Builds tools for employment, ESG, property law and more.
Clayton Utz has built a suite of tools to automate general and specialised legal tasks with OpenAI and RelativityOne, and is looking to save its lawyers more time by trialling Lexis+AI to generate documents.
The law firm, one of Australia’s ‘big six,’ will evaluate Lexis+AI’s ability to generate first drafts of documents including advice to clients, internal emails and court filings such as statements of claim.
After LexisNexis announced Clayton Utz’s participation in an Australian preview of the solution, which is only commercially available in the US, the firm’s chief executive partner Emma Covacevich said: “Lexis+ AI will allow us to make even more effective use of legal information resources.”
The Lexis+AI pilot follows a series of previous investments in automation.
Clayton Utz has a team of over 100 staff dedicated to building tools for both firm-wide legal tasks and niche operations specific to environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG), employment, property and other fields of law.
Data broker LexisNexis, most known for its legal document subscription services, tapped Clayton Utz and Holding Redlich to provide feedback on Lexis+AI’s ability to automate tasks within the Australian legal sector before its commercial release in the Asia Pacific in the coming months.
“As LexisNexis is a key content provider, we see its AI solutions having an important role in our own AI program and helping us to deliver a new level of client experience,” Covacevich added.
Built on two LLMs — Anthropic’s Claude 2 and OpenAI’s GPT-4 — and trained on LexisNexis’ 1.23 million court opinions, statutes, filings, and secondary materials, Lexis+ AI automatically drafts documents in response to lawyers’ prompts.
LexisNexis granted Clayton Utz preview access because it has already rolled out Lexis+AI’s more research-focused automation tool Lexis+, to its roughly 1500 staff, including just under 200 partners, a Clayton Utz spokesperson told iTnews.
“Lexis+ is providing our solicitors a superior platform that is easier and faster to use — research takes less time due to the use of extractive AI. We are truly excited to see what the generative AI [Lexis+AI] solution holds for us.”
The automation use cases that Clayton Utz will trial with Lexis+AI, and has already rolled out with Lexis+ and the tools that it’s built with RelativityOne, Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and other SaaS partners, include both automated research assistance and document-generation functions; Lexis+AI will advance its use of the latter.
Document generation: pros, risks and safeguards
Trialling Lexis+AI will not be the first time that the firm has sped up its workflow by automating content production; some of its in-house tools have document-generation functions that have “freed up our lawyers’ time significantly” Clayton Utz partner William Howe said last year.
More at
