AI Legal ‘Brains’ Pitched as Stand-In When Top Attorneys Are Out

The next time a general counsel takes time off, other members of the legal department might not have to interrupt their boss’s leave to figure out how to best write a contract.

Legal technology companies are rolling out AI capabilities aimed at distilling the distinct preferences and standards of legal department leaders and capturing them in software. That “intelligence” can then be applied to contracts, press releases and more. Instead of having a range of risk tolerances and contract language preferences spread across a company—or held within the brains of one or two top lawyers—tech vendors say their new AI tools make uniform legal knowledge available to everyone.

Advancements in underlying large language models allow the vendors to analyze more data, make it easier for attorneys to search through it, and apply stored knowledge. Legal teams are getting more comfortable living with overarching risks that gen AI tools present, and vendors say they’re addressing concerns over hallucinations and data privacy. Still, the tools are making some lower level attorneys nervous about job security.

Startup Eudia says it can make a “company brain” tailored to an organization’s legal team. Another vendor, Luminance, says its software can help legal teams retain the knowledge they lose when employees leave the company.

“What we’re building is a system that uses our own proprietary legal grade AI to act in a way that lawyers think,” Luminance CEO Eleanor Lightbody said. Her company this week launched an “institutional memory” feature that can apply lessons learned from previous contracts to current negotiations.

The new capabilities aren’t yet widely used, but they reflect some legal departments’ growing comfort level with AI tools, said Rudy DeFelice, who consults with corporate legal teams as the global head of the AI-focused Harbor Labs.

“It’s one of many indicators that we are relaxing our reflexive caution,” DeFelice said.

Beyond AI Consultants

Eudia and Luminance executives said their tools will fundamentally change the way legal departments work as they move beyond what legal tech has previously been capable of via contract management or redlining software.

Most companies are implementing isolated AI solutions that can do specific tasks, rather than broad-based solutions like the ones Eudia and Luminance are selling, DeFelice said. He likened it to when electricity was first invented, and people only used it for light bulbs.

“Eventually you rebuild the whole factory, right? And an AI brain will be part of that,” he said.

Lightbody said Luminance’s product update, the largest revamp in its ten-year history, is in the hands of some existing customers who are testing the tool. It will launch more broadly in late February.

The company says its tools can pull in context for contract negotiations from across any organization. When a legal department gets a draft procurement deal, for example, an attorney can tell Luminance to negotiate the contract as though its the end of the fiscal quarter. Luminance’s software will look through previous contracts to identify how the company closed deals at the end of previous quarters and apply those lessons to the new contract.

“That’s really exciting, because that then moves us from using AI to consult to a place where it starts to be something that shapes the way how work happens, essentially,” Lightbody said. “Which is a total shift in how people are using AI platforms today.”

Expert Knowledge

Legal departments have long had access to internal playbooks that store their preferred terms for routine contracts, like non-disclosure agreements. Eudia said it’s going a step beyond that by gathering information across a company’s playbooks and past contracts to determine when and how legal teams stray from those preferred terms.

The idea is to capture the principles behind decisions, rather than just looking at the language, according to Eudia. Then, the risk tolerance and judgment of top decision makers can be applied across a company. Lower level attorneys can essentially apply the expertise of their general counsel as they take a first look at a contract, Eudia CEO Omar Haroun said.

For example, if the marketing department were to send an assistant general counsel a press release for approval, that attorney could run Eudia’s plug-in and let the software take an initial pass based on the general counsel’s guidance.

“We can essentially convert knowledge from a set of human brains to a company brain,” Haroun said.

By capturing the risk tolerance of top attorneys, Haroun said his company helps maintain consistent standards, which mitigates risk. The technology also saves time and produces a better result than lower level attorneys because it actually applies the preferences of a top expert, he said.

“To us, the real moat, the real scarce resource, is the undocumented knowledge in the mind of the expert,” he said.

The company brain is in production with dozens of customers, including some in the Fortune 500, Haroun said.

Saving time

Rob Beard, chief legal officer at the publicly traded industrial laser producer Coherent Corp., said Eudia’s principle-based redlining software has slashed contracting time by 78%. The biggest challenge now is feeding Coherent’s brain with enough knowledge, he said.

Beard had a two-word answer when asked if his lawyers get nervous when he talks about using Eudia for lower level tasks: “Hell yes.”

But Beard, previously the top lawyer at Mastercard and at Micron Technology, said he still has plenty for those nervous attorneys to do. Eudia frees up his lawyers to work on higher level tasks by making some knowledge accessible to the broader business, he said. Lawyers didn’t go to law school just to spend every day grinding through contract redlines, he said.

For Coherent’s biggest problems, Beard said he’ll still hire outside law firms

“For that bet-the-company stuff, we’re a long way off from entrusting AI,” he said.