by Barbara Taylor and Elisabeth Cappuyns
Generative AI (“GenAI”) is transforming the legal profession in many ways. From reviewing and summarizing legal documents to generating new insights, GenAI can help lawyers work faster, smarter, and more creatively. While much has been published from the perspective of a litigator, this article will focus on the GenAI needs of a transactional lawyer. How can you leverage the power of GenAI in your own practice? The key steps are:
- Identifying your options
- Choosing the right technology for your practice
- Successfully onboarding and launching the new technology.
- Getting the most out of your chosen tool
How to identify your options
The legal technology landscape is vast and continues to grow. Fortunately, there are resources for finding tools. A helpful starting point is Legaltech Hub, a directory of legal technology tools and services where buyers can compare features and functionality in light of their use case.
GenAI functionality continues to expand and improve, but most offerings cover one or more of the following skills: research, search, review, summarize, draft, compare, and translate.
How to choose the right technology
There are three types of criteria for choosing the right tool. The first set of criteria relates to information security and data privacy. These requirements are foundational. If a vendor cannot meet certain security and privacy standards, you should look elsewhere. If you do not have access to an Information Security professional, you can look for external certifications that attest to a certain level of controls. SOC2 certification and ISO certifications are good examples. You should also be mindful of unique considerations that relate to your specific practice. For example, if you routinely work with Protected Health Information, you will want a Business Associate Agreement with the vendor.
The second type of criteria is based on the substantive legal needs and opportunities of your practice(s). This requires the identification of specific use cases to streamline legal and administrative workflows and improve the work product. It also involves ongoing testing to optimize the GenAI functionality and collecting feedback and examples. In addition, a gap and needs analysis can help identify other opportunities to support practices or clients that currently lack tech support.
With a focus on the needs of a transactional lawyer, a few illustrative use cases can include:
- Contract review and Q&A. GenAI can help us understand complex contractual provisions, explain their meaning, and make them more or less buyer-friendly, investor-friendly, or lender-friendly. It can also review, evaluate, and synthesize comments to agreements more quickly. Lastly, it can extract data points and contract provisions for benchmarking, negotiations, and other purposes. For example, GenAI can be used to:
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- Analyze and evaluate M&A covenants, indemnities, and termination provisions, as well as brainstorm ways to make them more or less buyer-friendly;
- Summarize and explain complex “waterfall” distribution provisions in limited partnership agreements and the letter of credit provisions in a lease;
- Help visualize and review amendments to a credit agreement in memo or table format, and further tailor the output to focus on a specific topic, like interest rates or coverage ratios;
- Extract key datapoints and information from purchase and sale agreements, joint venture agreements, and leases; and
- Abstract the material data points from a lease for a lease abstract.
- Due diligence review support. GenAI can help review common due diligence documents like customer / vendor contracts, organizational documents, as well as equity, debt, and other financing documents. For example, GenAI can:
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- Produce timelines of organizational documents, share issuances, and indebtedness, with date and time information and a short event description;
- Search for specific resolutions, agreements, amendments, or financing arrangements to surface relevant results and accelerate the diligence process;
- Summarize Word or PDF files in any language into English for easier oversight, review, and delegation to local counsel as necessary; and
- Help identify or confirm that requested diligence files may be missing or mislabeled.
- Drafting, review, and administrative support. GenAI can help facilitate and improve workflows and processes. For example, we have used GenAI to:
- Rework sentences and paragraphs, refine and structure arguments and provisions;
- Review and summarize data analytics reports; and
- Save time by providing a helpful starting point for new content and reformatting existing content.
The third set of criteria relates to the potential business benefits of using GenAI, such as using the increased efficiencies to improve the results of alternative fee arrangements and/or reduce write-downs and write-offs. Clients are increasingly expecting, if not demanding, that these efficiency tools be implemented as they become aware of how well these tools can save attorney time and therefore legal spend. And of course, GenAI functionality can streamline many repetitive, administrative, and tedious tasks, allowing lawyers to focus on higher value and more interesting work. This can in turn improve lawyer satisfaction and wellbeing.
How to onboard and launch new technology
Once you have identified, reviewed, procured, and tested a tool, there are a number of ways to support a successful launch of the new technology. Some key steps can help start on the right foot:
- Implement a policy for the use of GenAI tools, including your firm’s requirements for lawyers to get access to these tools, such as an ethics training on the responsible use of GenAI, and thorough training on the specific tool. For additional insight into the ethics of GenAI use, see Dyane O’Leary, GenAI is Not a Legal Tool. Or is it?, 68.2 Bos Bar. J. (Spring 2024).
- Create excitement and interest with a communications campaign that involves senior leadership to highlight your firm’s position on and plans for the use of GenAI tools;
- Offer ongoing trainings and forums for questions and knowledge sharing; and
- Identify and highlight power users and champions in various practices with regular communications.
How to get the most out of your tool
After you have launched a new GenAI tool, even more so than with more traditional technology tools, it is important to continue the conversation with your users about new functionality, unexpected applications and other use cases. For example, you can:
- Implement dynamic, tailored, practice-specific trainings, especially when new functionality is added;
- Encourage users to try new things, explore, and be creative. GenAI is more flexible than other technology and we have found unexpected use cases with unconventional applications; and
- Share use cases in open houses, panels, and on-demand resources, like intranets, to provide ongoing ideas and applications.
Conclusion
Since our first interactions with GenAI starting in late 2022, we have had more interest from our lawyers than in any of our past experiences with technology in legal practice. The current applications and expected potential of GenAI in legal will likely only increase.
Barbara Taylor is Chief Knowledge Officer and Elisabeth Cappuyns is Director of Knowledge Management at DLA Piper LLP.
