Legal Geek 2023 round-up: separating fact from fiction in the world of legal AI

Legal Geek round-up from the Robin AI team

We had a blast at Legal Geek 2023! As always, it was a great opportunity to connect with lawyers and legal tech professionals to discuss some of the emerging trends and to showcase Robin, our AI contract copilot. We loved hearing the feedback from those who attended our CTO and Co-Founder, James Clough's presentation - he discussed how large language models were being deployed at Robin AI to accelerate routine contracts work and to help lawyers to free up their time.  We thought it would be useful to do a round-up of the key takeaways from across the Robin AI team - and to share more information about James Clough's presentation for anyone who missed it!  

It's hard to separate fact from fiction when it comes to legal AI 

It seems that every legal technology company has released some type of generative AI add-on to their products. It's exciting new technology - and all the legal tech companies were keen to show that they were making developments in this space! But that left us all thinking that it is actually quite hard to understand who has legal AI products that are available to use now, that have real-world applications for lawyers, and who is currently building products that might be available for lawyers to use in the near future. It was also hard to distinguish what types of generative AI offerings were simply a wrapper for Open AI’s GPT-3 from those that had been tailored to different use cases across the legal industry.

Our CEO Richard Robinson has always been very clear on this point – we’ve had a free version of Robin AI that is available for all to use that was released in February this year. The purpose of this free account is to enable as many lawyers as possible to get their hands on the technology, so they can understand for themselves the potential that LLMs can deliver for optimising processes, and driving efficiency in teams. Using our AI contract copilot is like having your own dedicated legal AI assistant, and it’s been fascinating to speak to lawyers about how they see the applications for their own in-house legal teams or practices.

For more information on our strict “show don’t tell” policy, you can read Richard’s thoughts on the matter here. We have always, and will continue to enable everyone to create a free account with Robin AI.

Applications for LLMs in legal

It was a useful opportunity to reflect on the different ways that Large Language Models (LLMs) can be deployed to help with different legal tasks, from suggesting edits to contracts, to enabling fast contract querying using natural language. James Clough spoke in his presentation on the Disco Stage about some of the ways that Robin AI is leveraging LLMs to help lawyers to have better access to their contract data, and to accelerate contract processes.

1)   Natural language contract search

Robin AI’s AI-powered search functionality was released earlier this year. It’s a game-changer when it comes to finding information, including terms buried in specific clauses. With this feature, you can ask questions about your contract database in natural language, like “show me all my Supplier Agreements with an auto-renewal clause” and the specific contracts, where the highlighted clauses are shown to you in seconds. For in-house legal teams that are juggling tens of thousands of contracts, this type of tool makes it easy to find data, compare clauses, and use those specific clauses or wording for other contracts that are in play. We’ve heard directly from our customers about how this feature has enabled them to save hundreds of hours when finding specific clauses and precedents. You can read more information about AI-powered search here. Gone are the ways of wearing out your Ctrl+F keys!

2)   AI suggested edits based on playbooks

We know that for in-house legal teams, the biggest challenging when reviewing and marking up contracts is creating an accurate, consistent approach across all contracts that aligns with the company’s approach and fallback positions. Everyone is interested in accelerating the turnaround time of routine documents like NDAs, Supplier Agreements and more, but this can’t be done at the expense of quality and accuracy. Which is why using generic LLMs to review and markup clauses isn’t helpful – they may be able to suggest some best practice, but they haven’t been trained on how to review and markup clauses in line with your company positions.

This is why Robin AI’s playbooks are so special. We’ve helped legal teams to accelerate the time it takes to review and mark up contracts by over 80%. By harnessing AI to suggest edits in line with your company’s specific instructions and provisions, we ensure that you can quickly review contracts, without having to compromise on the consistency and accuracy. It has the added bonus of being a great way to help more junior team members to understand more about the company positions – and it’s a great way to boost team morale by getting more experienced lawyers through the routine work as quickly as possible. We’ve had great feedback about lawyers being able to focus on higher value tasks because they’ve got their time back using Robin, our AI contract copilot. You might actually be able to leave the office on time for a change!

3)   Chat that can read 150+ pages

Given that Robin AI’s contract copilot is specifically designed to help lawyers to fly through their contracts, it’s important to harness technology that can effectively read and understand full contracts in order to provide the best answers to questions. Which is why our AI copilot is so helpful – it can understand a huge contract with hundreds of pages, and can answer questions for you about that document, or help you to find key information buried in it. You can speak to the chat in a conversational way, and get help with common tasks like summarising obligations, drafting emails to summarise key information, or by helping with tasks like the translation of specific clauses.

We enjoyed showing some of those who stopped by for a demo of the software the ability to do some of the more fun things, like summarising a contract as a poem, but that is simply to show how powerful the AI is in how it reads and understands the documents. We know that using generative AI is a new step for a lot of lawyers, which is why our AI contract copilot will only answer information about the contract in front of it, and can draw your attention to specific clauses or terms in the contract to give you the ability to check the answers yourself. Everyone that we spoke to was very keen to have a dedicated AI assistant who could help with simple tasks that are often the most time-consuming and tedious ones to manage.

Legal GeekConference takeaways

We were really pleased to see how many lawyers created their accounts with Robin AI so that they could get their hands on the technology straight away. We have a strong belief in giving everyone access to our products so everyone can learn more about how large language models can be used to make contracts simple. You can create your free account with Robin AI here.

We talked to many of the Legal Geek attendees about how we've partnered with Anthropic and AWS, combining LLMs with the power of our proprietary machine-learning models and deep expertise in legal to develop products that truly add value to lawyers, and that are uniquely tailored to the day-to-day requirements of lawyers. This means harnessing the power of LLMs beyond their basic chat functionality - and to use them to search through large data sets, or to suggest edits to contracts that match company playbooks.

Overall, Legal Geek was a fantastic opportunity to connect with lawyers from the UK and beyond about how they’re thinking about using AI products in their businesses, and where they see the use cases that could add the most value. We were really excited by the appetite and the enthusiasm to pilot new technology, and to contribute to the conversation about the development of new features and products.

Legal Geek always sets itself apart from the other legal technology conferences by having a more interactive approach, by making learning about new technology and innovation really fun, and by getting some of the best speakers and thought leaders in the legal technology space together for 2 days of collaboration and ideas sharing.

If you missed the opportunity to speak to our team at Legal Geek, we’d be delighted to give you a walk through of Robin AI’s contract copilot, please get in touch below. We've also produced a Guide to Generative AI in the Legal Industry if you'd like to read more about the applications for LLMs in legal.