AI and the Death of Legal Paperwork
The Whiff of Salvation
Surveys over the past few years show that attorneys spend almost half their day on admin, non-billable work: billing, formatting, reviewing documents and tracking deadlines. Very little of that is devoted to legal analysis, advising, or document drafting.
On a grander scale, JP Morgan’s Contract Intelligence (COIN) AI system eliminated 360,000 legal work-hours per year by eliminating the need to read commercial loan documents manually. What used to take teams weeks is now done in seconds.
If only there was a clever assistant which could help you with all that drudge admin, working away quietly in the background. When you want that to occur, the Sigma Browser Agent is a great answer. It’s in your browser, you issue a request, for example, “Rename this contract draft to conform to California labor law with clause-by-clause commentary”, and while you’re pouring yourself a morning coffee, Sigma trolls through sources, suggests changes, pulls in relevant legal guidelines. You still get to make the final decision, but you won’t be stuck wrestling with formatting all night long.
The thing is, the legal world has been struggling with this for long enough. And now, if we apply it wisely, AI is starting to play that role.
How AI Is Already Fixing Legal Docs
The world of legal documents is changing. Artificial intelligence programs are starting to find their way into law firms, corporate legal organizations and even regulatory offices, helping to get through piles of documents. And some of them are not just “experimental” – they’re achieving true success.
A great example is Kira Systems. A global ride-sharing company had to review over 3,000 contracts in order to switch to a new contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform. With Kira’s machine learning contract review technology, a team of lawyers were able to extract the most critical metadata (clauses like termination, renewal, etc.) and finish the review assignment around 40% more effectively than when manually performed. How accurate is it? Reasonable 70-85% on first pass.
A case study with the Estonian firm Ellex demonstrates how AI can be helpful when there simply isn’t time to sift through everything. They had 70,000 documents to sift through for a competition law update. The softwareI brought the dataset down to around 600 docs that actually required someone to look them over in detail. That’s a lifesaver when you’re on deadline watches.
These instances all share some things in common. Long, repetitive tasks are the simplest to locate. Metadata extraction, clause identification, compliance checking – activities which legal individuals do not necessarily prefer repeating. AI is not yet a work of genius, but in the majority of real-world situations, it can reduce the amount of mental effort needed, decrease drudge activity, and enable human beings to spend more time engaged in more meaningful legal thought.
The Downsides to Using Legal Doc Automation
We’ve spoken regarding how AI software can help automate legal documents, like whizzing through contracts, flagging clauses and pulling metadata out. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves before we cover some actual messes individuals have gotten themselves into (some accidentally, others by trusting the wrong person), and some hazards you simply have to watch out for.
To begin with, there are the hallucinations. So that lovely legal precedent that AI discussed? Sometimes it just does not exist. In the Mata v. Avianca case, to illustrate, lawyers used ChatGPT to generate case law on a motion, inserted plenty of these suggested “cases” into a brief, and then got sanctioned when some were deemed entirely fabricated by a court. That kind of mistake is worse than embarrassing; it could damage your reputation or worse, influence outcomes.
And then there are the confidentiality and privacy issues. Legal files can be replete with intimate information, such as client data, case details and terms of contracts. Putting that into a public AI endpoint or an instrument that records for training models undermines confidentiality. This has been the difficult way that some law firms have learned with free or generic instruments without data policy checks, and then find client data was stored or processed outside secure areas.
Bias and fairness issues also come up. AI models are trained on historical data, which reflects back on society and replicates bias. The more decisions or documents your AI model has learned from certain demographics, legal styles, or jurisdictions, the more likely it will tip that way unintentionally. That can lead to unequal outcomes or systemic disparity. (Chambers and Partners, “Understanding Ethical Dimensions of Generative AI in Legal Practice”)
These aren’t show-stoppers; they’re warning signs. If legal doc automation tools ignore them, the potential harm can be extreme. But if they do, and they do them with human oversight, careful tool design, strong privacy protections, and simple language ethical guardrails, the benefit is still enormous.
How an AI Agent in Your Corner Solves Common Problems
Do you remember all the downsides that we talked about in the last section? Things like bad precedents, privacy concerns, prejudice and trust issues. Not everybody is cut out for this in AI. But agents with some design decisions can work around a lot of the issues. Your browser could be just what the doctor called for.
First, control and transparency. Very useful to have tools that show how they arrive at making recommendations, e.g., sources and legal standards. Also pleasant to log version/time of law referenced. That sets all up lower rates of hallucinations and lets you catch errors before they are embarrassing (or worse).
Secondly, managing privacy is also crucial. Sigma Browser has local processing and does not conduct third-party tracking on a majority of its operations. Sigma’s got this amazing AI agent which can log into sites, click on buttons, fill out forms and get things done for you, all right in your browser. So, you don’t have to pay so much attention to it and just be sure that everything’s safe and sound with your data still being where it should be.
Now, let’s consider a particular scenario. Suppose that you are a lawyer drafting a standard non-disclosure agreement (NDA) from a template but need to change it to satisfy California employment law. You would want to check for recent changes, include provisions on non-compete or non-solicitation, and highlight what can be risky. You can pull up your contract in the browser, pull up your Sigma Agent in the sidebar, and type in something like: Please would you update this NDA making it CA employment law compliant? Would you also mark any high-risk clauses and show the latest changes to the statute? And finally, could you do a clean version? Sigma Agent then:
- Searches legal databases or reputable sources online;
- Recognizes phrases that might violate new labor law;
- Gets into recommendations;
- Formats the paper, alerts your changes.
You save hours less, you reduce risk, but you’re still ultimately responsible.
Where Legal Automation Is Going
So where’s this leading us? Smaller and medium-sized businesses are going to have to get on board, not necessarily because they need to be testing the latest fad, but because they’re going to need to keep up with what their customers are expecting. People will want faster turnaround, less cost and less lost time. Prediction tools, virtual legal assistants and contract lifecycle platforms are going to be nearly a requirement. It’s a trend that we’re seeing in a lot of reports – law firms adopting AI are getting ahead.
So, what will legal work look like in 3-5 years’ time? Lawyers will still be required – judgements, strategy, empathy, advocacy don’t come into effect automatically. But it’s the tech that’ll be carrying out most of the “grunt work” in the future. Law schools will be teaching legal tech tools. Companies will offer services around AI. People (students, entrepreneurs) will desire personal assistants to help them generate legal content without requiring them to become experts in the law. And the agents that use comprehensive research, writing support, smart browsing and strong privacy will be people’s sidekicks of choice.
The future of legal documents is agent-assisted, not paperless. It would be great if it were possible to create a browser agent that really understands the world of law so “late night formatting” would be a thing of the past.
