LawVu assists in house legal teams with Azure OpenAI
NZ developer LawVu is aiming to transform the capabilities of in-house legal teams by adding AI enhancements to its legal workspace software.
According to LawVu’s latest In-house Legal Technology Report, the most pressing priority for in-house legal teams and their businesses is finding efficiency and productivity gains. A key barrier to driving productivity stems from in-house legal teams’ lack of access to the latest technology.
Typically, these teams have access to rich data sets that contain a wealth of information about the business, but lack the resources to unlock the insights this data holds.
LawVu has added new AI-powered features to its legal workspace that can optimise efficiency, remove administrative burden and provide secure access to valuable insights previously locked away in contracts and invoices.
LawVu’s AI Assist feature uses the latest generative AI and language models from Microsoft Azure OpenAI to help customers action contracts faster. This natural language processing tool reviews and summarises key information from contracts so that in-house legal professionals can find answers quickly without needing to read hundreds of pages.
AI Assist can give users a high-level summary of a contract, retrieve details such as parties involved, key dates, signatories, scope, liabilities and warranties, and identify contract renewal and expiry dates in a matter of seconds. It also allows users to evaluate the accuracy and value of the response with a ‘thumbs up or down’ vote so that the software can learn on the job.
LawVu developed these new features through a strategic partnership with Microsoft. As part of the Microsoft AI First Movers program, LawVu has enjoyed early access to Microsoft’s cutting-edge AI technology to build new tools and deliver rapid innovation to its customers.
“LawVu was already allowing in-house legal teams to manage their contracts, matters and vendor spend all in one place. Now, with the power of AI embedded in that workflow, we are taking a crucial next step in transforming what in-house legal teams can do and how efficiently they can do it,” says Sam Kidd, CEO and Co-founder of LawVu.
The company has also developed several other features leveraging Microsoft’s Azure Form Recognizer and Zuva’s DocAI. The AI Contract Import and Review feature lets customers import existing contracts in bulk into their LawVu environment up to four times faster, saving thousands of valuable lawyer hours per year.
The AI Contract Extraction tool automatically captures and extracts key contract clauses and important data much faster than before. This saves in-house legal teams huge amounts of administrative time and effort. The tool pulls critical data from contracts into in-house legal teams’ record systems, so it can be used for alerts, notifications and reporting. It also helps to create a standardised, complete dataset to facilitate reporting functions.
Delivering customer benefits is not the only way LawVu is using AI. The company has developed an internal ChatGPT capability using the Azure OpenAI Service, which draws on LawVu’s database to respond to employee questions. This allows staff to retrieve information more quickly and simplify manual operations, freeing them up for more creative or demanding tasks.
LawVu’s software engineers are also utilizing GitHub Copilot to help them write better code faster. Using the software’s latest developments in the Copilot Chat, engineers can offload the laborious task of generating test cases for new code quickly. The speed at which engineers can test and develop new code allows LawVu to innovate rapidly.
The company’s AI philosophy is to identify places in the legal workflow where it can add value without introducing risk. Security is a major consideration as LawVu works to embed AI in its in-house legal workspace solution. By working closely with Microsoft and utilising built-in security and compliance approaches, it can ensure customer data remains ‘containerised’ in the relevant accounts so any AI-enhanced tools can access it without compromising data security and privacy.
“LawVu is supercharging the capabilities of in-house legal teams with AI. We are excited to witness and support their journey in augmenting what teams can do to drive efficiency, reduce burnout and improve the employee experience in the legal field,” says Lee Hickin, Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft Australia and New Zealand.