Canadian legal technology firm, Rally’s Spellbook tool seeks to help legal professionals in drafting contracts by using OpenAI’s GPT-3 large language model, which is an AI model trained on 45 terabytes of data from books and the internet. Spellbook deploys this technology specifically for legal documents and contracts. It is integrated into Microsoft Word, making it familiar to lawyers and eliminating the need for extensive onboarding.
The introduction of generative artificial intelligence technology in recent months has generated a debate on how AI can impact various industries, including knowledge professions such as law. Some view AI negatively, saying that it could render certain jobs obsolete; others take a more positive view, where AI can be a valuable tool that assists professionals and helps them become more productive.
Scott Stevenson, co-founder and CEO of Canadian legal technology firm, Rally, is of the latter school of thought. He says that the company’s AI-enabled Spellbook tool, launched in September 2022, can have a profound effect on how lawyers and firms approach the task of contract drafting.
“The main problem is that contract drafting and review is error-prone and time-consuming, which leads to unhappy clients, stressed lawyers, and lower margins for firms. We believe that the legal sector is slowed down by inefficient legal services, and lawyers want to work faster and more efficiently,” Stevenson says.
Stevenson says that lawyers, as part of the contract drafting process, must read long agreements for context, compare it with prior documents, find risks and omissions, fix formatting issues, look for conflicting terms, redline for negotiations, and explain all of this to the client. This is a huge amount of work, and Spellbook can help lawyers with all of these steps.
“This helps a lawyer review contracts faster and with much more confidence, which relieves a ton of stress in the process. It also helps solve the blank page problem, where lawyers get paralyzed thinking about where to start drafting or reviewing.”
Critics of AI often ask the question “what if the AI is wrong?” Stevenson’s response is that the major writing decisions still ultimately fall on the lawyers.
“It’s the lawyers who will always be responsible for the final decision on what to put in these agreements. But Spellbook identifies issues within the contract to which the lawyer can attend to. It’s like giving them threads to pull on, rather than just staring at the agreement.”
Moving forward, Stevenson sees the greater adoption of AI “co-pilots” in knowledge professions such as law, computer programming, and academic research. He says Spellbook was inspired by GitHub CoPilot, which automates coding in various programming languages.
“Everyone in the knowledge professions is going to have an AI co-pilot, helping remove the drudgery from tedious tasks and helping people work more efficiently. Currently, Spellbook works on a document level, helping users draft or review a single document. However, we are working on integrating Spellbook on the company level so that it can have awareness of all the contracts a company has signed.”
This will allow Spellbook to connect to the law firm or a corporation’s entire legal document library, giving the AI additional insight on how to help draft and review the organization’s contracts on a more customized level.
Harnessing AI will also have a positive financial effect on law firms, which are experiencing ever-growing contract complexity with higher expectations from their clients.
Stevenson says, “There is a huge segment of the legal services market that remains untapped, with around 70% of business legal matters never being sent to lawyers. Spellbook allows this untapped demand to be serviced due to increased efficiency. Firms can bill around 25% to 35% more, because they’re able to do more work for clients and keep them happier. This will ultimately benefit the lawyers, as well as their clients.”
“But I think our biggest selling point is the confidence and stress-reduction Spellbook provides. It is great at automatically spotting issues, so a lawyer doesn’t need to read a long contract over and over again to spot what is out of place. It is extremely important for a law firm’s reputation that they do not make mistakes.”
Media Contact:
Name: Scott Stevenson
Email: [email protected]
Original Source of the original story >> Spellbook Unveils AI Solution for Contract Drafting
