Meet 4 in-house lawyers using gen AI every day

As the legal profession moves past hype and into reality when it comes to generative AI, which are the use cases where GCs are seeing the most value? We asked four to share their practical experiences with us.

Laura Jeffords Greenberg: “This is the same kind of analysis we would provide as lawyers”

Laura is Senior Legal Director at Leapsome, and previously held a number of senior legal roles at fast-scaling technology companies. As an early adopter of generative AI, she constantly looks for ways to find efficiencies through the latest technology.

“ChatGPT is amazing, but it doesn't solve all our problems. So normally I'll ask myself three questions. 

• What problem am I looking to solve? 
• Is ChatGPT the right tool? 
• Can I verify the output?

Following those three principles, I can highlight three areas where I use generative AI as an in-house lawyer:

1. Proofreading

In this instance, I drafted a mutual non-disclosure agreement that we really wanted to give to the sales team so that they could run with it and then we would never see it again. I uploaded a mutual non-disclosure agreement and said, ‘can you proofread it for me?’"

"You can see that it's actually come back, identified the sections, and then told me where I can make changes for improvement. You can do proofreading for grammar, but you can also do it for style, consistency, plain English, and even tone of voice.

2. Data visualization

Imagine that I have to give a presentation to the CFO and the CEO to provide an overview of where we are with all of our contracts based on key metrics. 

How do I take that information and then get it to do a quick visual so that I can present it to the leadership team? Well, instead of taking my data, I actually used ChatGPT to create dummy data for a presentation. I then prompted it to create an Excel sheet that has contract information in it that I could use to then generate visuals."

"In the output, it pulled out contract ID, party name, type, start, end date, contract value, and status. I can now use that as a basis to create my own presentation with the real data, with these dummy graphs as a guide.

3. Analysis

In this instance, I upload a company policy document to ChatGPT and inform it that an employee has asked me whether or not they can join a non-profit board to make a mobile game.

ChatGPT applies a decent two-step analysis, based on what it learned from our policy document. This is exactly the same kind of legal analysis that we would provide as lawyers, going through and breaking down the policy. That saves me a tonne of time and I can move on to other tasks."

Yuliaa Andrusiv: “it helps us get the negotiation outcome we want faster”

Yuliia Andrusiv is Legal Counsel at 3Commas, a leading developer of crypto trading software. 3Commas operates with a lean legal team but has more than 100 employees to support around Europe.

Yuliia and her team deploy Juro’s legal AI Assistant to gain an advantage during the contract lifecycle - particularly when negotiating with unhelpful counterparties.

“The counterparty might leave comments and amendments, but not propose a version of the clause. Juro’s AI function handles that for us and creates a clause when we need it.”

"The draft clause I get back is always really on-the-money. It’s faster and more convenient than Chat GPT because it analyses all the context from the contract itself, and we can stay within our contract platform without having to switch between different tools.

It definitely helps us get to the outcome we want in negotiation faster. AI is a big part of our future as legal teams, and it’s great to be able to use it so easily for our contracts.”

Read more about how 3Commas accelerates contracts with AI Assistant.

Lucy Ashenhurst: “you enable yourself to be better equipped for big decisions”

Lucy is a fractional GC. Having held legal leadership positions at a number of high-growth companies, she now advises a number of startups and scaleups, covering a wide range of legal matters.

“When using generative AI, I don’t ask it to do things I couldn't do well myself - just things I could do, but slowly. Then I can know if the work has been done well, and I can’t suffer from inaccuracy in the results. I also always ask for sources.

Here are three examples where I use generative AI:

1. Legal research

In this case I would describe a scenario, and ask (for example) ‘Which regulations in the US would apply to these activities?’ I would also always ask for sources to be cited.

2. Generating training content

This might be useful when I need to deliver a training presentation on a legal topic to an audience of non-lawyers - generative AI can give me the headers and bullets points to get started.

3. Summarising regulations

In an area like climate, for example, there’s a huge amount of informal regulations and codes of conduct. It saves so much time to copy/paste those into Chat GPT and ask it to summarize these until I reach an A4 summary.

Not only does automating these tasks save a vast amount of time, but it also helps to avoid decision fatigue - you don’t spend all your time on boring decisions that don’t matter. If you can automate non-critical, non-material decision-making, then you enable yourself to be better equipped for big decisions."

Michael Haynes: “it’s like having a really great trainee”

Michael is General Counsel at Juro, and previously held senior legal roles at a number of hypergrowth scaleups. As a legal leader with an inbox full of contracts, he leverages Juro’s AI Assistant to remove routine contract work from his to-do list wherever possible.

"I use generative AI to streamline my workload in three main ways:

1. Setting guardrails for contract review

In AI Assistant, I can set up an AI playbook at a template or a document level, to provide context and constraints for every supplier contract that I review.

For example, I might want AI Assistant to always act on these contracts from the position of an English-qualified lawyer, with expertise in commercial contracts, acting for the customer; and I can also set out in very basic terms in natural language the things that we don't accept under our playbook.

It's like having a really good trainee - it’s really helpful, it speeds things up, it’s very efficient. but you still ultimately take responsibility for the output."

2. Summarizing contract information

"Part of my job as a lawyer every day is to translate things in a contract for business users or my clients internally, who rely on me to advise them. 

To do this, I might ask AI Assistant to write an email to my CFO, summarizing the key legal risks in this contract. The output I get is a draft email which I can kind of click and copy to my clipboard to take into my email browser.

3. Drafting

"There are lots of ways to leverage AI for drafting within Juro. For example, I can pick a clause to shorten; because it's served up in context, AI Assistant will highlight information in the clause to help you understand its meaning.

Or I could draft from scratch; for example, if I need a notices clause, and I ask it to draft one, it will rely on the AI playbook I mentioned earlier. It will act as an English-qualified lawyer, so I should end up with a notices provision that looks familiar to me as an English lawyer. 

I can copy and paste it into the agreement, and I'll just review it and make sure I'm happy with it, and it’s ready to go."

Find out more about generative AI for in-house legal teams

If you’re looking to take advantage of the latest technology, but wondering where to start, check out our guides on AI for lawyers.

Alternatively, request a demo of Juro to talk to a contract specialist about how AI can help you get contracts agreed up to 10x faster.