The NetDocuments Legal AI Assistant is designed to help legal professionals work more efficiently with the documents already stored in NetDocuments. Unlike legal research tools that focus on case law and judicial analysis, the Legal AI Assistant focuses on your firm's work product, helping you analyze, summarize, and draft from the documents you already have.
Legal AI tools generally fall into three categories:
The NetDocuments Legal AI Assistant belongs in the third category. It works within NetDocuments, using the content already stored in your repository while maintaining a single system of record.
One of the most valuable use cases is quickly understanding a new matter.
Traditionally, getting up to speed on a case might involve reviewing pleadings, correspondence, agreements, deposition transcripts, and other documents. Depending on complexity, this process can take one to two hours or more.
With the Legal AI Assistant, you can:
The assistant reviews the selected documents and produces a summary in minutes, allowing you to begin work with substantially more context and less manual review.
The quality of your results depends heavily on the quality of your prompts.
A vague request like:
Suggest changes to this document.
provides very little guidance.
A stronger prompt provides context and a clear objective:
I represent Company ABC in the negotiation of this Master Services Agreement. Review the agreement and identify language that creates risk for Company ABC related to goods during shipment, delivery, and possession. Specifically evaluate liability and insurance provisions.
Effective prompts generally include three elements:
Tell the assistant what to do.
Examples:
Provide background information that helps the assistant understand the situation.
Examples:
Describe how you want the response formatted.
Examples:
This simple framework can be remembered as ACE:
Many users try to accomplish too much with one request.
For example, asking the assistant to summarize estate planning documents, identify beneficiaries, locate powers of attorney, identify fiduciaries, and build a timeline all in one prompt may produce weaker results.
Instead, use chain prompting:
Breaking complex work into smaller requests often produces more accurate and thorough results.
Generate comprehensive overviews of selected documents to quickly understand a case or transaction.
Ask the assistant to create timelines from witness statements, correspondence, pleadings, and other matter documents.
Use the assistant to locate specific facts buried across multiple files.
Examples include:
This "needle in a haystack" capability can save significant time compared to manual searching.
Every response includes citations back to source documents.
Users can click citations to:
This allows attorneys and legal staff to validate outputs rather than simply trusting the generated response.
The assistant includes settings where users can provide:
Providing this information helps the assistant generate responses that are more relevant to your work and responsibilities.
The Legal AI Assistant also supports saved prompts.
Users can create and store prompts for recurring workflows, while administrators can provide team-wide prompts that everyone in the repository can access. Building a library of proven prompts helps create consistency and reduces repetitive prompt writing.
The Legal AI Assistant is most effective when paired with your legal expertise. It excels at summarizing large collections of documents, generating timelines, finding critical information, and providing traceable answers backed by citations. By combining thoughtful prompting with document-grounded AI responses, legal professionals can reduce review time, accelerate onboarding to new matters, and focus more attention on higher-value legal work.
