Feature
Law firms might understandably be leery of AI after a widely reported incident where an attorney turned in a ChatGPT-written brief with case law made up by the software. But that’s no reason to write off AI legal software. AI software is a useful tool to help take some of the drudgery out of legal practices. Here, we look at some of the top companies providing AI software to the legal industry.
1. CoCounsel
Casetext’s CoCounsel is described as an AI-powered legal assistant, specializing in legal research around case law. And while it’s based on GPT, it uses a different large language model (LLM) from ChatGPT that works with Casetext’s proprietary legal databases to ensure it doesn’t make cases up. In addition to legal research, the software also reviews documents and checks contracts for compliance. The company said it has been working in AI since 2013. Named as one of Fast Company’s “most innovative companies” this year, Casetext was acquired by Thomson Reuters last year for $650 million.
2. Luminance
Luminance is specifically intended for contract processing and review and consists of three products. Luminance Corporate performs contract processing, while Luminance Diligence performs contract review. For example, the platform flags non-standard clauses and suggests alternative phrasing. In addition, the company also offers Luminance Discovery, which summarizes documents for e-discovery purposes. Notably, the software works with more than 80 languages, including non-Latin alphabets and right-to-left text. The company is based in the U.K. and recently received $40 million in its Series B financing round.
3. Harvey
The product isn’t widely available yet, but Harvey is getting wide attention — it reportedly has a 15,000-firm waiting list. Due for wider availability in Q3 of this year, it’s a generative AI product based on GPT that uses natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML) and data analytics for legal work, such as contract analysis, due diligence, litigation and regulatory compliance, and the company is partnering with OpenAI to develop custom case law models. In addition, the company is partnering with firms, such as PwC and Allen & Overy. It recently received $80 million in its Series B financing round, including from the OpenAI Startup Fund.
4. Klarity
Klarity straddles the line between legal and accounting by reviewing contracts, order forms and purchase orders — including lease accounting and revenue accounting — to validate order, billing and revenue data. Originally, the software worked with Klarity’s own AI models, but the company’s product is now based on OpenAI’s GPT. GPT support means the software can extract data from unstructured documents, such as PDFs, tables and metadata, The software also integrates with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and similar products from enterprise vendors, such as Salesforce, Oracle and SAP. The San Francisco-based company raised $18 million in Series A funding.
5. Ironclad
Ironclad, a contract review software company around since 2014, has added AI. The software can now scan and tag contracts looking for information, such as contract renewal dates, which means that sales teams can then approach customers proactively to look for renewals. The software can also point out areas where contract terms are non-standard and suggest replacing it with standard language used in other contracts. Ironclad received $100 million in Series D financing and was named a leader last year in both Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant” for contract life cycle management and Forrester’s “Wave” for contract lifecycle management.
6. Everlaw
One of the most expensive aspects of legal cases is electronic discovery or ediscovery, which involves sorting through terabytes of documents from the opposing side to look for useful information. Everlaw is intended to help with ediscovery through predictive coding, which means reviewing the documents itself and leaving just a few that may still need manual review by an attorney. It accepts many kinds of files and data, including audiovisual. Everlaw, founded in 2010, added AI support to summarize documents and help write narratives. It received $202 million in Series D financing.
7. Neota Logic
Lawyers and code are not usually two words that go together but Neota Logic makes that happen. It’s a legal automation tool, powered by AI and natural language processing, that lets law firms design applications and workflow processes for their clients without having to know how to code. Topics for such applications could include contract administration, document automation and compliance monitoring and other routine legal tasks. Neota Logic, founded in 2010, hinted last year that it’s working on using generative AI as an interface for its software.
8. Kira Systems
Kira Systems produces patented machine learning software that identifies, extracts and analyzes content in contracts, such as merger and acquisition due diligence, internal audits and lease abstraction. The software uses AI to look for and extract about 1,000 common clauses, provisions and data points, or users can create their own specific fields for search. The result is designed to make contract review quicker and more accurate than manual review. Kira Systems, founded in 2011, was acquired by legal technology company Litera in 2021 for an undisclosed amount.
9. Lex Machina
Lex Machina is like “Moneyball” for law firms and updated every 24 hours. The product performs legal analytics, such as information about law firms, federal judges and judges in a number of state courts in areas, like time to trial, time to termination and case outcomes. More recently, it added its Litigation Footprint on the litigation history of companies in more than 27 million cases filed in 94 federal district courts and over 1,300 state courts in 34 states and the District of Columbia. Started as a project at Stanford University in 2006, the company was acquired by LexisNexis in 2015.
10. Ravel
Ravel performs legal analytics on law cases, starting by scanning the Harvard Law Library. LexisNexis acquired Ravel Law in 2017. Ravel is designed to provide insight into arguments that were likely to be persuasive to a judge, LexisNexis said. The product uses machine learning, data mining and visualization and is now called Ravel View. LexisNexis also announced Nexis+ AI, which presumably incorporates Ravel View.
