News You Can Use

The Vals Report evaluates the performance of 4 legal AI tools - CoCounsel (Thomson Reuters), Vincent AI (vLex), Harvey Assistant (Harvey), and Oliver (Vecflow) across 7 common legal tasks. These tasks include Data Extraction, Document Q&A, Document Summarisation, Redlining, Transcript Analysis, Chronology Generation, and EDGAR Research. The study benchmarks each tool's performance against a control group of lawyers (the Lawyer Baseline). Key findings: - Harvey Assistant: Participated in six tasks, achieving top scores in five and second place in one. Outperforming the Lawyer Baseline in four tasks. - CoCounsel: Evaluated in four tasks, it consistently ranked among the top performers, with scores ranging from 73.2% to 89.6%. Highest score for Document Summarisation (77.2%). - Lawyer Baseline: Outperformed AI tools in two tasks and matched in one. In four tasks, AI surpassed the Lawyer Baseline. Task-specific insights: - Document Q&A: Harvey Assistant achieved a high score of 94.8%. - Chronology Generation: Both Harvey Assistant and the Lawyer Baseline scored 80.2%. The study concludes that legal AI tools provide significant value in legal work, particularly in tasks involving document analysis, information retrieval, and data extraction. Certain areas such as complex research tasks still require further development to meet law firm expectations.

This study provides a useful benchmark for evaluating our own AI tools such as Deal Clarity. Some key areas relevant to our workflows are document analysis, Q&A and extraction that we are actively trying to deal with. Our clients will be interested in this report, where the focus on refining human-AI collaboration is key in assessing AI strengths and gaps, and may help select suitable vendors.

LexisNexis has released a report on how legal service providers can improve client experience through technology and innovation. It highlights key client demands such as: Greater transparency in legal services; Faster turnaround time; Personalised legal service delivery. This Report emphasises that law firms and legal departments that fail to adopt AI and automation risk falling behind as clients increasingly expect tech-enabled efficiency.

This Report reinforces the importance of integrating AI into client-facing workflows, not just internal use. The demand for this aligns with our work, such as exploring client dashboards that provide real-time updates (i.e. HighQ, PowerBI), refining our contract review, extraction, and analysis (i.e. Legora, Kira).

The Forbes article examines the ongoing transformation of the legal industry, driven by: AI adoption with automation reshaping contract review, compliance, and strategy; The rise of alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) which are using AI to offer cost-effective solutions that challenge traditional firms; Regulatory challenges as AI in legal services raises ethical and compliance concerns. The article underscores that firms must embrace AI and alternative service models or risk being left behind.

The growing role of AI in legal services reinforces the need to continuously refine and expand our tools. For example, our work in developing and optimising AGPT becomes even more critical, especially with evaluating whether our AI models are delivering the depth of insight and efficiency that clients and lawyers expect. Another focus is assessing how our tools compare to AI-powered ALSPs and competitors, spotting any potential gaps in customisation, engagement and integration with existing workflows.