13 Best Legal AI Tools

How is AI Used in The Legal Industry?

AI legal tools automate basic and repetitive tasks that don’t necessarily require a lawyer’s experience and expertise, like responding to phone calls or drafting contracts. Some AI tools are also advanced enough to help with legal research, like e-discovery, regulatory compliance, and legal due diligence.

Apart from workflows within a law firm, artificial intelligence can also be used to simplify certain legal marketing activities, such as:

• Using generative AI tools to produce pieces for content marketing.
• Incorporating AI to refine audience targeting in advertising campaigns.
• Implement AI chatbots to cater to website visitors.

“Legal generative AI is supposed to augment what a lawyer does. It’s not going to do legal reasoning, not going to door case strategy. What it’s supposed to do is do repeatable rote tasks much more quickly and efficiently.” — Zach Warren, Thomson Reuters Institute.

Benefits of Using AI Tools For Law Firms

• Save time from low-level, routine tasks. Use AI for legal work like summarizing documents, drafting contracts, analyzing deals, and legal due diligence.
• Aid in legal research. AI-powered legal research tools can quickly pull up relevant statutes, regulations, and precedents.
• Augment risk assessment. A few AI-powered tools can tap into streams of historical legal data to forecast potential outcomes, taking your risk assessment process to levels of efficiency.

13 Legal AI Tools Multiply Your Productivity

Check out the top 13 AI legal tools to supercharge your firm’s productivity and efficiency:

1. Casetext

Casetext helps thousands of law firms through the tedious and time-consuming process of legal research. It performs tasks like finding relevant case laws, regulations, rules, statutes, and briefs — serving them up in a more scannable and organized dashboard.

Casetext accepts keywords and natural-language queries with boolean operators (e.g., “And,” “Or,” and “Not”) to find relevant content to aid your research.

Alternatively, you can use the Case Analysis Research Assistant (CARA) AI to conduct legal research by simply uploading a relevant document, like a complaint or memo.

2. CaptureNow

CaptureNow is a straightforward tool that implements intelligent automation to make sure every call your law firm gets will contribute to your lead generation efforts.

You can use CaptureNow so that prospects no longer have to deal with long wait or hold times. An AI voice will be available and ready 24/7 to facilitate the initial interview process, collecting information like the legal services the caller needs and their personal information.

At the same time, your law firm’s intake specialists no longer have to worry about missing calls, making mistakes, and performing additional tasks, like call transcriptions or CRM data entry. Instead, they can focus on handling the influx of leads that CaptureNow generates on autopilot.

3. CoCounsel

CoCounsel is an AI chatbot baked into the Casetext platform, helping with more advanced tasks like summarizing documents, outlining crucial contract details, searching large databases, drafting emails, and more.

While Casetext relies on keywords, queries, and document uploads, CoCounsel relies on real-time conversations. Just talk to CoCounsel like a real, human legal assistant to get the work done — whether you need them to prepare a deposition outline or come up with contract revision suggestions.

4. Harvey AI

Harvey AI is another generative AI platform developed from the ground up for legal teams.

Just like Casetext, this AI tool is equipped to find answers to your legal research questions. Similar to CoCounsel, it does everything through natural language prompts, including some advanced tasks like legal document automation, contract summarization, due diligence, and regulatory compliance.

5. Lex Machina

Lex Machina is a legal analytics software that uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to process millions of rows of court data, including judges, case outcomes, law firms, and involved parties.

Use Lex Machina’s “Case List Analyzer” to convert and organize important metrics into more digestible formats, like interactive tables and data visualizations. This will help your law firm to use legal analytics to predict likely outcomes and plan a data-driven case strategy around them.

You can also use the data to evaluate your opposing counsel, analyze the involved parties, and get an AI-generated case summarization.

6. Smith.ai

Smith.ai is a good alternative to CaptureNow if you don’t want to lose the “human touch” in your lead generation and client intake process. This turnkey legal answering solution combines live virtual receptionists and AI to ensure no call goes unanswered in your firm.

While the call-answering side is primarily manned by humans, the live chat aspect relies on AI to automatically handle website queries — answering basic questions or connecting visitors to live agents for more complex requests.

7. FirmPilot

FirmPilot is a law firm marketing platform that leverages AI to help you craft effective marketing campaigns based on your ideal audience. It also analyzes competing law firms to underline marketing strategies that work in your legal practice.

Based on our independent FirmPilot review, an AI-first approach to marketing has pros and cons. While it’s effective in speeding up tasks like content creation, competitor research, and reporting, always remember that anything AI-driven still requires human reviewers to ensure quality and brand alignment.

8. Blue J L&E

Blue J L&E utilizes the power of AI predictive analytics to help law firms build well-grounded and ironclad case strategies. It can augment your risk assessment and legal research by converting vast amounts of case data into readable reports and insights to reinforce your case strategy.

You can easily discover similar court decisions, predict possible outcomes, and identify important deciding factors that will help you build your case.

Blue J L&E also uses AI to help with scenario planning — complete with predicted timelines and matching court decisions in the past.

9. Diligen

Diligen lets you take advantage of ML to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your contract analysis.

Within seconds, it can summarize key provisions, clauses, changes, and other details that require your attention.

Diligen also constantly updates and improves its algorithms to align with your contract analysis needs. Just keep analyzing contracts to help the AI get better at the job.

10. Relativity

Originally designed to streamline the manual document review process, Relativity now includes a handful of AI features that can help law firms with case strategy.

Contract review and analysis are still important themes, with Relativity aiR helping you from identifying key documents to getting recommendations and predictions.

Generative AI also enables Relativity to assist with e-discovery, deposition outlining, and fact generation. This offers a huge advantage in the legal sector, where thorough due diligence is paramount.

11. LawDroid

LawDroid is a flexible generative AI assistant that’s specifically trained in legal use cases.

Use natural language prompts to instruct LawDroid to help research case laws, summarize legal documents, write a debt collection letter, analyze motions, and create content for lead generation.

If you require something more advanced, you can use the LawDroid no-code AI builder to automate processes other time-consuming processes. Some examples are answering phone calls, responding to live chat queries, and answering FAQs.

12. Auto-GPT

If you have an in-house Python developer (or have the resources to outsource one), Auto-GPT can help your firm create its own AI legal assistant.

Auto-GPT is an open-source framework built around the GPT-4 technology refined to autonomously accomplish tasks for your firm. Picture ChatGPT, but re-tooled for higher-level tasks with “AI Agents” that can complete objectives like crafting personalized outreach emails, generating reports for legal research, or building a case strategy based on existing facts and available documents.

Just remember that Auto-GPT is still in its infancy, and it will take your firm a lot of trial and error to train the AI for your legal workflows.

13. ChatGPT

Finally, ChatGPT is a free, all-around OpenAI chatbot that excels in basic generative text. You can use it for document drafting, creating templates or outlines for marketing content, reviewing contracts, and simplifying complex concepts for client communications.

Whatever you do, avoid using ChatGPT for fact-finding and legal research.

In an aviation injury claim in 2023, two attorneys and a law firm were fined $5,000 for including fake case citations in their arguments. These, of course, were generated and fed into their case strategy by ChatGPT.

As a rule of thumb, only use ChatGPT for low-level writing tasks. Never use it as a legal research platform unless you’re willing to put the extra work into fact-checking the AI’s outputs.

Which Law Firms Have Adopted Generative AI?

In February 2023, London-based law firm Allen & Overy announced an official partnership with Harvey AI after using the tool for their daily client work. Throughout the trial phase, Allen & Overy’s lawyers sent around 40,000 questions and prompts to streamline tasks like contract management, regulatory compliance, and due diligence.

Another note-worthy case study involves Austin-based construction litigation firm, Allensworth. The law firm turned to Everlaw and its generative functionality to accelerate tasks like data deduplication, document summarization, and e-discovery.

Lastly, The Right Law Group deployed Smith.ai to automate 95% of their lead generation funnel. And thanks to their AI-powered live chat tool, the firm was able to keep its intake channels open 24/7 — making sure that the growing firm had zero missed opportunities.

Parting Tips on Choosing The Right AI Tool For Your Law Firm

Remember the following when looking for an AI tool for your law firm:

• Understand your law firm’s specific needs. Evaluate your law firm to look for problems and bottlenecks that AI can solve, like manually reviewing contracts or missing calls due to the lack of intake specialists or receptionists.
• Investigate the developer’s track record. Be sure you choose an AI vendor that can provide your law firm with advancements and reliable support for years to come.
• Look into the AI tool’s security policies. Choose a platform that doesn’t keep or utilize sensitive legal information to train the AI model. It also helps to pick a company that’s transparent with their cybersecurity and data privacy protocols.
• Verify the required technical skills. Make sure that you have the manpower needed to successfully deploy the AI legal tech into your law firm’s processes.
• Request a demo. Most modern vendors offer virtual discovery sessions or demos to let you see firsthand what an AI solution can actually do for your law firm.