| Not op but someone that currently runs an ai contract review tool. To answer some of your questions: - contract review works very well for high volume low risk contract types . Think slas, SaaS… these are contracts comercial legal teams need to review for compliance reasons but hate it. - it’s less good for custom contracts - what law firms would benefit from is just natural language search on their own contracts. - it also works well for due diligence. Normally lawyers can’t review all contracts a company has. With a contract review tool they can extract all the key data/risks - LLM doesn’t need to provide advice. LLM can just identify if x or y is in the contract. This improving the process of
review. - context windows keep increasing but you don’t need to send the whole contract to the LLM . You can just identify the right paragraphs and send that. - things changes a lot in the past year. It would cost us $2 to review a contract now it’s $0.2 . Responses are more accurate and faster - I don’t do contract generation but have explored this. I think the biggest benefit isn’t generating the whole contract but to help the lawyer rewrite a clause for a specific need. The standard CLM already have contract templates that can be easily filled in. However after the template is filled the lawyer needs to add one or two clauses . Having a model trained on the companies documents would be enough. Hope this helps |
Do you think LLMs have meaningfully greater capabilities than existing tools (like Kira)?
I take your point on low stakes contracts vs. sophisticated work. There has been automation at the "low end" of the legal totem pole for a while. I recall even ten years ago banks were able to replace attorneys with automations for standard form contracts. Perhaps this is the next step on that front.
I agree that rewriting existing contracts is more useful than generating new ones--that is what most attorneys do. That said, I haven't been very impressed by the drafting capabilities of the LLM legal tools I have seen. They tend to replicate instructions almost word for word (plain English) rather than draw upon precedent to produce quality legal language. That might be enough if the provisions in question are term/termination, governing law, etc. But it's inadequate for more sophisticiated revisions.