Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the fastest-growing technology sectors across industries today. The first AI applications focused on workflow management and big data; however, within the last five years, the legal AI landscape has expanded exponentially. There is a pervasive excitement about the new possibilities for contract management afforded by AI-powered innovations.

Excitement is not the only response to accelerating legal AI implementations, though. Some lawyers and legal staff are concerned about how these emergent technologies might threaten their careers. The truth, however, is that the gains in accuracy, efficiency, and speed provided by an AI-powered solution can free lawyers to concentrate on higher-level, strategic goals. 

Let’s take a closer look at how AI is innovating corporate legal departments and even assisting in onboarding new attorneys and legal staff.

Recent Advances in the Corporate Legal AI Landscape

Recent technological innovations have enabled legal AI tools to increase accuracy and speed in automated contract review and negotiation processes. As a result, platforms like LexCheck are changing the legal AI landscape by accelerating the contract review process through features like clause extraction and contract risk analysis. 

AI optimized for contract review and negotiation enables:

Risk Analysis and Context-Based Suggestions.

By comparing agreements with a company’s digital playbook, the AI can flag outlier clauses, vague language, and potentially risky provisions. By attaching a low, medium, or high-risk indicator to flagged contract language, reviewers can easily determine if an escalation is needed. With automated risk mitigation strategies and context-based suggestions for playbook compliance, corporate legal teams can save countless hours of confusion and back-and-forth emails while ensuring favorable negotiation positions.

Enhanced Training and Knowledge Retention.

Onboarding legal staff is expensive—and it’s even more expensive when the new team member changes positions or leaves. It can be difficult for corporate legal departments to function efficiently if they are caught in a continuous training loop. Companies that offer an AI contract platform can exceed the expectations of teams eager to work in a tech-enabled and forward-thinking legal department. Instead of continually having to train a continuous cycle of rotating junior legal resources on the company’s negotiation playbook (which is very expensive), new team members can immediately access clear, concise, actionable information flawlessly delivered by the AI which requires only one training cycle. 

Will Legal AI Replace Lawyers?

It’s a common misconception that AI will replace lawyers. Instead, the work is simply evolving to take advantage of the AI’s ability to relieve legal teams of certain time consuming and routine tasks—especially when the task involves locating and extracting clauses from enormous datasets, compiling aggregate data statistics, or automating reminders to review contracts.

How AI Is Changing Corporate Legal Departments

• For new associates coming in: Training has never been more straightforward. Rather than agonizing over wording, comparing drafts with the company playbook and best practices guides, and asking senior-level attorneys for help, legal associates can use the company’s AI platform to perform the initial contract review. The AI automatically compares the draft to the playbook, past contracts, and best practice examples. The legal associate can then choose to accept suggested changes or revise. And as they review the AI’s markup and revision suggestions, new associates can learn the company’s standard positions while avoiding exposing the company to unnecessary risk. 
  
  
• For experienced contract law attorneys: Instead of spending copious hours bogged down in routine reviews and double-checking junior associate work, experienced attorneys will be able to spend more of their time working on client relationships, dealing with high-level escalations, and occasionally renegotiating high-value renewal contracts. 

Early adopters have found that they can complete more contracts in less time. Agreements that used to require days or even weeks to review and negotiate can now be completed in less than five minutes. The increased efficiency allows corporate legal departments to accelerate contact approval and increase the total volume of negotiated contracts.