Law AI Chatbot : A Solution for Legal Firms

If there is one industry ripe for the mass adoption of chatbots, it is the legal sector. Whether it be legal documents, litigation papers or old statutes, the legal industry is awash with long texts. 

Reading and understanding all of the relevant legal documents isn’t always feasible or possible, especially for individuals or small businesses with limited resources. 

Chatbots, owing to their ability to analyse large datasets and to provide concentrated summaries, are helping to improve legal accessibility for consumers and lawyers alike.

What are AI chatbots?

Chatbots were first developed in the 1960s, but their widespread adoption has been accelerated in recent years thanks to advancements in natural language processing AI. 

AI-powered chatbots are able to simulate human conversations, helping to understand and respond to queries. 

Whilst there are basic chatbots that can answer general questions, many chatbots are built to perform a specific task. 

The matter of how to make an AI chatbot is complex, but to put it simplistically they are trained on a dataset containing information relevant to their desired purpose. For example, a customer service chatbot will be trained to answer queries such as the opening hours and contact details of relevant departments.

How are chatbots used within the legal industry?

Consumer advice chatbots

One of the most prevalent uses of chatbots within the legal sector is to provide an on-tap legal assistant for consumers.

Often trained in a specific field of law, such as family law or planning permission, these chatbots offer consumers an opportunity to request personalised legal advice. 

Not everyone has the resources to afford taking legal advice, especially in situations where a positive outcome is not guaranteed. These legal virtual assistants will ask a series of questions to ascertain the issue at hand.

It will then provide relevant resources, advice and judgements to help the consumer to understand where they stand regarding their legal issue. 

By providing this valuable resource around the clock and often as a free feature of their website, these advisory chatbots are helping to democratise and widen access to legal support, making legal equality and fairness more accessible to all. 

It is important to note that these legal chatbots are only designed to provide an overview, signposting consumers towards further resources or who to contact for legal representation. 

All legal chatbots include caveats that the chatbot is not a replacement for legal advice from a professional lawyer.

Contract Reviews

Research from Juro found that the average human-led contract review process takes 92 minutes on average. This is an inefficient use of legal professionals time, slowing down the legal industry whilst also adding extra costs to the consumers. 

Legal chatbots can be trained to read and understand contracts, and then to perform three primary functions:

• Highlight key areas that require extra attention, such as specific clauses or conditions
• Answer questions relating to the contents of the contract
• Condense the contract into manageable insights

By incorporating contract review chatbots into their workflows, legal professionals can free up time and budget to focus on the more specialised tasks that require expertise. This widens access to high quality legal representation, as the number of billable hours for basic admin will reduce significantly.

AI Compliance 

Compliance is big business, valued at over $38 billion in 2023. The compliance industry helps to regulate business practices, ensuring that a company’s actions are fully aligned with relevant laws and regulations, helping to keep consumers safe and industries fair. 

Ensuring compliance across the board can be difficult for businesses due to the sheer volume of documentation. Compliance chatbots can answer queries relating to specific areas of compliance, such as reviewing a contract to ensure GDPR compliance. 

They can also be trained to send reminders to employees through channels such as Slack about upcoming training or certification deadlines. It is easy to lose track of when certain compliance tasks need to be completed; chatbots can go one further than simply writing a reminder on a calendar.

Creating custom legal chatbots

To ensure legal chatbots provide relevant information, they must be trained on a controlled dataset. Whereas general conversational chatbots can be trained on publicly available information such as forum conversations, the accuracy threshold for legal chatbots is amongst the highest of any industry usage, up there with healthcare chatbots.

To achieve this, legal chatbots will require custom training. Specialists such as NetGeist create custom chatbots designed to streamline, simplify and resolve specific inquiries. 

Custom chatbots, such as those designed to provide legal information, can provide answers in the blink of an eye. Using a mixture of on-premises and AWS hosting, chatbots developed by NetGeist can handle multiple enquiries at once from different users, around the clock. 

Due to the sensitive nature of legal information, many legal firms will opt for an on-premise solution for their chatbot, which increases data protection. On-premise solutions, as opposed to cloud based solutions, offer increased data security as the data is stored on-site instead of being sent to a third party server. This provides the following advantages:

• Physical control of the data centres remain in the control of the company

• The data control systems can be customized to suit the requirements of the company

• On-premise servers do not necessarily require an internet connection, whereas cloud solutions do

• As there is no reliance upon third parties, it can be easier to prove and ensure data compliance and best practices are adhered to

When considering an on-premise solution for your legal chatbot, it is worth noting a few relevant considerations. Firstly, on-premises solutions are often associated with higher operational costs, as cloud solutions will often have economies of scale that can be distributed amongst other customers. 

If you do not have a specialist cybersecurity team, your on-premise system might quickly become outdated and vulnerable to nefarious attacks. If your employees require remote access to the data, this can be more difficult with on-premise servers.

If you are considering a chatbot for your legal company, NetGeist.ai is here to help. We can provide a custom AI chatbot solution tailored specifically for your industry to fulfil any needs or requirements you have in mind.

Whether it’s a particular communication style, intricate terminology, or a huge stream of queries, we can adapt the chatbot to deal with your particular case. Get in contact with us here.