AI-Assisted Legal Communications Drafting

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.

AI-Assisted Legal Communications Drafting

According to Bloomberg's 2023 State of Practice report, almost 2/3rds of legal professionals use genAI for legal writing for communications (memos, emails, correspondence to opposing counsel, etc.)[43]

Genie AI has reported barristers in New Zealand discovering the platform, uploading transcripts of proceedings, and then drafting correspondence such as affidavits. One such barrister who would rather not be named, suggested that the amount of clients who push-back and want to make edits to those affidavits has gone down from 2 out of every 3, to zero. As transcription improves, each AI use-case which interacts with that transcription gets better too.

Interviews we undertook as part of this research uncovered differences in how informal and formal communication is drafted. We learned that many legal professionals use tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot to draft informal language, but that formal legal language (especially in other languages) is often better handled themselves, or with specific Legal AI tools which understand, but don't over-use, legalese.