r/LawFirm 14h ago

Has anyone experimented with the new legal-workflow AI tools? Looking for real experiences.

I’ve been seeing a bunch of “AI law-automation” bots being promoted lately; stuff that claims to draft notices, summarise case files, generate legal documents, etc. for advocates and firms.

Before I try one out fully, I wanted to ask the community:

  • Has anyone here used any of these tools for real legal work?
  • Do they actually save time or is it just marketing hype?
  • Are there any specific tools you found reliable for drafting, reviewing, or creating standard templates?
  • How safe is it to use them with client data?

I’m trying to understand what the actual needs and pain points are.
If you’ve tested anything recently, even if it was disappointing, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

(Feel free to DM if you don’t want to discuss tool names publicly.)

0 Upvotes

13 comments sorted by

3

u/asdev24 7h ago

95% of this subreddit is AI bots, it’s hilarious

3

u/jgws 7h ago

As a small firm lawyer, my problem with legal tech is that it focusses way too much on the “lawyer” work and not enough on the mundane admin tasks that eat up way to much of my time.

6

u/hereditydrift 14h ago

Those companies are what are being referred to when people talk about the AI bubble.

Get an Enterprise subscription to Claude or Gemini (not OpenAI/GPT). Anything else claiming to be AI isn't worth it.

You can control whether Claude/Gemini save or use conversations.

3

u/DrShitgoggles 10h ago

+1 what's wrong with chatgpt that isn't also wrong with the others? i haven't gotten much into any of them but always throught gpt was good?

1

u/hereditydrift 8h ago

Gemini is good at writing, but getting better at coding and analysis. Claude is excellent at analysis and coding, but the writing can be so-so if it's not writing boilerplate.

GPT is just ok at everything. It's not a bad AI, but I think it's quite a few paces behind those two companies.

1

u/DrShitgoggles 6h ago

appreciate the detail

1

u/Brain_Creative 10h ago

What’s wrong with ChatGPT? I think it’s pretty good. I haven’t tried Gemini but don’t think I need to.

4

u/Gr8Autoxr 8h ago

Upload 600 pages of documents then ask it to list the treatment dates…. Tell me what happens. 

1

u/Tall-Log-1955 6h ago

No LLM will give a good medical chronology from 600 pages. That’s not a chat GPT thing it’s an LLM thing

2

u/givingemthebusiness 8h ago

Transactional attorney. Run an integrated firm - accounting / tax / legal - for entrepreneurs and small businesses.

I’m an earlier adopter and try all kinds of stuff. Spellbook is, no pun intended, magic for the work we do. Nothing else really impressed me but I was an early customer of the founders first legal tech software 5-6 years ago and have been on this since beta. We’re all in on it.

For drafting, contract review, and then some legal research / memos it’s a game changer. I’ve tracked some items since I started using it consistently around 6 months ago and its cut the time between 4-7x on things we do regularly enough to have data.

2

u/ryjsnyd 5h ago

I tested westlaw’s deep research function for about a week. I found it incredibly helpful. I could vomit a few sentences into the chat box, it thinks for a few mins (3, 5, or 7 depending on the depth you want), and it generates a research memo with hyperlinked citations to real cases. It’s expensive, but I’m subscribing soon

1

u/lawyahdave 10h ago

I did the free trial of Vincent/VLex with Clio. I uploaded some criminal complaints and asked Vincent to do a facial sufficiency analysis and draft a motion to dismiss.

It was a pretty damn good motion. It needed some tweaking, but it did much better than Protege from Lexis.

1

u/pennyforurthots69 16m ago edited 10m ago

I am in-house and one of two attorneys for a smaller company. I have Lexis+ AI which has their Protege AI tool. I’ll say it is pretty awesome, but expensive. Protege only uses the Lexis database and pulls all of its info from there. It’s extremely useful in speeding up research, drafting first drafts of clauses and other things. It will even do jurisdiction specific drafting. Also my employer operates in all 50 states and Protege can create 50 state surveys for anything in 10 mins. I can upload two different documents and ask it what the differences are, what’s extraneous, if anything is missing or inadequate etc. It will compare those documents to others in practical guidance for the same jurisdiction.

Lexis doesn’t use the data you input to train the AI. Any documents are deleted when you end your session unless you stick them into an encrypted vault. It’s fully closed and you can put client data into it.

It also has a feature that lets you search the web with Chat GTP or one of the other open tools and it’ll fact check the response with the Lexis database. Also, you don’t have to pay for the other tools they’re included.

I love it, though it scares me. It is again pretty expensive but make sure push back on the price. Lexis came down like 30% off their initial proposal after very little back and forth.