Beacuse too much AI is barely enough !
Ironclad Inc., a digital contract management startup, today announced the launch of its conversational artificial intelligence legal assistant named Jurist that will work with professionals to draft contracts and understand the law.
Michel Feaster, Ironclad’s chief product officer, told SiliconANGLE in an interview that the company is launching its AI assistant now because legal work, especially contracts, represents one of the best use cases for large language models.
“What do these LLMs do? Well, it’s reading comprehension and it’s writing,” said Feaster. “And, when you think of a lawyer drafting or editing or taking a company position, all lawyers are doing is reading, comprehending and writing.”
In fact, Feaster said, 68% of legal work takes place in in contracts, providing a lot of overlap with legal tech. The company’s customers themselves expressed a desire for a legal AI assistant to help them with contract work, which led Ironclad to launch Jurist.
Jurist was developed through five-month beta, which included in-house legal teams at companies such as AI-driven document automation company Ocrolus Inc. and e-commerce fraud protection platform Signifyd Inc., plus leading law firms such as Gunderson Dettmer.
“Jurist has already eliminated hours of manual review from our document review process,” said Katelyn Canning, director and head of legal at Ocrolus. “Its intuitive interface lets us easily define our own parameters, transforming tasks like NDA reviews into a streamlined workflow. What truly sets it apart is its ability to select the most appropriate AI model for each task behind the scenes, delivering useful results without requiring us to craft intricate prompts.”
Feaster explained that lawyers can use Jurist to save time by uploading multiple contracts to form an existing precedent to create a new one so that the AI can pre-generate a new one as a starting point. From there they can use the conversational interface to update the new document and update names and dates and fine-tune contract language.
Or, for example, if there are multiple contract documents for a business closing that need to be updated, they can all be open at once and Jurist can edit them simultaneously. Using the conversational interface, the lawyer can ask it to change the number of board seats, key terms or other elements and make sure all of the documents remain aligned.
One important feature of Jurist is that lawyers using it can see everything it does and it’s not a black box like other assistants, Feaster explained. As it operates, it provides citations and the reasoning for its decision-making.
“We made it completely transparent so that we’re not just creating trust by having a secure architecture,” Feaster said. “We also made our multi-agent assistant show its work, and the lawyer can obviously use that to then accept or reject parts of the work the Ironclad the assistant did.”
After a user prompts it to produce a draft or edit a section of a contract, all AI outputs can be examined and either accepted or rejected. According to Feaster this allows lawyers to apply their own “human intelligence and judgment” to the AI edits and therefore keeps the human in the loop at all times.
Contract law is complex and complicated even for the best professionals, who must pull information from numerous sources. Jurist does the same with by accessing legal knowledge from verified, reputable online legal sources, including FindLaw.com, EUR-Lex and Oyez.org.
Feaster said that in testing the AI assistant has also shown great results for productivity with early access partners. In one case with nondisclosure agreement reviews, one company saw the process become minutes where it ordinarily took an hour. In the case of translation from another language into English, a process that could take the better part of an entire day, plus attorney’s fees, using Jurist the job was also reduced to minutes.
“We’ve released Jurist as a standalone product because we feel this will benefit the entire legal community — whether they already use Ironclad or not,” said Ironclad President Jeremy Smith. “We are committed to enabling legal teams with the products they need to drive tangible business impact, and we believe Jurist will make a lasting impact on the future of the legal field.”
