Generative AI Tools For Lawyers

Introduction to AI in Law

For seasoned lawyers, as well as laypeople, simply trying to make sense of a tricky contract, new tools powered by generative AI promise to transform the way we engage with the law. Legal professionals often devote large chunks of their time to drafting contracts, researching previous cases, preparing documents for submission to court, or reviewing case law. Even for non-lawyers, many everyday tasks can require diving into legal concepts and principles—wading through corporate T&Cs, tenancy agreements, consumer rights advice or business compliance.

The Rise of GenAI Tools in Law

Fortunately, lawyers—professional and armchair varieties—are finding that there’s a wealth of genAI tools out there that can make their lives easier. So here’s my rundown of some of the leading apps, tools, and services that help with legal tasks. Some can help law firms and professionals automate dull and repetitive jobs, while others aim to make the legal systems and courts more accessible to laypeople.

Leading AI Platforms for Legal Tasks

Harvey AI is among the market-leading legal AI platforms. Like many of the tools here, it’s built on LLM technology (in this case, OpenAI’s GPT models that also power ChatGPT). However, it’s been fine-tuned to be particularly efficient when it comes to legal tasks such as research, contract analysis and compliance. As well as the vast amounts of training data at its disposal, it is further fine-tuned on domain-specific legal knowledge to ensure firms get assistance that’s tailored to their own way of working. Harvey now also offers agentic genAI capabilities, allowing it to work autonomously on carrying out longer, multi-step tasks.

LexisNexis has existed for more than 50 years as a database of legal information, including court decisions, judgments and case law. Today, it’s been given a generative AI upgrade in the form of Lexis+, which is designed to act as an AI legal assistant. Users—generally legal professionals—can engage through a conversational search interface in order to create tailored legal documents, and correspondence, as well as identify relevant case law, statutes and legal commentary. It also provides instant summaries of complex legal texts and integrates with Lexis’s Shepard Citation Service, ensuring citations are correct and up-to-date.

Consumer-Focused AI Tools

This is a web-based platform offering generative AI tools for a wide variety of legal tasks often faced by consumers and laypeople, including fighting parking charges, reclaiming debts and disputing bank fees. It isn’t purely AI-based—there is a strong community element to the service, too, and plenty of articles giving useful advice on a number of consumer rights, data protection and privacy issues. Billed as the "consumer AI champion," it can be used to generate dispute letters, file claims and navigate complex court processes no matter how inexperienced a user is in legal matters.

AI Assistants for Legal Professionals

Operated by Thompson Reuters, CoCounsel is an AI legal assistant that crunches through repetitive digital workloads like reviewing documents, researching case law, and identifying critical questions. It has developed a reputation as trustworthy among law firms due to a focus on robust data protection and privacy safeguards. CoCounsel has also added what it calls agentic functionality to its platform. Although it isn’t yet clear what their AI agents will do, it’s speculated that the legal industry will be heavily impacted by the adoption of these next-generation AI tools that promise even greater levels of automation.

Streamlining Legal Document Creation

GenAI-powered lawtech platform was built to streamline the creation of legal documents and the negotiation involved in contracts and agreements. Specifically tailored for startups and small businesses without full in-house legal teams, it offers AI-customized legal templates from employment contracts to NDAs, covering any standard documentation that smaller organizations might require. As it’s designed to be used by non-professionals as well as professionals, it features powerful functionality around reducing complexity and providing easy-to-digest explanations of contract clauses.

More Great Tools

That’s far from all of the tools out there designed for lawyers and armchair lawyers. If none of the above do exactly what you need, take a look at one of these:

• Blue J: AI-powered research assistant designed to help accountants and other professional services understand tax laws.
• ContractPod AI: Users of enterprise legal AI platform ContractPod can access Leah, a virtual legal ass