AI-powered legal document review, analysis, summarization, structuring, chronologies, and insights

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.

How I DON'T use AI as an in-house lawyer

I use AI. A LOT. But there are plenty of times when I don’t bother. It’s not a philosophical stance. Sometimes AI is simply not the fastest, safest, or most useful tool for the job.

A few examples:

1. When I already know the answer.

If the question is straightforward and I can answer it in 30 seconds, I do not need to spend 5 minutes writing a prompt, checking the output, and cleaning it up.

Sometimes the fastest tool is still your own brain.

2. When the facts are too thin.

AI is great at organizing information.

It’s great at understanding information.

It’s great at summarizing information.

It is not great at magically knowing the missing facts.

The number one rule about AI prompts is CONTEXT. If someone sends me “Can we do this?” with no context, I usually need to ask better questions first. Otherwise AI is just helping me analyze a mystery box.

Bonus: You CAN ask AI to draft follow up questions that help you fill in the missing facts.

3. When the issue is mostly political, not legal.

A lot of in-house work is less about the contract or the risks and more about:

Who owns this relationship?

Who promised what?

Who is already annoyed?

Who needs to be brought along before we respond?

The point? AI is not great at reading the room.

4. When I need company history.

Sometimes the answer depends on something that happened six months ago in a meeting, a prior exception, a sensitive customer issue, or a business preference that is not written anywhere useful.

AI does not know that unless I tell it.

And if I have to explain the entire backstory, sometimes I might as well just do the analysis myself.

5. When the work needs my voice.

Ok, yes, I use AI to draft my work emails. I tend to be a warm, casual person and AI is very helpful in assisting me meet the appropriate business tone.

But my LinkedIn posts? I always take the first pass.

Creative writing (I dabble 🙂)? I don’t use AI for anything except as an easier to use thesaurus. Not even editing. Not even outlines. It’s too easy to lose my voice which is death in creative writing.

For me, AI is most useful when the work is messy, repetitive, long, scattered, or mentally draining. It is less useful when the work is quick, context-heavy, relationship-sensitive, already clear, or deeply personal.

#LegalAI #InHouseCounsel #AIOverreliance

An associate uploaded protected work product pre-filed draft brief to AI (e.g., chatGPT, Claude, Genini) and had AI check the cites. I figured it out when I noticed some macros that AI leaves behind when copied-and-pasted and that some of the cites were wrong.

[Edit: We have the AI component with citecheck for wstlaw/lexis, that is not what was used]

The amount of stupidity (no, I'm not going to soften it) needed to use AI to check cites is astounding.

Unfortunately, the issue is prevalent and not just one associate.
...

Less than three months after replacing Lexis+ AI with Lexis+ with Protégé as its flagship legal AI platform, LexisNexis today is announcing a substantial expansion of that platform – what the company is calling its “next evolution,” combining significant build-outs of existing capabilities with several completely new ones.

Legal AI is shifting - and it’s not just about better answers anymore.

We’re introducing Protégé Workflows.

Protégé Workflows brings together trusted legal content, your organisation’s knowledge, and AI-powered workflows to support drafting, review, and analysis in one place.

✔️ Use pre-built workflows, or create your own.
✔️ Analyse and summarise documents at scale.
✔️ Work in a private, secure legal AI workspace.
✔️ Draft using Australia's most trusted legal content, and your firm knowledge.

Explore more today ➡️
https://lnkd.in/gFjbEzVt

#LexisNexisAU #Protégé #LegalAI #LegalTech

I'd argue that lawyers who aren't using AI are already behind on their ethical obligations.

Every lawyer has a duty to stay competent. That means keeping up with changes in the law, but also changes in HOW law is practiced.

AI is a change in how law is practiced.

If you can use it to work faster, research more thoroughly, and serve your clients better, and you're choosing not to - I think that's worth examining against your competence obligations.

I use it in my own practice - forms, information gathering, parsing documents quickly. It saves time. That time saved gets passed to clients.

But there's a line.

Last year alone, literally thousands of cases were flagged for citing law that didn't exist. It was hallucinated by AI and nobody checked. Many of those led to sanctions.

AI didn't get those lawyers sanctioned. Not checking the output did.

AI can read a statute. It can draft a demand letter that looks completely right and is missing five things a lawyer would catch. It doesn't know what it doesn't know, and neither will your client.

The legal judgment still has to come from you.

Use it and be more effective for your clients. Just don't outsource the part that actually requires a lawyer.

Most lawyers are still figuring that out. The ones who aren't are already falling behind.

From Practice to Product: What Legal AI Looks Like from the Inside — Week 1

For the next 6 weeks, I'm going to show you some of my favorite aspects of Legora!

Confession: I used to spend hours building chronologies.

Scrolling. Copying. Pasting. Double-checking dates. Wondering if I missed something buried on page 243…

Now? I let AI do the heavy lifting—and I sanity check like a lawyer should 😉

This week I’m kicking things off with one of my favorite Legora features: tabular review → instant chronology building.

In this quick video, I show how you can:
- Pull key events from a document set
- Structure them into a clean, usable table
- Turn that into a working chronology in minutes (not hours)

It’s one of those workflows that makes you rethink how legal work gets done.
Curious how others are using AI for early case analysis—what’s your go-to approach?

#LegalAI #LegalTech #AIinLaw #Lawyers #Innovation #Legora

I'm not anti-AI. I want to get that out of the way first, because what I'm about to say is going to sound like it's coming from someone who is. It's not.

I use AI every day. It's made my work faster, sharper, and more competitive. I've watched it get genuinely good at legal analysis, document synthesis, case research, things that used to take hours. I'm impressed by it, which is exactly why I can see where it falls apart.

There was a recent decision in US that said AI prompts were disclosable in litigation as they didn't attract privilege (I have incredibly oversimplified this)

Whilst we are a completely different jurisdiction and have different rules on privilege, but this serves as a good warning.

Spoiler - lawyers use AI, personally I use two different AI tools (one attached to a legal research database and the other on my case management system) both cost a huge amount of money per year compared to the open-source products and also have GDPR compliant data controls (unlike open source). But I know how the free/low cost alternatives have been useful to many litigants. So don't stop, but be wise, just in case we somehow follow the US court's lead, this would include:
- no telling AI your settlement expectations
- no writing anything you wouldn't want your opponent or courts to see
- if you're uploading documents to analyse make sure it is a document that is in circulation or that you will be disclosing
- turn off the feature that allows the chat to train other models

Lawyers on this page, can you think of any other tips?