5 must-haves for secure legal AI
Legal AI offers efficiencies that were unimaginable a decade ago—contracts that once took hours to draft can now be generated in seconds, and vast repositories of case law can be searched through with a click. Gartner® predicts that “LLMs will not replace lawyers. Rather, over the next two to five years, LLMs will boost legal department productivity by at least 10% to 20%, more than prior transformative technologies”
But as AI continues to embed itself into legal practices, its use raises important questions about how to safeguard client data, ensure accuracy, and remain compliant with the strict regulatory frameworks governing the legal profession.
Here are five important criteria to consider when choosing a legal AI platform.
1. AI trained for Legal: Reliable output
While AI can perform complex tasks quickly, it’s not immune to mistakes—especially when it comes to what’s known as “hallucinations,” where the system generates false or irrelevant information. In legal contexts, this can be disastrous. General AI models may not be equipped to handle the complexities of legal advice. The most secure legal AI tools are designed to minimise this risk, training the AI models to operate within strict legal parameters and ensuring that outputs are always reliable and fact-based.
2. Anonymisation: The foundation of client confidentiality
Confidentiality is at the heart of legal work, and any legal AI tool must safeguard this principle. The best systems ensure anonymisation from the start, stripping documents of any identifiable data before processing begins. This usually means replacing sensitive details with pseudonyms, ensuring that client information is never exposed.
3. Data control: Maintain your firm’s standards
Where your data is stored is as important as how it’s handled. Many law firms prefer to keep sensitive information in-house or in a dedicated, secure cloud environment. By opting for on-premise storage or a private cloud, you maintain full control over your data, reducing the risk of breaches and ensuring that client information remains confidential.
Legal AI tools should be fully compliant with regulatory guidelines such as GDPR, ISO 27001, and SOC2. Sensitive data should be stored in a repository that meets your security and compliance guidelines.
Gartner, Gartner Innovation Insight: Boost Legal Productivity With Generative AI, Ron Friedmann, 2 November 2023
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
4. Verified data sources: Ensuring accuracy
Accuracy in legal practice is non-negotiable, and this extends to the AI you use. A reliable legal AI platform should draw on verified, jurisdiction-specific data. This data should be continually updated with changes to regulatory guidelines and recent court decisions.
Check if law firms you respect have adopted the tools you evaluate. Build your own confidence during a trial period by challenging the legal AI with complex issues. You should be able to easily access the source for advice, along with the context, when you need a deeper understanding of a recommendation. Ensuring its outputs are consistent with the applicable legal frameworks and regulations is fundamental to the credibility of your legal advice.
5. LLM agnostic: Future-proof your investment
The technology is evolving rapidly and different large language models (LLMs) have different strengths. Select a provider who is agile and can use the LLM that is strongest for each specific use case. This flexibility maximises speed, precision and scalability for your legal AI.
Legalfy: The most secure legal AI
LegalFly meets all five key criteria for secure legal AI by combining advanced security protocols with legal precision. It anonymises client data before processing, ensuring confidentiality remains intact. By relying solely on verified, jurisdiction-specific data, LegalFly guarantees that its outputs are both accurate and compliant with legal standards. Its AI is trained to avoid hallucinations, ensuring reliable, fact-based results that reduce the need for time-consuming double-checks. Fully compliant with GDPR, ISO 27001, and SOC2, LegalFly meets global data protection standards, and provides you complete control over data, whether stored on-premise or in a dedicated cloud environment.
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