Gavel Launches ‘Exec’ AI Assistant for Small Law – Artificial Lawyer

Once again a legal tech company has – via the launch of a new AI product – raised the question: has the time come for Small Law to transform itself – and perhaps do so faster than Big Law?

But first, the product, which is priced to be affordable to smaller firms.

Gavel, which is based in Los Angeles, has built Exec, a genAI assistant that can be embedded in Microsoft Word. It’s already been tried out by several law firms and they’ve provided feedback to ‘ensure accuracy and quality of the results and helped develop market benchmarks and playbooks, starting with corporate and real estate law’, the company noted.

All well and good, but what does it do?

Gavel Exec ‘empowers lawyers to perform a range of activities, including contract analysis and redlining, negotiation based on firm precedents, and running playbooks with pre-defined rules’, they said, and added that it acts as an ‘extension of Gavel’s end-to-end automation platform’.

And here’s several of its features:

– Redline: Compare your document against Gavel’s benchmarks or your uploaded reference files to ensure consistency and alignment with your preferred rules and style.

– Draft and Revise: Draft or rewrite clauses or entire documents with domain-specific expertise.

– Chat: Ask sophisticated questions about your document, with clear insights informed by the full document context.

– Playbooks: Create reusable rule sets for document types, allowing for consistency across the negotiation process.

– Projects: Create projects to load custom data and instructions for your AI.

Dorna Moini, CEO and Founder of Gavel and a former attorney at Sidley Austin, commented: ‘We’ve seen lawyers commit and adopt Gavel Exec just 20 minutes after trying it.’

While Gavel’s CTO, Pierre Martin, added: ‘Gavel Exec uses advanced, proprietary AI agents that model the entire context of your document, reference files, guidelines, and prior behaviour before taking any action. This is not just another ‘ChatGPT in Word’ product – our approach yields … context-aware, and intelligent edits to elevate the way lawyers work.’

And that sounds promising, and perhaps promising enough to get a lot of lawyers at smaller firms interested. But, on that point – AL had to ask: do you think Small Law is having its ‘AI moment’, and could this part of the market actually even overtake Big Law in terms of AI adoption?

Moini replied to AL: ‘Yes, that’s what we’ve seen. We work with law firms of all sizes, but we’re seeing that Small Law firms are more receptive to using AI than Big Law firms, and they use it more regularly.

‘This is because they move faster, face more pressure to compete on efficiency, and are eager to scale their practices through alternative fees (rather than sticking to the billable hour, which could be less profitable for them).

‘I’ll also say that these firms often don’t have layers of procurement, so if a tool helps them serve more clients or reduce time spent on low-value tasks, they adopt it.’

And these are great points. AL would add that:

genAI can be relatively a lot less expensive for smaller firms to use (if the vendors are willing to adapt pricing to match Small Law budgets), than the older NLP / ML products which were rarely ever priced for this part of the market.

Small Law firms are… well….small….and so can make tech decisions very rapidly, if they feel compelled to do so.

And that even though many small firms will not even have a dedicated IT team, or if they do it’s for handling not much more than Windows updates and the website, let alone an innovation team to experiment with AI, this new wave of genAI tools are – in theory at least – quick to deploy and easy to use – as long as the users understand what’s possible and what is not.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, i.e. if Big Law, which has dominated legal tech in the US, eventually gets overtaken by hundreds of much smaller firms.

You can find more about Gavel and Gavel Exec here.

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Legal Innovators California conference, San Francisco, June 11 + 12

If you’re interested in the cutting edge of legal AI and innovation – and where we are all heading – then come along to Legal Innovators California, in San Francisco, June 11 and 12, where speakers from the leading law firms, inhouse teams, and tech companies will be sharing their insights and experiences as to what is really happening.

We already have an incredible roster of companies to hear from. This includes: &AI, Legora, Harvey, StructureFlow, Ivo, Flatiron Law Group, PointOne, Centari, LexisNexis, eBrevia, Legatics, Knowable, Draftwise, newcode.AI, Riskaway, Aracor, SimpleClosure and more.

Cooley, Wilson Sonsini, Baker McKenzie, Gunderson, Ropes & Grey, A&O Shearman and many other leading law firms will also be taking part. 

See you all there!

More information and tickets here.