Goodbye to the grind: How legal AI is streamlining repetitive work

Legal work is known for the thoughtful analysis and insight it requires. Yet, for many legal professionals, much of their time is spent on repetitive tasks like drafting and reviewing. Legal AI changes this—not by replacing legal professionals, but by simplifying routine processes, allowing for more focus on complex matters that require human judgement. As Gartner® notes, “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.”

This blog will explore how legal teams are beginning to automate repetitive work with AI.

Streamlining drafting

In many organisations, a substantial portion of contracts, such as rental agreements, NDAs, and service agreements, are routine. Drafting these agreements usually involves slight variations in language but largely follows established templates. AI can streamline this process by suggesting clauses based on the specific business terms required, guiding you through each stage with easy-to-follow prompts.

For example, drafting a standard NDA might take only a few minutes as AI quickly fills in typical clauses. In more complex cases, such as creating a multi-party service agreement, AI supports by suggesting precise terms to meet specific business needs. If the contract needs to be updated for a different jurisdiction, Legal AI can automatically adjust clauses to align with local regulations.

The best legal AI solutions allow you to work within a web interface or directly in Microsoft Word, making it easy to create accurate, compliant documents—from basic agreements to intricate contracts—while saving time and ensuring consistency.

Simplifying reviews

Contract reviews often involve a set of standard checkpoints to ensure consistency and compliance with organisational preferences. Legal AI makes this process more efficient by automating and standardising these checkpoints, reducing the likelihood of overlooked details. With customisable playbooks, Legal AI can guide users through each review question, ensuring every important element is evaluated against your organisation’s preferred terms.

For example, reviewing two versions of a contract becomes much easier as AI highlights specific changes, quickly flagging any terms that could introduce additional risk. If a vendor proposes modifications, AI can assess these changes based on predefined risk guidelines, clarifying which terms are acceptable and which may require further negotiation.

Legal AI also improves collaboration across departments. Teams such as legal and procurement can share review standards through a centralised playbook, enabling everyone to work from the same criteria and expediting approvals. This reduces delays, ensuring contract reviews are thorough, aligned, and efficiently completed.

Regulatory compliance

Regulatory compliance often involves reviewing thousands of legal documents. This is both time-consuming and resource-intensive, especially when documents come in a mix of formats—PDFs, scanned images, and photos. Manually extracting key information and structuring it for analysis strains resources and risks inconsistencies.

A global payments provider, faced this challenge. To comply with DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act), they needed to swiftly and accurately review over 1,600 ICT service provider documents. Their current internal tools struggled with the volume and variety of data, as well as with the extraction and structuring necessary for meaningful analysis.

Legalfly's platform enables their team to bulk process documents across formats, automatically extracting essential information into a structured table. This allows for the quick identification of non-compliant clauses, and replaces slow, manual processes with streamlined, automated compliance reports.

Enhancing discovery  

Legal AI also makes managing large volumes of documents simpler, which is helpful for discovery and litigation preparation. By creating a searchable repository of anonymised contracts, emails, and other documents, AI enables teams to quickly locate relevant information, build on previous work, and prepare for litigation with greater ease.

Imagine you’re preparing for a case and need to search for specific information in emails, memos, and agreements. Legal AI allows you to search an anonymised repository quickly to find the proof points for your arguments without exhaustive manual searches. This simplifies discovery, allowing legal teams to access the information they need promptly and with less effort.

Playbooks can further simplify this process by aiding data extraction in contract management. ECS, a leading supply chain logistics and intermodal transport solutions company, works with many truck drivers. They need to select a truck driver for each shipment and ensure the driver’s insurance coverage is adequate. A playbook could streamline this by guiding the team with targeted questions such as:

"Is this shipment type covered under the driver’s insurance?"

"What is the maximum insured amount in this agreement?"

These prompts allow teams to quickly pinpoint the right driver with the necessary insurance, ensuring efficient and accurate decision-making.  

From repetition to real impact

By reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks, legal AI allows legal professionals to focus on meaningful, interesting work. Drafting, reviewing, and document discovery no longer need to consume hours. Instead, Legal AI handles these tasks with speed and consistency, acting as a supportive, reliable associate who understands your standards.

As legal departments increasingly adopt AI, they’re finding new ways to work more efficiently and effectively. By taking on the routine, AI enables lawyers to apply their expertise where it matters most, creating a smoother, more focused approach to modern legal practice.

‍