From "Hello World" to Jurist: How AI is Redefining Legal Workflows
Written by Zuhair Saadat - Legal Engineer, Technical and Legal Operations Services at LECG
Ironclad recently released “Jurist”, an AI Agent for Legal teams that sits atop its standard contract life management platform.
For those of us who learned to code, this is a new “Hello World” moment: with a few lines of code, “Hello World” appears on the screen, but as exciting as it is to see the output from our input, we know we’ve barely scratched the surface of the code’s capabilities.
Jurist presents similar promises of powerful outputs from perfectly crafted inputs. And survey after survey confirms that investment in AI tools is increasing, but are you making the most of them?
In my former role as a contracts manager, I used Jurist to draft bespoke agreements incorporating the agreed-upon business terms shared by our stakeholders. It was a compelling enough use of the tool that Ironclad covered it in a recent customer story on their website.
Now, as a Legal Engineer at LECG, my corporate legal clients face the same challenges I did: make use of the limited resources at their disposal to accelerate and improve their contributions to the business.
With adept, knowledgeable prompt engineering, I’ve found that Jurist is a powerful AI Agent to assist in these four common use cases:
Redlining Counterparty Paper
Many of my clients wish to limit the scenarios where they must consider a counterparty’s contract. They increase risk by virtue of introducing non-standard terms to a deal and can be an additional review burden at quarter end.
I found two ways legal teams can both mitigate risk and reduce their own review time:
(1) I prompted Jurist to create a memo-style analysis of our contract terms against the respective terms from the counterparty. The memo flagged in red any counterparty term that violated one of our key standard positions. For terms that deviated from our standard preference but were not otherwise one of our high-priority positions, Jurist highlighted the term in yellow. All other terms in agreement with our own were labeled green.
(2) Adding to the above prompt, I instructed Jurist to redline each red-flagged clause to align those terms with our own. The end-result was a redlined agreement that our General Counsel was able to download and send to the counterparty for review.
Drafting From Precedent
I field this common ask: “Can you assist us with building a workflow for a specific client of ours? We have forms and terms we’ve agreed to in the past with them, it doesn’t make sense for us to process new contracts with them through our other Ironclad workflows.”
Jurist is a potential solution and would allow you to reduce the technical burden and professional service cost of standing up and then maintaining those workflows.
I found three of Jurist’s tools useful for solving this. First, Jurist allows you to upload existing agreements or query executed contracts in Ironclad’s repository. Second, Jurist allows you to save prompts – prompts either specific for yourself or prompts usable by anyone on your team. While even a single purpose prompt could speed your work, I identified immense possibility with creating client-specific prompts to handle the common change order terms that arise during the course of an engagement. And finally, Jurist’s drafting agent was able to follow the prompt to identify and populate the precedent automatically with new commercial details while leaving the previously agreed legal language intact.
Scaling Processes
In the two examples above, I focused on how Jurist operates as an AI agent for legal professionals. Custom business terms, however, may require approvals from non-legal stakeholders, like a Chief Financial Officer.
Through Ironclad today, it is possible–without AI–to automatically send notifications that include contract properties to an approver. For example, payment terms or renewal type. Those notifications must be pre-configured, however, and don’t place the properties within the overall context of the deal or the contract.
Jurist would allow for the legal team to send a more comprehensive summary by reading the draft itself. The Finance team is likely to be involved in complex negotiations which include non-standard clauses, but this summary would serve as one final check for approvals of all negotiated terms before putting pen to paper. A robust prompt can be an asset especially in long cycles where terms may have been negotiated over months with multiple stakeholders. In short, Jurist can help reconfirm relevant business terms for stakeholders and complete this task in a matter of seconds, vs. the minutes or hours it may take a Contracts Manager to prepare a similar comprehensive summary.
Building a Playbook
Ask an attorney how they’d draft a contract from scratch, and they’re likely to say they would rely on existing templates they can then conform to their individual needs. This makes sense–why reinvent when there may be years of precedent?
However, even this approach is intimidating: with so many templates and precedents to choose from, where does one begin?
Jurist, being built on an LLM, contains a literal library of clauses. Let’s look at the audit clause, with the intent of building a playbook for that clause.
If you’re starting from scratch, Jurist can provide twenty examples of an audit clause. If results are too broad, you can narrow your ask to write clauses specific to your industry. If you’re still not getting what you need, you can further refine by describing your company in more detail, and who you’re trying to reach (e.g. a customer, a partner, or vendor). At this point, your prompt is probably relatively long, but you can further still refine outputs by attaching precedent clauses or contracts you’ve executed in the past, so Jurist has more specific bearings on what outputs would be right for you.
Putting it all together: Working with LECG to Enhance Ironclad’s Jurist
If you’re thinking that executing on the processes above would take their own set of skills, you wouldn’t be wrong. Like those early-in-their-journey coders looking to go beyond “Hello World”, you will discover that the quality of your inputs impacts the quality of the output and the variable outcomes are endless. Tackling large-scale projects with AI assistance may require expert guidance. Even understanding what’s possible based on your own set of requirements and unique business needs can be detailed by a resource well versed in the space.
LECG can help you choose and then implement AI tools like Jurist that are right for your business. With our real-world experience employing AI tools, we can share best practices about what’s worked in the past, but we can also tailor AI-based solutions for your recurring tasks. Do you have a task not described above? Contact LECG to determine the best tool to achieve your objectives.