Looking toward the legal landscape of the future, Thomson Reuters concluded that “much like email changed the way we do business every day, artificial intelligence (AI) will become ubiquitous—an indispensable assistant to practically every lawyer. Those that do not adopt and embrace the change will get left behind.”  The future is arriving rapidly with company spending on AI forecasted to reach $342 billion this year, increasing more than 600% over the last five years alone. 

So it’s not a matter of “if” but “when” and “how” corporate legal departments will adopt this technology. Below, we’ll examine the top fears and misconceptions attorneys have about the intersection of legal tech and AI while providing a few salient facts that may help balance your perspective. 

Top 4 Fears and Misconceptions about Legal Tech and AI

Anna Lozynski is a Melbourne-based consultant, changemaker, and author of Legally Innovative: How To Maximise Your Legal W.O.W. She recently released industry polling results compiled from hundreds of attorney surveys that reveal their top four concerns about legal tech and AI. 

#1: 30% of Lawyers Surveyed Believe AI Is Difficult to Implement.

Fact: An AI-powered contract platform like LexCheck requires only a couple dozen agreements and your company playbook to train the AI. Platform onboarding is intuitive, and submitting a contract for review is as easy as sending an email or uploading the agreement to the platform. Within minutes, the AI returns a reviewed and redlined agreement. 

#2: 29% of Lawyers Surveyed Worry AI is Inaccurate.

Fact: AI is evaluated according to an "F1 Score" that tracks precision and recall. LexCheck’s fully-trained and deployed AI delivers higher F1 scores than human reviewers. As a result, our users experience significant consistency gains across routine contract reviews and negotiations. 

#3: 23% of Lawyers Surveyed Fear AI Will Replace Them.

Fact: Instead of replacing lawyers, the AI can serve lawyers by automating routine contract review and negotiation. Lawyers can prioritize difficult renegotiations and escalations and concentrate on high-level creative and strategic tasks.

#4: 17% of Lawyers Surveyed Believe AI Will Be Too Expensive For Them. 

Fact: Building an entire AI protocol from scratch would be prohibitively expensive for most legal departments. Fortunately, AI Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is available, and implementing legal tech and AI can be more affordable than hiring paralegals or outsourcing alternative legal service providers.

Introducing LexCheck: An AI-Powered Contract Negotiation Platform

LexCheck is the only company in the world that has cracked the code and enabled a practical approach for AI-powered automation in contract review and negotiation. Founded by University of Pennsylvania law professor and fellow at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, Gary Sangha, LexCheck is known by top-tier corporate legal departments and procurement teams as the standard for automated contract review and risk analysis. 

Because its AI adapts to the legal department’s unique playbook, LexCheck can return fully-reviewed and redlined agreements with context-based suggestions in minutes. The legal department can then complete its analysis of the findings, accept the changes, or simply attach the suggestions to the contracts before forwarding the revised agreement to the counterparty. This improves the speed, efficiency, and accuracy of legal departments that handle contract negotiations for frequently used business agreements like Non-Disclosure Agreements, Software License Agreements, and Master Service Agreements.