AI-assisted contract review, draft review, redlining, drafting, negotiation, and risk analysis

At ILTACON, Litera will preview how deterministic redlines, firm-approved precedent, and agentic change management work together

CHICAGO – Aug. 18, 2026 – Litera, the Legal AI platform provider that best unifies the practice and business of law, announced new capabilities that connect contract drafting and negotiation in one trusted Legal AI workflow. From sourcing firm-approved precedent and building the first draft to comparing versions, understanding risk and proposing response language, Litera keeps the work connected instead of forcing lawyers across separate tools. The announcement includes new Lito workflows, Litera’s award-winning Legal AI agent, in Microsoft Word and Litera for Windows, a modern desktop experience that brings Litera’s Legal AI platform directly to a user’s computer.

July brings CoCounsel Legal closer to the tools legal teams already rely on and further into the everyday moments where they work. This month’s releases center on two themes: a more connected platform that reaches into firm document repositories like NetDocuments and Smokeball, and tools built for how legal teams actually work, from importable playbooks to an agentic contract review experience. Read on for what’s new.

A client recently ran a piece of legal drafting through AI. It flagged a clause as wrong.

The clause was not wrong. The client had insisted on it — it was the thing that won them the deal.

Here is the trap we are all going to fall into at least once.

Judging legal work from the final document is like judging an argument from a single screenshot. You read one message, decide who was right, and never see the thousand that came before it.

AI reviews documents. Lawyers advise people. AI saw the final draft; the lawyer saw every decision behind it — the instruction that changed, the compromise that closed the deal, the foreign rule that forced an odd piece of wording.

To be clear: I use AI every day. It is one of the finest drafting tools ever built, and it catches what a tired eye misses. This is not an argument against it. But reviewing wording and reviewing judgment are two different jobs.

So when AI says "your lawyer got this wrong," the honest answer is often: maybe, maybe not. The useful question is not whether AI found an issue. It is what AI never saw.

Have you ever watched AI confidently flag a "mistake" that turned out to be a deliberate decision, once someone explained the context?

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The conversation surrounding artificial intelligence in the Canadian legal sector has fundamentally shifted. No longer a novel concept or a distant future projection, AI has become a baseline reality for modern legal practices. Today, the real challenge facing law firms and corporate legal departments is operational: how to move past isolated, ad-hoc digital experiments and turn generative AI into a dependable, structured part of how legal work actually gets done.

The recent market introduction of Lexis+® with ProtégéTM in Canada marks a significant evolution in this landscape. By moving the industry away from standalone AI utilities and introducing end-to-end, automated legal processes, this launch represents a major turning point in how the Canadian legal profession applies technology to everyday practice.

The recent market introduction of Lexis+® with ProtégéTM️ in Canada marks a significant shift in the legal tech landscape, moving the industry away from standalone AI functionality and into a new phase that where AI is woven into the fabric of legal work. This shift is worth paying attention to because it marks an important turning point in how the Canadian legal profession is applying the technology to legal practice.

I do not use a dedicated legal AI review platform. I use a frontier general-purpose model on commercial terms, with a structured set of instructions built around it that enforce the discipline the platforms sell as a feature. Generally, Claude (on their Pro Max plan) at the time of writing, but ChatGPT’s Work (released this week) is looking decent too.

Every legal team hears that AI will change contract work. But we also hear the horror stories about relying on it too much. Where is the practical advice for your daily work?

Join our next session to get real, honest guidance.

What you will learn:
🛠️ Where AI works and where it fails: The truth about AI in drafting and review.
❗ Risk framework: How to easily spot mistakes in AI content.
⭐ Smart prompting: Techniques to get reliable results every time.

We will show you these strategies live in LawVu Draft using real contract examples.

Link in comments

Harvey is now available as an agent inside Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Cowork.

Legal teams don't need more tools. They need the tools they already use to work smarter for them.

Harvey is now available as an agent inside Microsoft 365 Copilot and a plugin inside Copilot Cowork, bringing expert-level legal intelligence directly into the environment where legal teams already work.

Using AI to draft contracts without legal expertise is a lot like someone with zero cultivation experience using ChatGPT to start a cannabis grow.

Everything might look good at first. The SOPs look right. The facility is built. The plants are hopefully growing. But when harvest comes, all the things you didn't know to look for inevitably pop up.

The same thing happens with contracts.

AI can produce documents that look professional. The problem is that if you don't know which risks to address, you probably won't recognize what's missing. And by the time you find out, you're already in a dispute, dealing with regulators, or paying someone to fix the problem.

To be clear, I'm not anti-AI. I use AI to draft and review contracts every day.
But there's a big difference between using an out-of-the-box LLM and using AI that's guided by custom skills, MCPs, legal playbooks, and subject-matter expertise.

Will this change in the future? Probably. But today, expertise is still what allows you to spot the problems AI consistently misses.

What are your thoughts on using AI to draft contracts? Let me know in the comments.

DISCLAIMER: Attorney advertising. This post and any comments are not legal advice.

Draft smarter, right where you already work.

Clio for Word is now in beta, bringing legal AI drafting, analysis, and review directly into Microsoft Word so you can stay in the environment where you already do your best work.

Drawing on the world's largest legal database, it generates first drafts, surfaces revision suggestions through track changes, and analyzes documents for legal and structural risks, all without switching applications.

Learn more at the link in comments.

Docusign agents triage, review, and move agreements forward across its Intelligent Agreement Management platform, solving business problems in the way point products cannot

SAN FRANCISCO, May 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Docusign (NASDAQ: DOCU) today announced a new set of AI-powered capabilities and strategic partnerships designed to help in-house legal teams drive progress for their companies while enjoying cutting edge AI-based legal tools. With the introduction of a contract assistant and agents, Docusign is expanding its Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform — the only platform with total context of your agreement history and relationships — to serve as the system of action for legal professionals and the teams they support.