Key considerations for buying legal tech with AI

Good legal technology needs to solve your problems to be valuable. That’s why we built LawVu – because we recognized the need for a new kind of product that solves your problems better than what was already available, with features like great design and usability, unified workflows in a single UI, easy configuration, we could go on!

AI is like any feature – it should be part of a product when it can be used to create value. For example, there’s real value in using AI to automate administrative tasks so you get time back for strategic work or quickly identify patterns across hundreds or thousands of data points which would be hard for a human to do reliably.

AI at LawVu

At LawVu, our AI philosophy is to focus on identifying places in your workflow where we can add value without introducing risk.

We also leverage the best technology partners to implement AI in a way that is practical, transparent, delivers value fast and is secure.

We have already solved the critical problem of getting your historical contract data into our CLM as quickly as possible. We do this with our AI-powered bulk upload, which allows you to import contracts into LawVu four times faster, saving thousands of valuable lawyer hours per year.

The next cab off the rank is AI-powered contract extraction, where AI pulls out key clauses so you can populate the contract data in your CLM quickly, with less human effort. Again, this gets critical data into your system of record, so you can use it for alerts, notifications, reporting – and generally action contracts faster, without spending valuable time on manual data entry. This also makes it more likely for you to have the standardized data you need in the system, which is critical for good reporting.

LawVu’s AI Assist is our latest feature and is now in beta, leveraging the latest generative AI models from Microsoft Azure OpenAI to help summarize legal documents in a safe and secure way.

Our AI features are built with a simple UI that makes it easy for you to assess and review AI-extracted data, so you can apply your expertise to ensure accuracy without interrupting your workflow.

The underlying technology

AI-powered products (like all features) have to be trustworthy: reliable, secure and easy to use and understand. This is especially critical in legal tech where the inherent risks of AI or badly implemented AI can expose you to risk or simply shift the way you spend time from one set of low value tasks to another one.

For this reason, we have partnered with established and trusted AI heavyweights Zuva and Microsoft to bring these efficiencies to your workflow in a way you can trust.

Things to watch out for

One of the advantages of using dedicated in-house legal technology, like LawVu, is that we build features that solve your specific problems with deep knowledge of the in-house legal domain. And the application of AI is no exception, with every feature we release designed specifically for in-house legal workflows. So when you are getting tempted by those glossy AI features out there, always check that it is designed for the in-house use case and not a more generic or even legal firm workflow. LawVu’s AI-powered features are a great example of our investment in tech returning significant value that you could not build on your own or expect to be available in a generic tool.

Another thing to look out for is AI automation loops. As we’ve said, AI is designed to save you time but if it increases risk or creates unnecessary back and forth with the other side, no one is saving time. Redlining is a great example, with some tools being so heavy on redlining they miss the commercial decisions or trade offs an in-house lawyer might make. The AI model will redline everything it’s trained to, and then the other side does the same with their AI redlining tool. And back and forth we go. This is something to be wary of when assessing AI and an example of the in-depth workflow assessments LawVu undertakes. Be sure to assess a vendor’s implementation of AI alongside the real life human-assisted workflow scenarios you care about. These are the kind of assessments LawVu undertakes as part of our approach, in close collaboration with our customers.

Conclusion

Innovation and disruption are important in technology – but only when they deliver the outcome you need, not when they’re a gimmick. Leveraging AI is crucial to save time for in-house legal, but only when it’s part of a product that best serves your needs overall.