Category: Artificial Intelligence

Introducing ReviewAI for Generative AI-Driven Contract Review 

A New Era of Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM): Quickly and Accurately Draft, Review, Redline, and Edit All Types of Contracts in Minutes 

The legal landscape is rapidly evolving, with technology at the forefront of this transformation. At Onit, we understand that the demands on legal teams are higher than ever before. Efficiency, accuracy, and speed are no longer just nice-to-haves—they are essential. That’s why we are excited to introduce the enhanced ReviewAI, now powered by Onit’s industry-leading generative AI capabilities. 

Pioneering AI in Contract Management 

For over three years, ReviewAI has set the standard in automated contract review as the first software that truly reads, writes, and reasons like a lawyer. But we didn’t stop there. We’ve continuously innovated to ensure that ReviewAI not only meets but exceeds the needs of modern legal departments. Today, we are proud to announce that ReviewAI is even more powerful, thanks to its integration with the latest in generative AI and large language models (LLMs). 

Jean Yang, Onit’s VP of GTM Strategy and AI Transformation, shares, “We’re extremely proud to offer ReviewAI as a standalone product for organizations everywhere. By deploying the game-changing technology of generative AI, we are providing intelligent contract review that is intuitive, collaborative, and user-friendly.” 

Why Generative AI Matters for Legal Teams 

Generative AI is not just another buzzword—it’s a transformative force that is reshaping how legal teams operate. With ReviewAI, you can draft, review, redline, and edit all types of contracts in minutes. The result? Legal teams can focus on strategic priorities rather than getting bogged down in routine tasks. 

ReviewAI delivers: 

  • 4x faster contract audit and migration projects 
  • 70% faster contract negotiations 
  • 400% accelerated data entry and validation projects when connected with Onit CLM, reducing human effort by 60% 

This isn’t just about speed—it’s about enhancing accuracy and boosting overall organizational performance. By leveraging Generative AI-powered chat and virtual assistants, ReviewAI allows users to ask questions and receive answers on the fly, making contract reviews more efficient and precise. 

Reimagining Contract Playbooks 

One of the standout features of ReviewAI is its library of playbook templates, pre-configured with legal concepts, fallbacks, and approved clauses. These templates are ready to be used out-of-the-box, accelerating the review process and ensuring consistency across your legal documents. Legal and business leaders can also configure these playbooks to align with their unique business standards, providing a tailored approach to contract management. 

Natural Language Processing (NLP) further enhances ReviewAI’s capabilities by providing AI-powered legal text processing. ReviewAI meets you where you work, whether it is in Word, via email or a multilingual environment, making it easy for legal professionals or business users to adopt and utilize these tools.  

Moreover, Onit’s commitment to ethics and privacy is paramount. Our detailed Ethics & Privacy / Zero Data Retention policy, coupled with robust support for EU customers, ensures that your data is secure and managed responsibly. 

The Future of Contract Management is Here 

As Jean Yang eloquently states, “ReviewAI represents the future of contract review, delivering precision, speed, and an AI virtual assistant that speaks your language. It’s the adaptable, AI-powered solution for tailored contract workflows that agile organizations need to scale and adapt in an ever-changing, fast-paced business environment.” 

In a world where business agility is key, ReviewAI offers the tools that legal teams need to stay ahead. Whether you’re looking to streamline your workflows, improve accuracy, or simply keep up with the pace of business, ReviewAI with Generative AI technology is your answer. 

Take the Next Step 

Ready to experience the future of contract management? Schedule your demo of ReviewAI today and discover how generative AI can transform your legal operations. 

Practical AI Prompting for Legal Teams: What You Need to Know

Feeling comfortable with core prompting concepts? Great — now it’s time to take the next step with integrating AI into your Legal workflows. Let’s walk through some examples to implement these skills. You can use any AI tool (ChatGPT, Anthropic) to illustrate these different prompting techniques.

Feel free to follow along by creating your own prompts, inputting them into the tool, or simply reviewing the examples provided. You can copy and paste the sample prompts into ChatGPT to test it yourself.

After each prompt, think about ChatGPT’s response and how you might refine the prompt using techniques like interactive dialogue or iterative refinement. The prompts below aim to demonstrate ways legal professionals can collaborate with AI to get the insights they need.

Exercise 1: Basic Legal Prompting

Basic Objective:
Have AI summarize a legal contract.

Contract Sample to Summarize:
“THIS AGREEMENT entered into this 1st day of January 2023, by and between Party A, a corporation organized under the laws of the State of California (‘Party A’), and Party B, a corporation organized under the laws of the State of New York (‘Party B’). Both parties agree to maintain and protect the confidential information obtained during the course of this agreement, following the confidentiality clause outlined in Section 5.”

Persona and Specifics:
You are a Paralegal assisting a lawyer, and your role is to review and summarize key points of contracts. The lawyer needs quick understanding through clear and concise summaries of the essential contract content.

Objective:
Short Summary Points: Offer short, precise summaries that illuminate the crucial contract aspects like agreement parties, confidentiality obligations, and other significant rights or duties. Summaries should be brief yet encompassing, shedding light on the contract’s main elements without over-detailing.

Constraints:
Output Length: Limit each summary point to two sentences maximum, with the overall response not exceeding 1000 characters.

Examples (Few-Shot Prompts):
Input: “A clause in the contract defines the agreement parties.”
Output: “Agreement Parties: Party A (California-based) and Party B (New York-based) are engaged in this agreement, each with distinct rights and obligations.”

Input
: “Section 5 of the contract outlines the confidentiality obligations.
Output: “Confidentiality: Both Party A and Party B are bound to protect and uphold confidential
information as detailed in Section 5 of the agreement.”

Accuracy:
Ensure summaries are exact and faithful to the contract’s text, avoiding assumptions and inaccuracies. Summaries should be strictly derived from the contract information.

Format:
Summaries should be presented in a bullet-point format. Each point must have a headline followed by a brief description, ensuring easy readability and understanding even for individuals not specialized in law.

AI Task:
Given the sample contract snippet above, craft a concise summary following the objective, constraints, examples, and format detailed in the Crafted Prompt for AI. Ensure your summary accurately reflects the contract’s content, facilitating quick and clear comprehension for the lawyer you are assisting.

Follow-up questions:
• Iterative Refinement: Ask it to summarize the key points in 3 bullet points instead
of full sentences.
• Interactive Dialogue: Could you clarify the confidentiality obligations – who is responsible for maintaining confidentiality?
• Chained Reasoning: What are the consequences if confidentiality is breached? And then, have it explained based on its previous summary.
• Socratic Questioning: What factors should be considered in determining if this confidentiality clause provides adequate protection?
• Self-Reflection: Review your summary. What are 1-2 ways you could improve the clarity or conciseness?

Exercise 2: Intermediate Prompting

Basic Objective:
Generate LinkedIn posts using AI based on an IDC MarketScape report.

Report Sample to Summarize:
The IDC MarketScape report content provided as input to AI.

Persona and Specifics:
You are an Enterprise Marketer working for a leading legal tech company. Your primary role involves creating engaging content for LinkedIn, blogs, and emails to inform and attract potential clients and partners.

Objective:
Short Summary Points: Deliver succinct, engaging LinkedIn posts capturing key findings and insights from the IDC MarketScape report. The focus should be on the unique capabilities and values of your company over competitors.

Constraints:
Output Length: Each LinkedIn post should not exceed 280 characters (standard LinkedIn post length), and the overall content generated should be close to 3000 tokens to yield multiple LinkedIn posts.

Examples (Few-Shot Prompts):
Input: “The IDC report mentions the unique capabilities of the leading legal tech
companies.”
Output: “Leading in legal tech! Our capabilities stand out in the latest IDC MarketScape report. Discover how we surpass competitors! #LegalTech #IDCReport2023”
Input: “The IDC report emphasizes the importance of business values.”
Output: “Business values at the forefront! The IDC MarketScape report echoes our
commitment to integrity and innovation. #LegalTechValues #IDCInsights”

Accuracy:
Ensure LinkedIn posts capture the essence of the IDC MarketScape report without misrepresentation. The posts should strictly adhere to the report’s findings while highlighting the company’s strengths..

Format:
Posts should be presented in a casual, engaging style suitable for LinkedIn. Each post must capture attention and motivate readers to learn more about the company and the report.

Temperature:
A temperature of 1 is set to encourage the AI to generate creative content. The temperature setting influences the randomness and creativity in the generated text, with higher values resulting in more creative outputs.

AI Task:
Given the sample IDC MarketScape report snippet above, craft LinkedIn posts following the objective, constraints, examples, and format detailed in this Crafted Prompt for AI. Ensure your posts accurately reflect the report’s content and promote the company’s unique position in the legal tech landscape.

Follow-up questions:
• Iterative Refinement: Can you reduce the length of this post while retaining its key message?
• Interactive Dialogue: What were the primary findings regarding our company in the IDC report?
• Chained Reasoning: Based on our company’s highlighted capabilities in the IDC report, how do we compare to our main competitor?
• Socratic Questioning: How does the report’s emphasis on business values differentiate us in the market?
• Self-Reflection: Review the posts you generated. Are there ways to make them more engaging or relevant to our target audience?

Want to learn more about how you can unlock the true potential of AI systems (including advanced prompting techniques)? Download our full eBook entitled The Legal Professional’s Handbook: Generative AI Fundamentals, Prompting, and Applications.

5 Key Factors to Consider When Integrating AI into Your Legal Department

Integrating advanced legal AI tools like LLMs catalyzes a significant shift for in-house legal teams. These models are evolving from mere tools to invaluable partners, extending in-house professionals’ capabilities. Adopting legal AI software is a strategic decision for in-house teams that can transform service delivery, enhance productivity, and provide data-driven insights.

Here’s a closer look at five key factors to think about when integrating AI:

1. Cost Considerations

Immediate Efficiency Gains: AI automation of repetitive tasks like contract reviews can yield direct time savings, reducing manual hours spent.

Optimize Spend: The cost savings allow for investments in training, advanced AI tools, and other high-value initiatives rather than repetitive manual work.

2. Workflow Evolution

Reskilling: With AI excelling in routine tasks, in-house team members can take
on more complex responsibilities, upskilling into higher-value work.

Ongoing Learning: As AI evolves, so must in-house professionals’ skills. Regular AI training ensures everyone stays updated on the latest developments.

3. Data-Driven Insights

Instant Analysis: AI for legal documents can provide real-time insights from data that previously required extensive manual analysis. This empowers faster, informed decisions.

Proactive Risk Monitoring: AI analysis of contracts and documents can proactively detect risks, allowing preventative mitigation.

4. Change Management

Addressing Hesitancy: Hosting regular workshops provides a venue for hesitant team members to gain familiarity with AI systems in a collaborative setting. This can ease adoption.

User Feedback: Encourage continuous user feedback on AI tools. On-the-ground insights allow refinements tailored to team needs.

5. Integration with Other Technologies

Legal Tech AI Synergy with Blockchain: AI can help validate blockchain data beyond smart contracts, offering a more robust solution for secure transactions or records.

Collaborative Platforms: AI can seamlessly integrate with collaborative tools and platforms used by legal firms, ensuring a cohesive workflow. Whether it’s document collaboration or scheduling client meetings, AI can bring efficiency to these tasks.

Adaptive Systems: The beauty of modern AI is its adaptability. By connecting it with tools like CRMs or document management systems, it can learn and adapt based on historical data and user interactions.

Integrating AI is an ongoing journey requiring strategic planning, skills development, and a willingness to evolve. The payoff makes this effort invaluable for in-house productivity and insights. With thoughtful change management, AI transitions from an external tool to an intrinsic capability. Involvement and feedback from professionals is the key to ensuring the tech aligns with team needs. With meticulous implementation, AI becomes a seamless ally rather than a disruptive presence, propelling teams to new heights.

Want to learn more about how you can unlock the true potential of AI systems (including advanced prompting techniques)? Download our full eBook entitled The Legal Professional’s Handbook: Generative AI Fundamentals, Prompting, and Applications.

7 AI Applications for In-House Legal Workflows

As AI capabilities progress, in-house legal teams have an invaluable opportunity to integrate these advanced technologies into key legal workflows and processes to drive greater efficiency, insights, and productivity. When thoughtfully implemented, legal AI can serve as an ally in handling high-volume, repetitive tasks that have traditionally burdened legal professionals’ time.

From contract management to legal research and beyond, AI systems powered by strong prompting skills can amplify and augment in-house teams’ efforts, allowing professionals to focus their expertise on the most strategic, high-value aspects of legal work.

Here are 7 key AI applications for in-house legal workflows:

  1. Contract Analysis and Review: A well-crafted prompt can enable AI to sift through complex contracts meticulously, spotlight duties, identify potential risks, and offer actionable insights.
  2. Invoice Auditing: AI can rapidly process high volumes of legal invoices, flagging potentially erroneous charges for auditors to review. This optimizes the invoice validation process.
  3. Litigation Support and Preparation: AI assists with tasks like organizing case documents, drafting briefs, and finding supporting precedents to bolster arguments. This reduces repetitive preparation work.
  4. Regulatory Monitoring: AI tracks updates across vast regulatory sources and alerts teams to key changes relevant to the business. This enables proactive compliance.
  5. IP Management: Consider the herculean task of analyzing vast patent databases. With its efficiency, AI ensures exhaustive patent searches and assists in drafting applications with precision.
  6. Discovery: AI expedites eDiscovery by quickly filtering huge document sets down to the most relevant materials, minimizing review time.
  7. Legal Research: With thoughtful prompting, AI can rapidly traverse extensive legal databases, identifying pertinent cases, rulings, and regulations.

Integrating Legal AI into these critical in-house legal workflows with meticulous implementation and oversight can profoundly augment legal professionals’ capabilities and enable more strategic, high-value work. AI’s incorporation in legal practice is not just a pursuit of efficiency — it’s about refining the quality of legal services. As we harness AI’s prowess, a principle must be held sacred: AI tools, no matter how advanced, should serve as an extension of your expertise and not a replacement.

Want to learn more about how you can unlock the true potential of AI systems (including advanced prompting techniques)? Download our full eBook entitled The Legal Professional’s Handbook: Generative AI Fundamentals, Prompting, and Applications.

Mastering the Art of Legal AI Prompting: The 3Ps Framework

Well-crafted prompts are key to accurate, useful AI outputs. A prompt is your input to the LLM to guide its outputs. Essentially, it’s a question or statement the LLM is asked to respond to or build upon.

Prompts can range from a single word to a whole paragraph, depending on what the user is trying to achieve. LLMs use the information in the prompt as a basis for generating their response, so the quality and clarity of the prompt can significantly influence the answer.

Careful prompt design is key in instructing the LLM to produce the desired output. Vague prompts lead to confusion, but clear, detailed prompts elicit outstanding results. Framing prompts using the AI’s language gets the desired responses.

The First Step: Begin with Basics and Progress Gradually

When integrating AI into legal tasks, start with straightforward, manageable prompts. For instance, initially use AI to summarize legal documents or provide legal principles overviews. This practical approach allows you to familiarize yourself with AI’s functionalities and limitations while developing proficiency in crafting effective prompts.

It’s common to encounter challenges as you navigate this learning process. Rather than aiming for immediate perfection, view each challenge as an opportunity for constructive learning. These early experiences, even the difficult ones, lay the foundation for future success with AI.

Remember that success with AI is collaborative. Adjust your approach accordingly if a prompt doesn’t yield the expected results. Refine prompts, analyze responses, and iterate as needed. This hands-on practice is key to mastering prompting and interpretation.

As your skills develop, gradually introduce more complexity into prompts. Consistency in practicing core skills leads from proficiency in basics to efficiently handling advanced AI interactions. With a solid foundation, you’ll be well-equipped to fully harness AI’s potential for elevating legal work.

The 3Ps Prompting Framework

The 3Ps approach provides a structured way to guide AI systems through effective prompting. It consists of:

  • PROMPT: This is the core instruction provided to the AI detailing exactly what you want it to do. A properly engineered prompt includes clarity, specificity, examples, constraints, and ample context to guide the system. The prompt is where you ask the AI for what you need, whether it’s a legal summary, analysis, document draft, or other output. An effective prompt maximizes accuracy. Combining thoughtful priming, persona setting, and a meticulously crafted prompt allows prompting at an expert level to get the most out of legal AI systems.
  • PRIMING: Priming involves setting the stage and establishing the necessary context for the AI. Imagine you need to brief a junior lawyer on a case’s background before they can work on it; explaining the goals, facts, and history allows them to dive in effectively. Similarly, priming an AI lays the groundwork for success. Examples of priming include summarizing documents the AI needs to read for context, explaining the business objectives, client needs, or legal issues involved, or providing any required definitions or domain knowledge.
  • PERSONA: You can specify a persona if you want the AI to adopt a specific perspective. This puts the AI in a certain mindset, similar to how lawyers think differently depending on their role, like prosecution vs. defense attorneys. Persona examples include patent lawyer (frames responses from a patent law point of view), plaintiff’s attorney (approaches issues from a plaintiff-favoring stance), and criminal prosecutor (considers implications in building a case against the accused).

Anatomy of a Strong Prompt

Now that we’ve covered the basics let’s dive into the anatomy of what makes an effective, robust prompt. What core attributes define a truly “strong” prompt?

Effective prompts contain:

  • Clarity – Unambiguous, precise phrasing
  • Specifics – Exact definitions of needed information
  • Context Richness – Sufficient background information for depth and insight
  • Good Structure – Clear formatting that aids comprehension
  • Readability – Use simple, concise language.
  • Examples – To illustrate desired outputs
  • Constraints – Outline boundaries and limitations (output length or formatting, timeframe, geography, etc.).
  • Accuracy – Avoiding errors that cause misleading results

Large language models are trained on extensive written text, making structural details like complete sentences and line breaks important for accurate responses. Constraints and examples guide the AI by setting expectations and a pathway to follow.

Every element of a prompt influences the AI’s response. Vague prompts confuse the AI, while focused, tight phrasing elicits spot-on responses. Constraints like length limits limit the scope. Examples guide better outputs. Each detail shapes the final result. Craft prompts carefully, considering how each component impacts the AI’s understanding.

Key Technical Settings

When using AI systems, there are specific settings you can adjust that impact how the AI responds. Knowing these key technical settings as a beginner will help you get better results.

  • Creativity Setting: This controls how consistent or varied the AI’s responses will be. A high creativity setting makes the responses more random and diverse. But it also increases the chance of incorrect or nonsensical outputs. A low creativity setting makes the AI’s answers more predictable and fact-based. But the responses might be too basic.
  • Response Length Setting: This controls the approximate length of the AI’s responses. Longer responses allow the AI to provide more detailed explanations. But it limits how much background context you can provide in your prompt. Shorter response settings enable you to give more context upfront in your prompt. But, the AI’s answers may lack depth.

Using moderate creativity settings and medium response lengths is a good starting point. As you get more experience, you can refine these settings per use case. The key is balancing detail, consistency, and context to get optimal results.

Want to learn more about how you can unlock the true potential of AI systems (including advanced prompting techniques)? Download our full eBook entitled The Legal Professional’s Handbook: Generative AI Fundamentals, Prompting, and Applications.

How Large Language Models (LegaLLMs) and AI Can Uniquely Supercharge Vital Legal Work

Imagine having a super-powered contract review assistant, able to rapidly comb through thousands of pages in record time to flag key clauses, risks, and insights. That’s the promise of Legal LLMs, generative AI large language models: a highly advanced predictive text system with specialized training in a legal context. For in-house legal teams, these tools accelerate the review of contracts, invoices, and legal service requests by eliminating attorneys needing to pore through mountains of paperwork and emails manually. That’s why AI adoption is surging for these document-intensive tasks that frequently overwhelm in-house legal professionals.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) broadly refers to computer systems capable of tasks requiring human intelligence like visual perception, speech recognition, and decision-making. Machine learning is a specific subfield within AI where algorithms improve through experience without explicit programming. Rather, the AI is trained use a representative dataset. The neural network is a common machine learning structure, inspired by the human brain’s interconnectivity.

A significant AI area utilizing machine learning is Natural Language Processing (NLP), which focuses on automating language understanding and generation. NLP employs neural networks trained on vast text data. Generative AI represents an advanced subset of NLP models called Large Language Models (LLMs) designed to produce human-like text. So, while not all AI uses machine learning, modern innovations like large language models leverage machine learning and neural networks to achieve their natural language capabilities.

This brings us to recent advancements in generative AI and the advent of Large Language Measures (LLMs), which have driven much of the recent excitement around AI applications in the legal field. These are specialized neural networks trained on vast amounts of text data, designed to understand and generate text.

What are Large Language Models?

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are trained on massive datasets of billions of data points, refined through human feedback loops of prompts and responses. This allows LLMs to break down text into tokens — commonly occurring groups of 4-5 characters – that are encoded as parameters. When you provide a prompt, the LLM uses that context to statistically predict the most likely sequence of tokens to generate a coherent response, like an advanced autocorrect.

However, LLMs have limitations. They don’t learn or understand content — they generate plausible responses using their parameters but don’t comprehend meaning. LLMs have restricted context windows, limiting how much text they can process, require substantial computational resources, and struggle with math or numbers. Poor data quality or biased prompts can result in inaccurate outputs. While LLMs can produce human-like text, they don’t innately understand language semantics. LLMs are powerful but require thoughtful prompts and oversight to mitigate risks. Setting realistic expectations by understanding how they leverage statistical patterns rather than true comprehension allows appropriate usage for augmenting legal work while providing necessary guidance and validation.

Challenges and Common Issues with (Legal) LLMs

While large language models represent a breakthrough innovation, they have inherent limitations requiring prudent risk management. As static systems, LLMs cannot continuously adapt on the fly post-training. Their memory capacity, or “context windows,” vary widely. More limited windows constrain the processing of lengthy content. State-of-the-art models boast expansive context but are still pale compared to human memory.

More concerningly, LLMs have several key issues that warrant caution:

  • Hallucinations: LLMs may generate or “hallucinate” data not present in reality, as they are optimized to respond to prompts without the ability to discern truth from fiction. This tendency to produce false information, incredibly confidently stated, is concerning and requires oversight.
  • Biases: The training data may contain societal biases encoded into the LLM’s parameters. Additionally, reinforcement learning through human feedback loops during training can further ingrain biases. Once deployed, even prompt wording can introduce biases that lead to unfair LLM responses.
  • Inconsistency: Due to the statistical nature of how LLMs generate each token and the inherent randomness built into models to enable creative responses, LLMs do not always take the same path to respond to identical prompts. So, you cannot rely on consistent output, even adjusting for creativity settings.
  • Misalignment: LLMs have demonstrated some awareness of when their outputs are being evaluated or tested and can provide responses that diverge from a user’s true intent. This makes it challenging to understand alignment with user goals outside of testing scenarios thoroughly.

Informed perspectives on LLMs’ capabilities and limitations allow full utilization of their transformative potential through responsible oversight. Their breakthrough innovation warrants measured adoption to realize possibilities ethically.

Realizing the Benefits of Legal LLMs & Generative AI While Mitigating the Risks

Generative AI has huge potential upsides for legal teams if thoughtfully applied. But we need to be realistic — Legal LLMs aren’t going to completely replace your skills and judgment overnight. Rather, they can take the grunt work off your plate so you can focus on high-value tasks like strategy, analysis, and client needs.

Before turning LLMs loose, comprehensive testing and review by real experts is crucial. We can’t just immediately take what LLMs spit out as gospel truth. Their output needs real validation via ongoing review. LLMs should collaborate alongside professionals, not try to substitute your judgment that’s sharpened through experience.

It’s also critical to regularly audit for biases, inconsistencies, or false info. The teams behind LLMs must take responsibility for thoughtfully addressing these risks head-on. Rigorous data governance, privacy protection, and cybersecurity are essentials, too. We need systems we can understand, not opaque “black boxes” that undermine trust.

LLMs can uniquely supercharge vital legal work:

  • They can rapidly pinpoint the most relevant info for document review out of massive document troves, saving tons of time over lawyers pouring over everything manually. But human oversight still matters to double-check what the LLM flags and catch subtleties it might miss.
  • For analyzing contracts, LLMs can efficiently unpack dense legalese to surface issues like inconsistencies or missing pieces for tightening before signing. But niche clauses unique to certain deals might get overlooked. Experts still need to verify that nothing big slipped through the cracks.
  • LLMs shine at legal research, promptly finding past precedents, citations, and case law to build persuasive arguments. However, they might miss seminal cases only seasoned attorneys would know; your guidance remains key for strategy.
  • LLMs can also assist organizations in the creation of legal service requests and invoice summaries, helping to ensure a more streamlined workflow, saving valuable time, and bringing clarity to collection processes. Human oversight, however, is still essential to ensure crucial elements are included and that requests and summaries get to the right people or departments.

Navigating the Ethical Frontier

Implementing new technologies for a legal team requires prudence to uphold core values like transparency, fairness, and accountability, considering the potential risks and rewards tied to distinct AI models.

While AI promises benefits like efficiency and insights, particularly in routine tasks like contract review, it is imperative to distinguish between consumer models and enterprise solutions of generative AI. Consumer models, like ChatGPT through OpenAI, a version provided through Microsoft, and others provided through Google, are accessible but pose significant data privacy concerns that are unacceptable for legal professionals. Such models may use confidential client data for future training or other purposes, potentially exposing sensitive information inadvertently.

In stark contrast, enterprise solutions offer robust data protection essential for in-house teams. These commercial models assure that client data won’t be used in future model training, nor will the results be shared or misused. This safeguard is pivotal for in-house legal professionals who handle confidential information daily and must assure clients and internal stakeholders about data security. Hence, in-house legal teams should avoid using consumer-level AI models to prevent compromise on client data privacy.

With these distinctions in mind, in-house legal teams must consider the following when evaluating AI solutions for integration into workflows like contract review and legal invoice examination:

  • Explainability: In-house legal professionals should require AI providers to disclose the inner workings of their systems. Understanding how recommendations are generated is crucial to fostering trust in AI outputs and preventing reliance on opaque “black box” systems unsuitable for legal work.
  • Accountability: Despite AI’s efficiency in reviewing contracts and invoices, in-house lawyers must still thoroughly vet AI outputs, establishing clear oversight procedures without mindlessly following AI-generated advice. Human oversight remains essential.
  • Fairness: Ensuring AI is developed without biases is essential to uphold legal principles. Continuous monitoring and assessment during both the development and production phases are necessary to sustain fairness.
  • Transparency: In-house teams need to be transparent about their AI usage with clients and courts, clearly communicating the chosen AI’s capabilities and limitations.
  • Risk Assessment: Identify and mitigate potential harms, like biases, security flaws, or loss of professional judgment, early when assessing AI solutions for integration into workflows.

The sweet spot is thoughtfully harnessing AI’s power while mitigating risks through governance, security, testing, and expertise-based oversight. This balanced approach lets us ethically integrate AI into legal work to augment your talent.

Ready to learn more about how you can integrate AI into your Legal workflows? Download our full eBook entitled The Legal Professional’s Handbook: Generative AI Fundamentals, Prompting, and Applications.

Bringing Workflows and AI to Life for Legal Ops: A Conversation with Harbor  

Jean Yang, co-founder and vice president of Onit’s AI Center of Excellence, recently chatted with Amy Good, vice president of client engagement at Harbor Consulting, about the revolutionary potential of artificial intelligence to provide an ecosystem of workflow solutions — and what they can do for you. (You can view the entire video here).

Generative AI has become a modern-age gold rush, taking this brave new world — and its collective imagination — by storm. Legal operations is no exception. Integrating workflows with artificial intelligence (AI) can unlock a new level of efficiency for legal departments, especially at a time when any definition of success extends to driving innovation while containing costs.

According to Amy Good, the adoption of AI-powered workflows tends to follow three stages:

  1. A corporate legal department notices an abundance of manual tasks can be automated.
  2. As legal service requests (LSRs) pour in, legal leaders realize more connectivity to other parts of the organization is warranted and they implement a matter management system.
  3. Others build upon that foundation, continuing to improve legal tech throughout the organization’s journey.

Still, customers often wonder: What can AI do for us? Where — how — do we begin? Good’s advice? “Look for a place of demand.”

A Game-Changer for Efficiency

Chartered principally as protector of the business, it is Legal’s purpose to examine every detail of a deal for compliance and risk mitigation. However, the need to respond faster is paramount in this macroeconomic climate. The 2023 Enterprise Legal Reputation (ELR) Report uncovered that only a third (35%) of enterprise employees perceive their legal team as very responsive. Jean Yang noted that this is an area of opportunity to do more work in an efficient manner.

“Some clients have multiple places of requests from outside law departments routing to the center of excellence (COE) or administrative pools,” elaborated Good. These might include outside counsel vendor onboarding, approval requests, or information collection, such as structured reporting on diversity or vendor performance. “Often they are looking for self-service — any processes to fully automate, like non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).” These might include outside counsel vendor onboarding, approval requests, or information collection, such as structured reporting on diversity or vendor performance.

“We hear that, too. Attorneys don’t want to spend time on low-level contracts, but they need to get done,” Yang concurred.

This is where workflow automation and AI step in. With contract management an essential aspect of legal operations, constant demands, requests, and “fire drills” land on attorneys’ desks.

When there is too much important work to do and not enough time, AI adds intelligence to workflow by automatically populating LSR fields. According to Yang, “AI can remove friction and engage with processes and tools by really knowing how to route things to the appropriate person at the appropriate time with the appropriate level of priority.”

Being able to extract metadata on a mass basis to understand the information in contracts reduces time-consuming, manual, and not particularly invigorating tasks, Good agreed. In turn, this significantly streamlines workflows and elevates efficiency, freeing up Legal’s valuable time for more strategic, visionary, and materially impactful work.

Connecting Workflows and AI

At the 2023 CLOC Global Institute, Yang — along with a distinguished panel — demonstrated three practical and impactful ways of how the legal space can optimize AI: reviewing invoices for compliance and value with spend management, using AI as a co-pilot to run playbooks and perform legacy agreement extraction for contract review, and auto-generating LSRs from plain text communications like emails.

Following the standing-room-only presentation, seven in 10 (70%) legal professionals admitted to feeling positive about AI. And in Harbor’s latest Law Department Survey, 29% of respondents state they already implement workflow automation, while 26% use AI for at least one use case — up 10 and 11 percentage points, respectively, from the previous year.

This revolution may have been sparked by ChatGPT and other AI language models, such as Google’s Bard, truly bringing AI to the mainstream.

“Generative AI has strong legal comprehension and can generate billions of interactions,” Yang said, pointing out that GPT-4, the latest version, even passed the Uniform Bar Exam. Though some legal practitioners remain terrified this means AI will usurp jobs, there are limitations to the technology — including ‘hallucinations,’ the term for factually incorrect or meaningless information generated because of encoding and decoding errors.

Yang acknowledges that while generative AI will never be 100%, by understanding legal challenges and pain points AI can now feasibly and realistically assist with a range of processes — from leveraging immediate insights from spend and contract data to building apps more quickly.

“In the past year, AI seems to be coming together in a way it hasn’t before,” Good marveled. This includes data sets and tech infrastructure to make workflows faster, smarter, and more transformational.

The Future is Now

As a subject matter expert (SME) herself, Yang suggested exploring various use cases when asked about the best way to approach AI.

Good seconded experimentation, sharing that ChatGPT has often helped her transcend writer’s block and describing it like a conversation with a nonjudgmental friend to move you to the next step.

“Start small and gain momentum,” she advised.

Similarly, both emphasized the importance of working with vendors who are continuously future-proofing. One caveat? Always work with vendors with commercial licenses.

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter where your organization is today — some companies are already ‘there’ with AI, while others are still being cautious, watching and learning.

“The key,” Yang said, “is to learn and engage with what this tech means: Get demos, play along, see what’s coming. Because the hype is real. AI is here, and it will be impactful in many ways.”

Learn more about how Onit’s AI-enabled products digitally transform the contract lifecycle.

Generative AI in Legal: What Are the Opportunities?

Note: originally published on the CLOC.org blog

The rapid growth of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to fuel seismic changes throughout every aspect of the business world. A quick glance at recent headlines gives a good sense of just how the expanding power of AI-spawned text, images, and media is reverberating:

  • Google added the power of Generative AI to its search engine, allowing users to receive AI-generated summaries to select queries.
  • IBM is launching a new “WatsonX” studio for organizations to create their own generative AI workflows.
  • A Goldman Sachs survey forecast “significant disruption” to labor worldwide from Generative AI — potentially affecting up to 300 million jobs.

The legal industry will be in the middle of the Generative AI revolution. But what will that transformation look like for the legal world — and how can the industry best take advantage of its promises and potential?

Three areas of transformation

These three legal areas will see meaningful opportunities for value from generative AI:

  • SPEND MANAGEMENT. Generated AI can also boost departments’ ability to make sense of their tens of thousands of lines of invoice data by delivering insights into value, helping departments understand exactly what they are paying for. These quick, accessible insights are a powerful way to stop the attorney habit of “rubber-stamping” invoices and address capacity concerns for busy departments. It also increases the quality and speed of invoice review, flagging patterns that can violate billing guidelines (especially for lengthy, complex invoices).

Additionally, generative AI can assist with vendor management — particularly tough conversations around rate, value and performance. When backed by detailed, insightful data, it is easier to have productive, emotion-free, and surprise-free conversations.

EXAMPLE: Invoice summarization
. Onit integration with ChatGPT provides a quick, insightful summary of a contract’s tasks to analyze overall value – allowing users to glimpse into the hours spent per task, the work done by specific timekeepers, and much more.

  • CONTRACTING. With Generative AI’s ability to generate content such as summaries and redlines, Contracting is a natural place where the technology will have significant impact. In fact, contracting is one area where we see more mainstream adoption of AI — for example, most of Onit’s CLM customers use AI in contracting. Fueling this growth? The improvement in legal comprehension by Generative AI; for example, GPT4 passed the bar exam, scoring in the top 90th percentile on one 2023 tryout. These advancements mean the industry can use AI as a co-pilot to run contract playbooks. AI serves as a powerful tool to help reduce some of the repetitive manual work plaguing this part of the process and improve consistency.

What about post-signature? In an era of constant mergers and acquisitions, regulation and compliance demands, companies often find themselves with questions about the contracts in their repository. AI-driven analysis gives a valuable look into these contracts and their clause libraries, allowing the new company to quickly identify risks and remediate them.

EXAMPLE: Contract analysis
. Onit’s AI Co-Pilot sits alongside you as you review your contract. You can ask it to spot issues, suggest redlining, compare against your template language and flag deviations from your standards.

  • LEGAL REQUESTS. This impact is one our CLOC panel and audience were extremely excited about; sometimes, the most beneficial use of AI is to remove manual work (like form filling), remove friction and encourage the adoption of our tools and processes. AI technology can help to kick off the workflow with minimal user intervention, automating legal request creation, determining routing priorities, and establishing tracking — removing significant administrative tasks for attorneys. It can also assist as the “first response,” automating common business requests before they go to Legal.

EXAMPLE: Creating a legal request. Onit’s AI integration can read an email chain and automatically generate a legal request.

This is what our audience at CLOC 2023 said when we asked them about the impact of Generative AI. Do you agree with their thoughts?

Word cloud of Generative AI's impact on Legal
CLOC Session word cloud

As Legal takes its next steps into the AI world, it’s a good idea to have these general principles in mind:

  • Be future-minded. Seek out vendors with a clear, future-proofed vision and plan for generative AI in their product. Additionally, look to partner with organizations prioritizing privacy and security with AI; they should offer commercial licenses that protect privacy. Once partnerships and processes are in place, layer the technology on top of that solid foundation to ensure successful rollout and implementation.
  • Keep on top of technology. Designate some time for yourself or ask a team to keep up with the possibilities and enhancements of Generative AI. In a world where rapid advancements happen weekly (if not daily), education and knowledge are king.
  • Address the fear of the unknown. The disruptive effects of new technology can be intimidating for many. Don’t rush or push anyone into this new world; encourage them to learn and engage with the space, focus on opportunities and use carefully tested and validated tools.

Learn more about how Onit’s AI-enabled products digitally transform the contract lifecycle.

Experts Evaluate the Potential of Legal Contract Management Software and AI  

Legal contract management software also referred to as contract lifecycle management, has made significant headway in the world of in-house counsel, racking up impressive stats such as reducing the average sales cycle by 24% and saving 9% on annual average costs. But what happens when you combine legal contract management software with AI?

A panel of legal and AI experts from organizations including Adobe and Onit, presented at Legalweek on just this topic, examining the potential impact of AI on managing contracts and how to start implementing AI into your contract management workflows. The conversation touched on the business value of using AI in legal ops, the efficiencies AI can bring to your business and future trends in AI, among other things.

Here are some of the biggest takeaways for AI and legal contract management software.

How to get started with AI

One of the easiest places for legal departments to start using contract AI and automation is in common use cases like reviewing NDAs and other routine contracts because these are high-value but time-consuming activities. The need to increase speed is high, but the risk is relatively low.

On the applicability of AI to law

AI has strong applications to both the business side of law and the practice of law. From a business perspective, contract AI can help with important, routine tasks like invoice review and billing. As for the practice of law, AI is ideal for tasks like tracking 20 different clauses in the 56,000 NDAs you handle each year, significantly boosting productivity and efficiency.

Do your research

To get the most out of your AI tools, you want your relationship with your technology vendor to be a true partnership, and you want to apply your own judgment to why your solutions are doing what they’re doing. With both your vendor and your solution, you want to retain a certain level of control to ensure you’re getting the results you want.

Have a strategy

When you start implementing AI with your legal contract management software, you don’t want to be thinking just six or twelve months down the road but further down the horizon. When you create a longer-term vision, you’ll be better able to take into account the needs of your various stakeholders and secure their buy-in for your chosen AI solutions.

Laying the groundwork for adoption

Many companies find it easiest to start with a single use case or data set and train their AI models from there. Once you have your first success, it will be easier to roll out your new technology across other business units and the organization as a whole.

AI and compliance

When you use AI for contract lifecycle management, your tools can help you stay on top of the constantly changing federal and state regulatory landscape. AI can assess your legacy contracts against new regulatory changes and ensure that any necessary updates are made.

Contract AI and CLM

AI helps in the pre-signature phase of contracts by creating centralized workflows for contract management and templates that allow your team to draft, review and redline contracts with just a click. AI also assists in the post-signature phase by extracting actionable intelligence from your contracts that can serve as the basis for informed decision-making.

On justifying spending money on AI to the C-suite

According to a recent study, users saw on average a 51.5% gain in productivity after using AI for contract review. That’s an almost immediate gain in productivity, and some use cases saw even better results. Moreover, the efficiency continued to increase over time as users became more familiar with the tools and the tools got smarter. The data extraction capabilities of AI contract tools also help to reduce risk and stop revenue leakage, which has a positive financial impact on the business as a whole.

Future trends in AI

While AI was originally targeted more toward law firms, the focus has shifted to in-house teams. We’re likely to see an even greater emphasis on using AI in contract drafting and CLM this year.

If you’d like to learn more about AI and contract lifecycle management, here are two helpful webinar replays:

  • The Future of Contracting: CLM + AI Transformation at Lenovo – Every company needs a faster and more efficient contracting process that enhances risk and spend management, improves revenue and profit margins, and increases visibility into counterparty relationships. The Lenovo Legal Department’s transformation journey is delivering value to the business by centralizing the global legal transactional support resources, standardizing the contract process across the company and optimizing the process with technology.
  • AI Mythbusters: Deprogramming Misconceptions – Confusion and misinformation around what Artificial Intelligence is and how it works is widespread, particularly in the legal technology space. Watch this webinar to debunk ten common misconceptions and learn how to decipher marketing-speak to separate true AI from just software.

Introducing Onit Catalyst – Upping the AI Game for ELM and CLM

Since the birth of artificial intelligence at a conference held at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956, it has made rapid strides. In recent years, AI has garnered considerable investment; as of the end of 2020, the top 100 AI startups globally had a combined valuation of over $258 billion.

However, in some regards, AI technology has become a commodity, with many of the technologies being part of the open source community. Its application to specific business or technical use cases that depend on models built by a combination of data scientists and engineers, functional or industry experts, and a large amount of curated data makes AI a valuable business contributor.

We have been at the forefront of incorporating AI technology into our product as we seek to add more customer value through automation and intelligence. Beyond AI-based products developed in-house, we have acquired various AI-based products and technologies to bolster our capabilities.

We are excited to announce the new brand name of our AI-enabled products purpose-built to transform ELM and CLM is Onit Catalyst. A chemical catalyst is an inert substance, but when added to a reaction, it accelerates it. Onit is applying AI in the same way – combining it with your data, use cases, and other Onit products – to accelerate the value you receive from it. The Onit Catalyst products were previously marketed under the Precedent and Bodhala brands.

Onit Catalyst provides actionable insights from legal matters or contract data through better reporting, dashboards, benchmarks, and legal business intelligence. They can be implemented alongside an existing third-party ELM or CLM implementation or with the OnitX platform, to which they have tight and seamless integrations. With Onit Catalyst, we have done the data science for you. In addition, our AI Center of Excellence has applied AI and other analytic techniques to address real and practice use cases related to enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management. Powering the Onit Catalyst products is a dataset that includes $47B+ in legal billings, over 200,000 timekeepers, 8,900 law firms, and more than 1 million assisted legal interactions each year.

Below are the products within the Onit Catalyst family:

Onit Catalyst for ELM
Proactive law firm management using legal business intelligence so legal can run like a business
Onit Catalyst for CLM
Smart management of legal documents via process automation, augmentation, and intelligence
Onit Catalyst Report Cards
Onit Catalyst Quarterly Business Review
Onit Catalyst Rate Benchmarking
Onit Catalyst Matter Benchmarking
Onit Catalyst Rate Proposal Analyzer
Onit Catalyst Comparative Analysis
Onit Catalyst ReviewAI
Onit Catalyst Contract Extraction

Onit Catalyst products will always work best with the OnitX platform to form smart solutions that provide insights at the point of decision and need.

Contact us to learn how Onit Catalyst can enhance your ELM and CLM workflows today.