Key Areas of Legal AI Development

Note: This article is just one of 60+ sections from our full report titled: The 2024 Legal AI Retrospective - Key Lessons from the Past Year. Please download the full report to check any citations.

III. Key Areas of Legal AI Development

AI in the legal sector is advancing in several key areas. This section merely touches on some of the most prominent developments of Legal AI in legal practice, backed by recent data and research. Each will be covered in much more detail later on.

Most bleeding-edge research is conducted via collaborations between:

• Law Firms

• Legal Technology companies

• Academic Institutions

• Large Language Model Providers

• Government and Regulatory Bodies

All of whom will need to work more closely together than ever before, in order to keep up with the pace of change.

The 2024 ACC Chief Legal Officers report shows that 45% of Chief Legal Officers (CLOs) will invest in new technology solutions to boost operational efficiency in 2024—the highest since 2021.[25]

We will therefore investigate the following key areas:

A. Document review and contract analysis

• Natural Language Processing in Legal Text Analysis

• Contract analysis

• AI-Driven Legal Research and Knowledge Management

B. Due diligence and compliance

• AI-Powered Document Review

• AI-Enhanced Risk Assessment and Management

• Automated Regulatory Compliance Monitoring

• Summarizing Legislation

• Reacting to Legislative Changes

• Data Privacy and Security Compliance

• Automated Due Diligence Reporting

• Automated trademark infringement monitoring

C. Legal and contract drafting

• AI-Assisted Legal Communications Drafting

• AI-Assisted Document Drafting

• Open Access and Open source Legal AI

• AI Contract Generators

• Multilingual Contract Drafting

• AI-enhanced Contextual Clause Suggestions

• Emerging Legal Editors and Drafting Tools

D. Data Governance

• IP Risk Assessment in Data Flows

• Compliance Decisions

These developments in Legal AI will reshape the legal landscape, offer new efficiencies and insights and also present real challenges.