Lawyers and AI are ideal fit

Notorious for using complex language, the field of law is poised to be disrupted by Gen AI
SpotDraft is a software company, it is not a law firm, stresses Shashank Bijapur, co-founder & CEO of SpotDraft. Yet, law is what this Bengaluru and US company is simplifying for multinational firms like Airbnb, Crunchbase and Notion.
In the real world, Shashank notes, legal costs are high.It’s something that gets paid by the hour. So how do you do it at scale to reduce costs? How do you do it exactly the way an organisation wants it to get done, according to their rules?”
The answer that SpotDraft came up with initially in 2018, when the company was formed, was to build an AI review tool to help legal teams review NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) faster. “We spent a lot of time training our own models but could never hit economies of scale, with the lack of sufficiently varied data required to train our models,” Shashank says.

By the end of 2019, the company had pivoted into building out a CLM – a contract lifecycle management platform – and launched it in 2020. But when GPT-3 was released, Shashank and his co-founders at the company realised that everything had changed. “We could now create the best experience for legal use-cases by leveraging foundational models and adding a layer of proprietary technology.”
Now, thanks to advances in Gen AI, and their own proprietary tech and training, SpotDraft’s AI-driven contract automation platform helps businesses create, manage, analyse, and collaborate on contracts.
Gen AI tools are getting incessantly better at dealing with complex language, the kind that legal contracts are notorious for. “Managing contractual obligations demands deep expertise in legal language, understanding nuances like ₹may’ vs ₹might’ and ₹shall’ vs ₹should’. Skilled resources to manage such contracts are expensive, making contract management unaffordable for many companies,” says Rishi Agrawal, co-founder & CEO of Teamlease Regtech.
This complexity, Rishi says, is easily managed by Gen AI. “Gen AI can help by composing contracts with minimal resources, ensuring faster, more accurate, and more effective drafting. It can break a contract into manageable tasks, improving drafting, review, and compliance to finer points. With the right input parameters, Gen AI can create a tailor-made contract based on predefined templates. It can also review contracts to identify relevant laws and regulations and flag clauses of sig nificant importance.”
Gen AI tools, Rishi says, can also quickly go through large volumes of contracts to extract key data and has the ability to simplify obligations and responsibilities within the contract for ease of understanding.
PLENTY OF CHALLENGES
There are, however, multiple challenges in deploying these tools in a field as sensitive to mistakes and privacy as law. Aadya Misra, counsel at Spice Route Legal, says that accuracy is a big concern. “AI hallucinations can significantly impact legal advice and strategy if not identified and culled.”
A related problem is the accuracy of data sources, he says. “Notifications, rules, regulations, guidance, and circulars form the bedrock of legal advice – together with the actual laws and rules. In India, these ₹supplements’ to existing laws are haphazardly organised among various government and public sources. There is no guarantee that Gen AI training sources account for these aspects. In the absence of an efficiently digitised government database across all ministries and regulators, it’s unlikely that the training sources will be up to date.”
Another major issue is privacy, says Siddharth Chandrashekhar, lawyer and counsel for the Bombay High Court. “AI tools often require access to sensitive client data, raising concerns about maintaining confidentiality and ensuring compliance with data protection laws. We must also remember that AI uses machine learning. This means that sensitive client data could be stored for future reference to train the AI algorithm.”
LAWYER+AI
So, legal jobs are nowhere close to going away. Anandita Sen, DGM of corporate legal at L&T, says it’s also worth understanding that a large portion of legal work includes tasks like interaction with businesses and clients, development of strategy, drafting of innovative solutions and contracts to address specific problems and risks, negotiation and advocacy, and so on – none of which can be replaced by AI-powered tools.
SpotDraft’s Shashank says he does not see a world where lawyers will lose a job to AI. But, he says, a lawyer is definitely going to lose their job to a lawyer with AI.