AI Tools for Lawyers: Improving Efficiency and Productivity in Law Firms

AI tools for lawyers can help law firms streamline processes, increase productivity, and reduce costs. But, with so many AI tools available, how can you choose the best options for your firm?

Here, we explore some of the most widely-used AI legal tools that legal professionals in Australia and the rest of APAC can use to improve law firm operations—and how to choose the best options for your practice.

Summary

• AI-powered legal tools are here to stay; 79% of legal professionals surveyed in our most recent Legal Trends Report cited AI use in some capacity at their law firm.
• Clients want to work with firms that use AI automation solutions.
• Uncover 8 powerful legal generative AI tools that can aid legal professionals, including ChatGPT, Manage AI, (formerly Clio Duo), CoCounsel, and more.

Read on to explore our curated list of the most talked-about AI tools that may be useful for legal work.

11 Legal AI tools for lawyers 

AI is a complex and rapidly-evolving science in itself, with new uses and advances made almost daily. As part of this larger technology industry, lawyer AI offers a multitude of opportunities and considerations for the legal profession. 

As the legal industry works towards understanding the full scope of possibilities and considerations for AI, you can consider several powerful AI-driven tools to help your practice law more efficiently and become more client-centric. 

Here are some of the most popular and highly anticipated AI automation solutions law firms are using right now.

1. Manage AI

Manage AI is powered by the latest Microsoft Azure OpenAI GPT-4 technology and is fully integrated into Clio’s legal practice management system. By using only your firm’s data, it delivers precise, contextually relevant insights tailored to your work.

With Manage AI, you can:

• Find answers faster: Extract key details from documents and case files in seconds.
• Stay on top of tasks and deadlines: Prioritise urgent tasks and deadlines with smart recommendations
• Manage tasks efficiently: Create tasks, calendar events and add time entries and notes from anywhere in Clio’s case management platform
• Track time: Receive suggestions for unlogged notes, calls, and emails.
• Respond faster: AI-generated emails and text messages help you reply to clients quickly.

All this, without compromising your firm’s privacy and security.

Discover how Manage AI can help you make the most of your workday today.

Curious about other legal-specific AI tools and how Manage AI stacks up? Check out this guide: Navigating the Legal AI Ecosystem: Tools, Trends, and Adoption.

2. CoCounsel

CoCounsel is a large language model powered by OpenAI. This AI legal assistant tool is knowledgeable, reliable, and secure enough to support the practice of law.

What sets this tool apart from other large language models is that it was trained for the law. Attorneys and AI specialists have rigorously and repeatedly tested this OpenAI-powered solution tailored to lawyers’ needs and reliable and secure enough to meet the highest bar.

What’s more: CoCounsel uses dedicated servers to access GPT-4, meaning your data isn’t sent to “train” the model as part of publicly accessible knowledge.

3. Harvey AI

Using a mix of different types of AI—natural language processing and machine learning—Harvey AI is an AI-powered legal research tool that’s touted as “unprecedented legal AI.” Similar to the AI bot ChatGPT, Harvey AI is built on a version of Open.AI’s GPT AI, while also using general legal data (like case law) and a law firm’s own work products and templates to specifically support legal work. 

Though it’s still in beta, Harvey AI will be able to assist firms with tasks like contract analysis, due diligence, litigation, and regulatory compliance, while also helping to generate data-based insights, recommendations, and predictions.

4. ChatGPT

We can’t forget the ever-popular generative AI tool.

ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot from OpenAI that responds to open-ended text queries with paragraphs of text-written answers. It was trained through reinforcement learning from human feedback. 

This generative AI tool can be used by lawyers to create legal documents, such as contracts, leases, and wills, conduct legal research, and so much more. You can also create your own GPT, a personalised version of ChatGPT tailored for specific tasks, industries, or user needs using custom instructions, files, and tools—no coding required. Check out our AI for Lawyers GPT.

Just remember: While innovative and useful, generative AI tools like these can “hallucinate,” making up false information in their responses. And you should always be mindful of the information you are feeding it and ensure you’re fact-checking with other sources. 

5. Diligen 

Reviewing contracts can be time-consuming and tedious, but Diligen helps make the review process more efficient. Using Diligen’s machine learning-powered analysis, you can conduct due diligence to review contracts for specific clauses, provisions, or changes and quickly output a convenient summary. 

Additionally, Diligen incorporates AI for legal documents, enabling lawyers to automate contract drafting and clause identification with greater accuracy. And, to further streamline your workflows and review contracts even faster, lawyers and legal professionals can also import documents directly between Diligen and Clio’s document management software for efficient document organisation.

6. Auto-GPT

A new technology (it was launched in March 2023), Auto-GPT is one of the latest iterations of AI, described as “an experimental open-source attempt to make GPT-4 fully autonomous.” Put simply, the technology uses OpenAI’s text-generating AI models (mainly GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) paired with a companion bot to respond to queries and “think through” complex tasks “autonomously.”

As a potential AI tool for lawyers, Auto-GPT could, hypothetically, assist lawyers with creating their legal strategy in response to a lawyer providing a specific “goal.” In this speculative example, Auto-GPT could theoretically respond to a human prompt to perform tasks, make decisions, and “think through” the strategy—ultimately offering specific insights for the lawyer to consider.

7. NEXLAW AI

Nexlaw AI is designed to automate routine processes so that lawyers can free up their time for higher-value advisory and advocacy work. It leverages generative AI, machine learning and natural language processing to enhance efficiency, accuracy and productivity. This allows lawyers to process large volumes of legal documents, extract key facts and derive actionable insights within minutes, rather than hours or days.

The platform offers a suite of legal tools including advanced case law search across AU and global jurisdictions, case summarisation and document review, automated contract drafting and compliance checks, litigation analytics, trial preparation support (Trial Copilot), and legislative and regulatory monitoring. Furthermore it ensures client privacy by storing confidential data securely in the cloud (AWS) with robust encryption and granular access controls.

8. Luminance

Luminance is an advanced AI platform built specifically for lawyers to make reviewing contracts, leases, and other legal documents easier and faster. Developed by experts from the University of Cambridge, it uses a combination of supervised and unsupervised machine learning to read, understand and analyse complex legal texts.

Luminance learns from the actions of lawyers as they interact with the documents to highlight relevant sections, make helpful comparisons, and flag unusual or risky provisions. It supports teamwork by allowing document review projects to be divided and assigned with real-time tracking of progress and insights.

This allows contract review lawyers to handle high volumes of documents with significant time savings, while mitigating risks and streamlining costs.

9. Everlaw

Everlaw is a cloud-native AI-powered platform designed to help legal teams manage the e-discovery process and handle huge volumes of documents efficiently and securely. The platform covers the entire e-discovery lifecycle from data ingestion and processing to document review, analytics, case-building and trial preparation.

Its generative AI-powered Everlaw AI assistant automates document review, generates summaries, provides citations, and builds case narratives. Lawyers benefit from reduced manual work and a speedier review process. The collaboration tools allow legal teams to work together seamlessly while the UK-based infrastructure and G-Cloud status ensure compliance with UK’s strict data privacy and sovereignty requirements.

10. Leap AI

Leap AI is designed to help lawyers work faster and more accurately by providing them with LawY, an AI legal research assistant. Lawyers can ask it questions and receive instant AI-generated answers backed by references to case law and legislation.

There are a number of other complementary tools. Matter AI analyses correspondence and documents and delivers instant insights. The LEAP Generator accelerates document drafting with AI and templates. AutoTime automatically captures billable activity in the background to improve billing accuracy. 

Taken together, these tools handle research, drafting, admin and billing allowing lawyers to focus on advising clients and growing their practice.

11. Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot offers lawyers an AI-powered assistant built into the existing Microsoft 365 ecosystem of Word, Outlook, Teams, Excel and more. Copilot can whip up first drafts of contracts, letters or legal memos from prompts and summarise lengthy documents in seconds. 

There are a number of other features. Copilot can search through databases, emails and saved documents to pull up key precedents, statutes or key pieces of information. Dense and indecipherable legalese can be summarised in plain English for clients and non-legal colleagues to understand. Admin tasks and even client management can be automated. 

Lastly, Copilot keeps all data secure and private, following the same permissions and compliance rules specified by the account’s Microsoft 365 settings.

Benefits of AI tools in your law firm

• Boosts productivity: AI tools can be used to automate routine and repetitive tasks, which improves your firm’s workflow.
• Saves time: AI can analyse and process more information than a human can, in a matter of seconds, saving you precious time. And that time saved can be passed along to your clients.
• Produces higher quality work: Humans can be error-prone, especially when doing repetitive tasks. AI can produce work that is consistent, such as review documents for inconsistencies or missing clauses.
• Improves client experiences: When you’re free from low-level tasks, you can spend more time doing legal work, which translates into building better experiences, serving more clients, and running a client-centered law firm.

Remember: AI will never replace the judgment and experience of lawyers. But AI tools for lawyers can be leveraged to quickly sift and analyze big data, automate routine tasks, and produce high quality work, which enables lawyers to focus on what matters most: their clients.

You can read more about AI in our resource hub, AI for lawyers, which includes a post about AI tools for legal research.

How to choose the right legal AI tool for your firm

When considering integrating an AI tool into your practice, it’s important to choose a solution that fits your firm’s specific needs. Here are key factors to consider when selecting legal AI tools for your law firm.

Evaluate security 

As a lawyer, you handle highly confidential and sensitive client information. It’s essential that any legal AI tool you adopt meets the highest standards of data security and privacy. Look for providers that implement robust internal controls and partner with trusted external security services. Ensure the solution adheres to industry-leading security protocols and complies with relevant data protection regulations.

Identify the specific needs of your firm

While the rise of legal AI tools is exciting, not every firm needs to adopt every new solution—and implementing too many tools without a clear plan is likely not the most effective strategy.

Instead, audit your firm for specific areas and tasks that are the most time-consuming and tedious (like manual contract review, legal research or document drafting) and then look for potential AI-powered solutions that can help you augment those tasks.

Consider the user interface and ease of use

An AI tool can be incredibly innovative, but consider the end user, who is often a non-technical person. If the application is complex or its interface too difficult for legal professionals at your firm to navigate and use reliably, it may not be the best fit. 

Does it come with integrations?

Another factor that can make AI tools even more useful for lawyers is integrations. If a potential AI tool already integrates with your legal case management system it can add further efficiencies to your workflows, such as Manage AI. v works inside of Clio Manage. This ensures security, and fits seamlessly into existing workflows.

Consider the vendor’s reputation and support

Beyond just looking at the features of a specific AI tool, it’s a good idea to also evaluate the vendor. How long have they been in business for? Do they have a less-than-favorable reputation? Any news of security breaches or data leaks? What is their customer support like? An amazing AI software that lacks adequate client support may result in lost time and frustration for your law firm. 

Is it AI hype?

Another good question to ask yourself: Is this a tool that will actually benefit your firm or is it part of the AI hype machine? 

We recommend looking for solutions where the underlying concept is easy to understand. It’s also good to consider how long they’ve been in business for; are they jumping on the AI bandwagon or have they been around for much longer? This is where doing research and talking to sales teams and asking every question and use case imaginable will help you get a solid understanding of what you stand to gain.  

Final thoughts on AI tools for lawyers

AI is not a replacement for lawyers, but the right AI-powered legal research tools can help lawyers work more efficiently and productively while reducing costs. Always evaluate any potential AI software to ensure it’s a good fit before embracing it, and remember that the right AI tools, used responsibly, can help law firms stay competitive and provide better service to their clients.

Ready to elevate your firm’s operations? Meet Manage AI—your AI-powered partner that transforms everything from planning your day to summarising cases before calls. Let Manage AI take care of it, empowering you to focus on the work that only you can do. Book a demo today to see how Manage AI can accelerate the way you work.