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

AI definitely has a place in legal services. I use it to review voluminous files, prepare preliminary drafts, and double check certain work for any additional suggestions. Given my legal training and three decades of experience, I know how to prompt it, I know how to review it, and I know when it’s right and when it’s wrong. It is still very often wrong.

I continue to see very bad AI created documents coming from clients and potential clients. Please understand that while these documents might have the right label, they lack the content necessary to solve problems and avoid litigation. I am deeply concerned that when problems arise, business owners and executives will lack the tools in their contracts and governance documents necessary to resolve them.

Please do not fuel the litigation pipeline. Consult with counsel about your legal needs and find counsel who can use AI appropriately as a tool to reduce legal fees, expedite services, and provide the best outcome.

CoCounsel Legal is engineered to work at the level of a senior associate, drawing on Westlaw, Practical Law, and your firm's knowledge to deliver work you can stand behind

Thomson Reuters says the large language model it has been quietly building in-house now performs competitively with the best general-purpose AI models in the world, and it has released its first benchmarking results to back up the claim.

The model’s first deployment will come in August, when Thomson becomes the default model powering Tabular Analysis in CoCounsel Legal.

Since launching its Clio Work AI product in October 2025, Clio says it has been the fastest-adopted product in the company’s 18-year history. But there was one place where Clio Work was not available — Canada, the country where Clio was founded and is headquartered.

Now Clio has brought home the bacon, so to speak, launching Clio Work in Canada — and doing it roughly six weeks after acquiring the Canadian legal data company that made the launch possible.

Clio Work went live in Canada on July 23, enabled by a corpus of more than 470,000 Canadian cases drawn from Jurisage, the Toronto-based legal AI and data company Clio acquired in June.

Aiming this at the Discover users specifically, since I know that's not everyone here.

Disclosure up front: I work on Claira (Claira). We built an integration with Nuix Discover so you can run AI-assisted review against a case that's already loaded in Discover - no migration or re-processing. Starts at $49/mo.

Instead of describing it, here's it actually in use so you can see what it looks like live:
- Workflows, with real videos of the step-by-step: https://support.claira.to/docs/en/workflows
- Demos (short, medium, and long): https://www.claira.to/demos

Mostly I'm curious whether this is on anyone's radar yet, and for those of you who've looked at it or tried it, whether you saw real value for the kind of matters you run. Genuinely interested in the discussion - if it's useful I'd love to know, and if it's not a fit for how your team works I'd like to understand why.

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.