The practice of law is an area with many peculiarities where nuances matter. That's why it was not one of the first areas to embrace AI tools. However, since the emergence of ChatGPT, which kicked off this race, several artificial intelligence services have emerged that are geared towards the legal world.
These are tools for searching legal documents, reviewing contracts, and even creating text drafts. We have already discussed how lawyers can use ChatGPT, but other services specialize in the legal field. Some of them even use the same engine or model that the OpenAI application uses.
Let us take a look at some of the AI tools designed to improve the productivity of a lawyer or law firm.
Casetext
This platform belongs to Thomson Reuters, one of whose main business areas is the legal sector. In 2023, the company acquired the startup Casetext, which offered AI services for lawyers, for 650 million dollars and integrated it into its portfolio. It is a comprehensive tool that helps lawyers with legal searches find the legislation required for a particular case or the applicable regulations and laws.
Casetext's main service is CoCounsel, an AI model that acts as a legal assistant. You can ask it to review a document, perform a legal search, or prepare questions to identify a person associated with a case. CoCounsel is based on the same technology (GPT-4) used in the premium version of ChatGPT and also allows the analysis of contracts, the organization of information on a timeline, or the summary of texts.
Lex Machina
Another well-known tool in the field of legal practice is Lex Machina. It also belongs to a larger group, in this case, LexisNexis, a company that focuses on information analysis. Therefore, as expected, the AI service can be used to analyze all kinds of legal documents, from judgments to testimonies or laws.
In addition, Lex Machina makes it possible to find certain trends in the behavior of lawyers, judges, or courts through comprehensive data analysis. In this way, important factors can be identified that can help in the preparation of the defense. This AI tool is primarily informative.
Lawgeex
This tool is designed to analyze and review contracts. Lawgeex aims to automate this task as much as possible. Its main customers are the legal departments of companies that sign highly complex contracts due to their business activities. However, it can be used by any legal professional, especially if contract review is an important part of their work.
Lawgeex enables the integration of knowledge so that we can incorporate both a company's internal policies and the legislation to which it is subject. On this basis, Lawgeex can analyze which contract clauses we should rewrite. It also ensures that different contracts for the same client are consistent. This saves time that is often spent in tedious hours of review.
Interlocking
This tool goes a step further in supporting contracts and due diligence processes. While the previous tool was used to analyze the document and highlight parts to be reviewed by the lawyers, Latch also modifies clauses and makes suggestions for the document. It helps to summarize certain parts of an agreement and creates texts in a simplified language that can be presented to the client if they are not a legal expert.
One of the advantages of Latch is that it integrates with Microsoft Word, so all the support is done in this program, which is used in most offices. However, it does not work with other applications, such as Google Docs.
Harvey
The developer of this tool is a start-up company of the same name, Harvey, and it is one of the most popular in the legal field. Not so much in terms of its services, as these are still in beta and only available to a limited number of customers. But because of the enthusiasm generated by the capital injection it has received: 80 million dollars with participation from OpenAI.
Harvey has set itself the goal of developing a complete assistant for lawyers. Its artificial intelligence, also developed on GPT-4, allows it to review documents, answer lawyers' questions about a particular case, search for precedents, or generate text to rewrite parts of a contract. It is a versatile tool whose possibilities have not yet been fully exploited. So far, only a few customers, such as the law firm Allen & Overy or the consulting firm PwC, have access to this service.
Relativity
Relativity's task is to automate the search for information, but it also supports the review of documents and the creation of drafts. One of the advantages of Relativity is that it integrates data collection from different sources. This means that important details can be extracted from various legal and other documents, but also from social networks and other areas of the internet.
Relativity also enables the translation of documents into your language and the generation of text from the information obtained during the search. The verification of documents and the extraction of key data are further automatic services.