Summary

If you’ve bene handed a big pile of documents to explore and summarize, AI can help. Anthropic has a good guide to how to use their Claude AI system to summarize piles of documents, and how to tweak their system to get the best summary and analysis of the documents. It’s not a simple process, but if you have the technical knowledge to make it work, it might be the best way to get a lot of documents sumarized quickly.

Draft Contracts

Creating a contract is often a case of cut & pasting from prior work, but AI can make that process easier. A contract platform like Ironclad can use AI to automate this process, creating a draft contract from previous documents, then managing the changes that come with the negotiation process.

Redline Contracts

If you are checking a contract for a client, it is all about going through the details and working out what needs to be removed, or redlined. Spellbook can automate this process, highlighting the details of a contract that are likely to be problematic and suggesting changes based on previously negotiated contracts and specific guidance.

An AI Co-Counsel

CoCounsel from Thompson Reuters is claimed to be the first AI legal assistant. It’s built on the GPT-4 AI system from OpenAI, but tweaked to work on legal sources. It’s also completely separate from the main OpenAI systems, so it keeps documents you upload separate and confidential.

AI Receptionists

Big law firms can afford to have fully staffed receptions that can deal with new clients, incoming queries, and other stuff. Smith.ai might be an interesting option for smaller firms: it combines AI with real people to offer reception, scheduling and payment services without the overheads of running your own reception.

Are AI Lawyers On The Way?

Will AI replace lawyers? Probably not: there will always be a place for human intuition in interpreting and using the law. However, AI has already replaced some of the simpler aspects of legal work. The service DoNotPay uses AI to handle tasks like disputing parking tickets, negotiating car leases, and canceling contracts. Is this the shape of things to come? Perhaps, but there are still a few roadblocks on the way: The service was fined by the FTC for failing to back up its claim that it could replace the expertise of a human lawyer. That was more of a trade dispute, though: The FTC fined them because they didn’t substantiate the claim, not that the claim itself was false.

Will The Real Lawyer Please Stand Up

The DoNotPay story doesn’t end there, though: A small law firm in Chicago filed suit against DoNotPay, claiming that their work was “an infringement upon the rights of those who are properly licensed,[including] attorneys and law firms.” The judge dismissed the case on the basis that the law firm had not demonstrated how they had been damaged by DoNotPay. The law firm has not filed an updated suit, so that suit has been dismissed. I doubt it will be the last one of its type, though.

AI Celebrities

The UK TV presenter Sir David Attenborough isn’t happy: He said he was deeply disturbed by an AI clone of his voice, built from his voiceover work on hundreds of documentaries. I don’t know which AI voice cloning site was used, but I found at least one directly using his name to sell their AI voice service. Sir Davis certainly isn’t the only one: The legal representatives of many celebrities are working to quash this kind of activity.

Automate Debt Collection

Winning a case is one thing, but getting paid is another. AI can help, though, as services like Simplifai use AI to automate many parts of the process. They don’t just spam the debtor with AI junk, though: a human reviews the debt and sets the strategy that will be most successful, then uses AI to automate the process.