There are now hundreds of specialized GenAI tools that can be used in legal practice. These tools are marketed to assist with: contract review and analysis, document and contract drafting, legal research, eDiscovery, transcription, e-billing, and many other legal practice tasks.
It is important to remember that just because there is a GenAI tool marketed for a legal task, it doesn't mean that GenAI is the best solution for that task or workflow. A great deal of work is being done on benchmarking and assessing these types of tools.
This guide will highlight some of the tools we believe law students should be familiar with. As with all of the content in this guide, the resources we highlight will be updated. Here are a few helpful overviews of AI products in legal practice:
A note on hallucinations
Many specialized legal research tools contend that Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) greatly reduces the rate of hallucination in the products. RAG is a technique in AI where a model retrieves relevant information from a large dataset and then uses that information to generate more accurate and contextually relevant responses. It combines the strengths of both information retrieval and text generation to improve the quality of AI-generated content. While RAG appears to greatly reduce the number of hallucinations as compared to asking legal questions in general purpose models, a recent Stanford study argues that this rate of reduction has been exaggerated.
Lexis+ AI is now available to all faculty and law students.
Lexis+ AI offers a range of capabilities, but it's important to understand its limitations. For instance, it can't draft a 50-state survey or an entire contract! Also keep in mind that not all content, including some secondary sources, is included in Lexis+ AI. Also, law students do not have access to the "Summarize a Document" feature that is available in the law firm version (this feature is available to Berkeley Law faculty).
Westlaw currently only offers one GenAI product to law students: Ask Practical Law AI. This tools is limited to information in Westlaw's Practical Law database.
Westlaw's AI-Assisted Research is currently available to law firms; we expect that law students and faculty will have access in January 2024.
In the summer of 2024, Bloomberg Law made an announcement that Bloomberg Law Answers use GenAI technology to generative legal research answers.
More and more law firms are creating their own specialized GenAI tools to make legal work smoother and stand out from the competition. These tools are customized to fit the firm’s specific needs, helping with everything from drafting documents to conducting legal research, all while keeping in line with the firm’s unique practices. Here are a few examples: