A go-to guide to legal AI tools in 2024

Discover everything you need to know about legal AI, from how it's impacting the legal profession to the best legal AI tools and use cases right now.

What is legal AI?

Legal AI describes the application of artificial intelligence within the legal profession to complete tasks in a faster, more efficient way.

In particular, legal AI refers to the use of AI technologies like machine learning and natural language processing to complete legal tasks. 

How is AI impacting the legal profession?

The impact of AI on the legal profession has been topical for some time now, and despite the legal industry’s reputation for being slow to adopt tech, many believe that the legal industry presents the best opportunities for AI-based automation.

In fact, recent research by Goldman Sachs estimates that 44 percent of legal work could be automated.

What does this actually mean for lawyers, though? 

Well, many thought leaders believe that AI will force legal professionals to focus on skills like industry expertise, relationship-building and their ability to understand and respond to complex legal matters in particular. Essentially, they believe that AI will enable lawyers to focus on the higher-value tasks that they were trained for. 

Others in the legal industry believe that the rise of legal AI will require them to upskill in terms of their technological capabilities, with discussion about some lawyers even learning to code. However, recent developments in legal AI have shown that this may not be necessary, with easy to use, no-code legal AI tools becoming available for a variety of legal tasks. 

There's also been a major step change in generative AI in recent years, with new developments in the technology making the technology more accurate and accessible than ever before. This means that, for the first time, AI isn't just for tech lawyers. There are hundreds of use cases where legal AI can prove advantageous.

AI platforms have moved beyond an ask-and-answer format; now there are hundreds of use cases that can benefit legal - Caroline Iroegbu, General Counsel, Clarity

Common legal AI use cases

Let's explore some of the most common use cases for legal AI in 2024 now, and how legal AI solutions are already making these routine legal tasks more efficient.

1. Contract management

One popular use case for legal AI is to streamline and automate the contract management process for businesses. For example, Juro’s AI contract collaboration platform enables businesses to draft, review and  summarize contracts in a matter of seconds. 

Juro users can even set specific guardrails to minimize risk when automating contracts. These guardrails are fully customizable and will be reflected in the output, making it quicker and easier to create and manage contracts at scale.

Hit the button below to find out how your business can use AI contract tools to agree contracts up to ten times faster than with traditional tools. 

2. Case outcome prediction 

Another common use case for legal AI is to help litigators predict the outcomes of judicial cases. Legal AI tools are used to sift through hundreds of judicial decisions and identify patterns and likely outcomes. 

For example, a legal AI method developed by researchers at UCL, University of Sheffield and University of Pennsylvania has been used to predict judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights with 79% accuracy. The Legal AI was effective in quickly identifying patterns in cases and using these patterns to identify outcomes with success. 

Find out more about the application of AI for case outcome predictions in this article by Futurism. 

3. eDiscovery

AI legal software can also be used to automate and speed up the eDiscovery process. Instead of manually reading and tagging large volumes of documents for an investigation, AI-enabled eDiscovery tools can automate this process, recognizing and analyzing the data within them. 

Find out more about the application of legal AI for eDiscovery in this guide by Deloitte.

4. Compliance monitoring 

Legal AI tools can also be used to monitor and notify businesses about regulatory changes that might impact them. 

Using legal AI tools to monitor these developments means that legal teams are able to dedicate more time to implementing the safeguards and measures that meet these shifting demands. This enables businesses to be proactive in ensuring compliance, not reactive. 

Find out more about the application of AI for compliance monitoring in this guide by EY.

What are the benefits of legal AI?

Legal AI has the potential to transform the way lawyers work, freeing up their time for higher-value projects and improving internal processes. Let's explore these benefits in a bit more detail now.

1. Greater efficiency 

Legal AI solutions automate and streamline admin-heavy processes like document review, contract analysis, and legal research that traditionally required significant time and resources. 

AI legal software can quickly analyze vast volumes of data on behalf of lawyers, allowing them to focus on more strategic and high-value tasks. This improved efficiency translates to enhanced productivity and faster processes overall.

2. Improved accuracy 

Legal AI tools are designed to analyze documents, contracts, and other legal materials with a high level of accuracy.

In fact, AI tools can sometimes identify nuances and inconsistencies that might be missed by human reviewers, reducing the likelihood of errors and minimizing potential legal risks. 

By ensuring higher accuracy in legal tasks, legal AI contributes to more reliable outcomes. This is a big win for lawyers that tend to have a low risk appetite. 

3. More standardization

Standardization of legal processes is essential when it comes to ensuring consistency and compliance. Since legal AI has been trained to recognize patterns within data, it’s often well-equipped to create more standardized templates, contract clauses, and legal documents. 

This consistency is particularly important when legal teams allow commercial colleagues to self-serve on tasks like contract creation. 

What are the risks associated with legal AI?

With legal AI becoming a buzzword in recent years, it's important to remember that there are also risks associated with the use of artificial intelligence in the legal industry. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways you can mitigate these risks too.

1. Breach of privacy

Since legal AI systems process vast amounts of sensitive and confidential data, it’s natural for businesses to be concerned about privacy when using them. One of the biggest risks is that this data is used to train the AI and that it could potentially be reproduced for others. There are also concerns about how and where the data is actually stored. 

To mitigate these risks, we’ve built our AI contract management software with privacy and security in mind.

As part of Juro’s lawyer-grade security, we use zero-retention APIs and dedicated servers to ensure that none of your data is sent to train large language models. We also meet stringent security standards, with SOC2 type 2 compliance and GDPR-compliant servers. 

If you’re looking to invest in legal AI tools of any kind, it’s important that you look for vendors with the same measures in place to protect your privacy. 

2. Errors and hallucinations 

AI systems, including legal AI, operate based on patterns and data from their training sets. In some instances, these systems may generate inaccurate or false results, a phenomenon known as "hallucination." In the legal context, such hallucinations could lead to erroneous legal conclusions, incorrect advice, or weak contract clauses.

Fortunately, maintaining human oversight throughout the process can help mitigate the risks associated with hallucinations and errors. This is even more evidence that AI won’t replace lawyers, but it will change the instances where their expertise is most valuable. 

Some legal AI tools, like Juro, will even allow you to set guardrails when using the AI, meaning that legal teams still implement the contract playbooks. This helps to determine the accuracy and quality of the results produced by legal AI. 

Want to find out more about Juro’s AI Legal Assistant? Book your personalized demo. 

3. Lack of transparency 

The complexity of AI algorithms can make it challenging to fully understand how decisions are reached. This lack of transparency can pose significant challenges in the legal sector, where accountability and transparency are paramount.

That's why it's important for legal AI vendors to be able to explain how their solutions work and what users should expect. This lack of transparency also makes it even more important to ensure that the AI models are trained on comprehensive, complete data - not data that will cause the AI system to inherit a bias of some sort.

What are the best legal AI tools in 2024?

1. Juro - best legal AI tool for contract management

Juro is one of the best legal AI systems for contract management as it combines AI with end-to-end contracting functionality. This is distinct from many point solutions that only focus on a certain stage of the contract lifecycle. Instead, Juro offers the functionality needed to create, edit, review, approve, negotiate, sign, store, track and renew contracts - all in one workspace.

Below are some reviews from independent review site, G2, about how Juro customers are already benefitting from the legal AI.

The Juro platform has saved my team 90% of the time we used to spend writing and sharing contracts. The platform is efficient and intuitive - Verified Juro user, G2 review 

We have significantly reduced time drafting and managing contracts since implementing Juro - Verified Juro user, G2 review 

To find out more about Juro's rich set of features and how the platform can empower your business to agree contracts up to ten times faster, get in touch.

2. Westlaw Edge - best legal AI for legal research 

Westlaw Edge is one of the best legal AI systems for legal research because it offers advanced search functionality. This reduces the administrative burden of finding relevant cases and documents and makes legal research quicker and easier. Westlaw Edge also has a comprehensive library of content for individuals to search through. This improves the quality of the legal research too.

Below are some independent reviews from Westlaw Edge customers taken from G2:

I like how easy it is to find cases with their deep search because the results are easily generated with their system. I also like that it is intuitive and easy to use for legal aid, and its AI search is the best - Verified Westlaw user, G2 review

At a time when any number of companies are offering legal research and intelligence tools using AI and analytics, Westlaw appears to have the edge - Verified Westlaw user, G2 review

3. Casetext - best legal AI tool for litigation 

Casetext is an effective legal AI solution for litigation and deposition preparation as it enables lawyers to sift through large quantities of case data in seconds, answering specific legal queries based on cases, statutes and regulations. Casetext users can also enter a legal issue and their jurisdiction to receive instant support with their upcoming depositions.

Casetext has the research resources that I need to win my cases. The searches are smart enough to catch relevant sources that I might not have found otherwise - Verified Casetext user, G2 review 

Casetext's "Parallel Search" is an extremely useful tool to be assured of finding useful case law. Casetext continues to add features that make it a vital tool in my commercial litigation practice - Verified Casetext use, G2 review

4. Brightflag - best legal AI tool for legal operations

Brightflag is one of the best legal AI solutions for broader legal operations. The vendor offers e-billing and matter management functionality, along with spend management and automated invoice reviews. This makes Brightflag a popular choice for businesses that need a comprehensive legal operations tool and want to leverage the benefits of legal AI.

Brightflag has proven itself invaluable in just a few months. We now have insight into data that we never even tracked before, let alone could leverage - Verified Brightflag user, G2 review

Brightflag's AI-Powered software makes invoice review effortless and efficient and saves us time and money - Verified Brightflag user, G2 review

Want to find out more?

Want to find out more about how legal AI can help your business to agree contracts faster and reduce routine admin? Fill in the form below to book a personalized demo of Juro's AI contract collaboration platform.