Elevating CLM Legal Processes with Gen AI: The Latest Tools for Legal Teams
- 15 min read
- Arpita Chakravorty
Intro
Contract lifecycle management (CLM) software is becoming essential for law firms and in-house legal teams. A survey reveals that 65% of legal departments now utilize AI-powered contract management solutions, marking a significant 14 percentage point increase over the past two years. This trend is driven by the overwhelming volume of data legal professionals face, including emails, contract drafts, and compliance records, which necessitates structured management solutions. AI-enabled CLM software creates a ‘single version of truth’ for contracts, fostering collaboration and ensuring that critical information is readily accessible to all stakeholders. With AI CLM solutions, legal teams can organize, compare, and review documents with remarkable efficiency.
Legal Teams are Doubling Down on AI With Gen AI
The dramatic increase in legal teams’ use of AI CLM systems reflects a broader trend: the inclination to leverage Generative AI (Gen AI) for more complex tasks. Traditional AI performs specific functions, such as storing contracts in a digital repository and retrieving specific contracts, templates, or clauses using key search terms. While these functions are important, legal teams are now seeking CLM solutions that assist in content creation and other more advanced capabilities. A recent study found that 41 out of 100 surveyed law firms have begun using Gen AI, with expectations for even broader adoption.
Most Relevant Gen AI Use Cases for CLM in Legal Teams
Gen AI offers several relevant use cases for CLM in legal teams throughout the contracting process. The most prominent among these include:
- Conversational AI: Chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) can intuitively interact with legal teams in natural language, providing a personalized experience. This allows for easier understanding of contracts, more effective analysis of clauses, and streamlined searches through contract clause libraries. By better understanding user intent, these chatbots deliver more relevant and accurate answers, enhancing overall efficiency.
- Contract Summarization: Gen AI helps legal teams assess contracts more comprehensively by producing concise, easy-to-understand summaries in natural language. It extracts the most important points while eliminating confusing jargon, helping teams beyond legal. This enables legal teams to conduct reviews with greater confidence and efficiency, making it easier to navigate complex contracts.
- Precision Redlining: Gen AI can assist in the contract negotiation process by suggesting edits to contract language, ensuring alignment with compliance standards without overhauling entire clauses. This capability mimics the nuanced approach of a legal professional during redlining, allowing for minimal yet impactful edits.
Enhancing Legal Contracting Tasks Across the Lifecycle with Gen AI
A recent report by Gartner on legal technology investments revealed that 93 percent of surveyed legal leaders are exploring or implementing Gen AI technology to enhance various aspects of contract management. As legal teams seek to improve efficiency and effectiveness in their workflows, Gen AI goes beyond traditional capabilities, significantly enhancing multiple tasks throughout the entire CLM lifecycle. Here’s how:- Playbook for Streamlined Contract Creation: Gen AI empowers organizations to create detailed playbooks that define best practices and standard language for various issues within agreements. Utilizing AI-powered natural language processing, it ensures consistency and facilitates ease in contract creation across diverse scenarios, providing a valuable reference for legal teams.
- AI-Powered Review: By automating the identification of issues within contracts, Gen AI streamlines the review process. It compares contract terms against preferred standards from the organization’s playbook, categorizing risks by type and criticality while providing clear, concise summaries in natural language. This capability accelerates review times and improves the overall accuracy of contract assessments.
- Enhanced Contract Redlining and Negotiation Support: Gen AI can suggest optimal contract language and highlight areas for potential compromise based on historical data and patterns. This includes a surgical redlining approach that ensures contracts reflect desired risk management strategies while facilitating effective negotiations.
- Unlocking Company-Wide Contract Insights: By analyzing vast amounts of contract data, Gen AI reveals hidden trends and patterns that inform strategic decision-making. Users can access contract information through intuitive natural language queries, gaining valuable insights into their contractual landscape and optimizing agreements.
Considerations for Implementing Gen AI in CLM for Legal Teams
As legal teams evaluate the capabilities of Gen AI in their CLM solutions, several key considerations should inform their strategy. Off-the-shelf solutions that merely claim to be Gen AI should be approached with caution. It’s essential to choose solutions that are trustworthy and transparent, capable of citing sources and providing clear explanations for their recommendations to ensure reliability. Additionally, these tools should demonstrate contextual accuracy, tailored to specific legal domains and business contexts.
To maximize the benefits of Gen AI in CLM, solutions should include the following features:
- Multi-Model Framework: Prevent vendor lock-in and utilize various LLMs for diverse tasks.
- Pre-Trained Models: Use models tailored to an organization’s contracts for quicker, more accurate results.
- Self-Service Training Studio: Allow easy adjustments to the model to align with specific business processes and needs.
- AI-Driven User Experience: Enhance usability by tailoring responses based on user personas for smoother navigation.
- Private Cloud Solutions: Ensure compliance with data protection regulations while safeguarding sensitive information.
Why Choose Sirion to Enhance CLM legal operations?
Sirion is a leader in CLM technology, employing Gen AI to enhance contract management efficiency. With years of contracting data and multiple LLMs, Sirion offers businesses critical insights and significant time savings. One of the examples here can be Sirion’s core extraction engine that goes beyond the traditional AI models expanding to GenAI based models as well as multi model sequences.
How does that help? It enables to extract metadata which can be more unpredictably placed or not directly available in the document with great accuracy.
Interested in knowing more? Book a demo today to see how Sirion can transform your contract management process!
Conclusion
As the landscape of contract lifecycle management continues to evolve, embracing these trends and technologies will be crucial for legal teams seeking to improve efficiency and effectiveness in a data-driven world. By adopting innovative CLM solutions, law firms can better manage the complexities of their contractual obligations, ultimately driving greater success in their legal operations.
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