Plans & Pricing
About Gavel
Careers
Product Wishlist
Subdomain Log In
Manage Account
Learn how you can use 5 leading AI tools together to streamline research, e-discover, and document automation and boost your law firm's efficiency.
Easy intake and document automation to auto-populate your templates.
Being a lawyer is quantifiably one of the most stressful jobs around, with lawyers reporting that they experience burnout more than half of the time they’re working. Put simply: it’s a tough job.
While legal work is never going to be easy, there are ways to make your job easier. AI technology has finally reached the point where integrating it into your legal practice can save you hours of work and loads of stress. A recent survey by Clio found that 79% of law firms have started integrating AI into their workflows. So, consider this your official notice: it’s time to work smarter, not harder.
With so many new legal tech tools on the market, it can be tough to get your bearings. To help, we’ve put together what we consider to be the best AI legal tool stack for today’s legal professionals. These aren’t just the “best” tools, they’re the tools that work the best together, each filling the other’s gaps. We’ll give you an overview of each tool, where it shines, and then finally give you a brief overview of how you can use all of these together to become the AI-powered lawyer of the future.
Best for: Client intake and document automation
How to use it: Streamline your client intake and document drafting with powerful automation that can save you hours of work on tedious legal tasks.
Gavel is a legal document automation tool that helps you save time on time-consuming and repetitive tasks, like processing client intake forms and drafting the same types of documents (e.g., engagement letters, court forms, etc.). Even complex documents, like living trusts, can benefit from Gavel’s automation technology. Attorneys who use Gavel can save over 20 hours per week and improve efficiency thanks to the tool's powerful automation features.
Let’s break down what that means in practical terms. Imagine you need to draft an engagement letter for one of your clients. Instead of manually going through an existing template and finding and replacing variables, like pronouns or names, Gavel's questionnaire allows your clients' one-time answers to a prompt to auto-draft the correct references throughout the resulting document in seconds.
But Gavel goes deeper than single line items: it can dynamically adjust form parameters based on client input. For example, check out what happens when the client selects a different marital status on this client intake form. Here’s what it looks like when the client selects that they’re single:
And here’s what happens when they select that they’re married:
Gavel automatically adds in the relevant questions and then drafts up a finished Word document or PDF based on that information. This logic is not restricted to the questionnaire — conditional clauses can also appear or be excluded from the final document draft.
Once the client fills out their info, Gavel automatically outputs this completed form without you having to lift a finger:
It’s a fully set-and-forget system: set up your documents once and let Gavel handle the rest from there on out. If it can be repeated, it can be automated.
Gavel Blueprint takes things even further with AI-driven functionality. If you’re transitioning to Gavel and already have your document sets in Word or fillable PDF form, then Gavel Blueprint can automatically read those files, turn them into workflows and questionnaires, and even suggest other parameters you may want to include. Once the initial conversion is complete, you can manually edit anything you want to change. Plus, you don't even need to have your own templates — Gavel offers attorney-vetted, pre-built templates and court forms across many practice areas and jurisdictions.
“As an employment lawyer, I used Gavel to streamline my client intake process and automatically generate document sets, no matter how complex,” said Dorna Moini, attorney and CEO of Gavel. “Gavel is also powerful for rules-based areas of law like corporate, real estate, estate planning, and family law.”
If you’re already familiar with tools like ChatGPT but have been worried about integrating it into your legal services due to privacy concerns, Gavel can help on that front too: Gavel integrates with OpenAI using separate, private servers to prevent your data from being included in OpenAI’s training set. That gives you and your clients an extra layer of privacy so that you can use the popular large language model’s (LLM’s) capabilities to further work on documents — without even having to leave the Gavel app.
If you're interested in trying out Gavel, start a 7-day free trial or schedule a personalized demo before you sign up for a subscription.
Best for: E-discovery, case law research, and document analysis
How to use it: Get answers to legal research and case law questions with sources from Westlaw Precision’s database. Speed up your e-discovery process and finetune your deposition preparation.
Casetext has been a staple in the legal professional’s toolbox since its release in 2013. Originally marketed as a crowdsourced law library, Casetext began augmenting its capabilities with artificial intelligence starting in 2016 with CARA AI, making it one of the first AI legal tools on the market.
In 2023, Casetext released CoCounsel, a fully-fledged legal AI assistant developed in cooperation with OpenAI. Casetext saw GPT 4’s potential to help lawyers but also realized its limitations: it wasn’t secure nor reliable enough for professional legal use. CoCounsel aims to solve those problems with a GPT 4 model that is specifically designed for legal use and, just like Gavel, accessed via separate servers to prevent client data from being used for training. Following CoCounsel’s release, Casetext was acquired by Thomson Reuters, which owns Westlaw, adding some extra credibility to the product.
CoCounsel has the following AI “skills”:
That’s a lot of features, but only a few of them are unique to CoCounsel, so we’ll focus on those.
Let’s take a look at how CoCounsel works. When you log in, you’re presented with the following screen:
Everything you do in CoCounsel takes place in the context of a “chat.” If you’re familiar with ChatGPT, it’s the same concept — you speak with CoCounsel as if you’re speaking with a legal assistant, and CoCounsel delivers the results you want, whether that’s a draft of a document or an answer to a legal question.
For example, you can ask a CoCounsel a specific legal question, like so:
After verifying your request, CoCounsel will search Westlaw Precision’s database to look for an answer, and return a written memo including citations to relevant case law:
Scrolling down on the response, you’ll find relevant citations:
You’ll notice that CoCounsel follows the IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) legal problem-solving model: its response clearly states what the legal issue is, finds the relevant legal rule, analyzes the facts according to that rule, and then draws a final conclusion. If you need clarification or more information, you can also ask follow-up questions.
CoCounsel isn’t limited to just Westlaw’s database — you can use it on your own legal data and databases, making it an essential tool for e-discovery. Instead of reviewing thousands of emails and documents on your own, you can ask CoCounsel to search for anything relevant to a specific topic, and it will return the results you need. In a similar vein, CoCounsel can also read through case documentation and suggest questions that you should ask during a deposition.
If you need to review a contract, get a summary, or extract key data points, CoCounsel can use its advanced research skills to do that for you as well. It’s a must-have for legal departments everywhere.
“CoCounsel is the go-to for case law research. I used them early on in my litigation practice, and it sifted through thousands of cases, saving me hours of research by pointing me to the right cases,” said Moini.
If you're interested in trying out CoCounsel, the company offers a free trial.
Best for: Answering questions about internal documents
How to use it: Get answers to questions about your own legal documents.
Like the other tools we’ve covered, Harvey is based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT LLM and uses a separate server to maintain privacy and data security. However, whereas Gavel’s Blueprint focuses on using AI to prepare document-generation workflows and CoCounsel aims to offer an all-in-one legal assistant, Harvey concentrates on leveraging AI-powered legal research to provide you answers to questions you might have about your own documents.
For example, if you’re wondering which of your hundreds of contracts contains non-standard language, you can simply upload your documents, and Harvey will use natural language processing to look through them and generate a list for you. Or, if you’re wondering whether something is allowed according to a specific agreement, just upload the contract, and Harvey will let you know.
To use Harvey for its main use cases, you type in a request, upload relevant documents, and then you’ll get the results on the right-hand side of the interface:
One particularly useful feature of Harvey is its prompts library. When it comes to AI, the precise way you ask a question can greatly impact the answer you receive — learning to ask questions the right way, aka “prompt engineering,” is a skill in itself. To help you out on this front, Harvey includes a library of preset prompts for common requests.
For example, selecting a short prompt like one of the following in the library:
will provide you with a much more detailed prompt, saving you the time of having to type it all out yourself:
If you need to comb through large amounts of data and extract a summary Harvey can help you there too:
“I could see myself using Harvey during contract reviews to pull out key clauses or summarize terms, especially when working against tight deadlines,” said Moini.
Harvey doesn't advertise a free trial, but you can reach out to Harvey's team to learn more.
Best for: Tax code questions
How to use it: Get answers to tough tax code questions and summarize the answers in memos to other attorneys or to your clients.
Blue J L&E is unique among legal research tools in that it’s designed exclusively for tax code questions. By now, you probably understand the basic gist of how it works: you have a chat screen, you ask it a question, and it gives you an answer. The main difference between Blue J and products like CoCounsel and Harvey is that Blue J’s data set is focused on tax codes.
For example, if you ask it, “What are the rules for determining the allocation of consideration received in an applicable asset acquisition?”, you’ll get a response like this:
Throughout the response, you’ll have hyperlinked citations and links to the relevant sections. At the end of the response, you’ll see a list of the sources it drew from:
There are a couple of unique features to note here. First, you’ll notice that to the right of each source is a “Summarize” button. You can click this to get a quick summary of the source, like so:
Below the response is a button that says “View more sources.” This will show you sources that were not used to generate the response but have relevant info that you might find useful as you conduct your research.
At the end of each response, Blue J will provide you with a few questions that you might want to ask Blue J if you want to go deeper into the topic. This feature is particularly useful for junior and mid-level practitioners, but even veteran tax pros may find these suggestions give them inspiration for new, creative directions to pursue on a problem.
Once you’re satisfied with your answer, you can have Blue J draft up either a memo to another tax pro or an email to a non-professional using its generative AI tools.
“Blue J would be useful in cross-checking interpretations of tax rules, particularly when dealing with ambiguous or highly technical provisions. It’s like having a virtual tax advisor on call,” said Moini.
If you're interested in learning more about Blue J L&E, you can book a demo via their website.
Best for: General questions that could impact your cases
How to use it: Draft emails and get answers to broader questions.
Most of these tools are based on ChatGPT, so it may seem redundant to include it as a separate tool. However, these tools’ specialization are both their strengths and their weaknesses. Tools like CoCounsel, Harvey, and Blue J can get you answers to very specific legal questions, but what if you need an answer to something that’s only tangentially related to law? For example, what if you’re working on a product liability case, and you need an answer to a question like, “What level of force is required to fracture this type of consumer product, and is it reasonable to expect that force to occur under normal use?”
This is where ChatGPT can come in. While you need to approach all of its answers with a bit of skepticism, it can be a good way to weed out whether there’s any viability to your line of questioning.
Let’s see it in action. Imagine you’re working on a medical malpractice case, in which you suspect your client received a dosage of a medication that falls outside of the standard of care, but you aren’t quite sure. You could ask ChatGPT to get a quick sanity check before consulting an expert for the final word. Here’s part of the answer you get by asking the 4o model the question, “What is the recommended dosage of heparin for a 150-pound adult patient undergoing routine surgery, and how does the dosage administered in this case compare to that standard?”
Something important to be aware of is that ChatGPT currently offers three different AI models: 4o, o1, and o1-mini. 4o is considered the go-to for general questions, whereas the o1’s are better for technical questions that require in-depth reasoning (o1 tends to provide better answers, but o1-mini is a little faster). However, the o1 models do not support web search, which makes them more prone to false information.
For comparison’s sake, here’s how o1 answered the same question:
Keep in mind that you should not trust these answers at face value. AI models, like ChatGPT, are very prone to providing false information, called “hallucinations” Luckily, you can ask ChatGPT 4o to give you some sources by clicking the web icon and typing in your question:
When you do that, ChatGPT will give you a breakdown of the important info along with the sources that it’s drawing from:
Of course, you can also use ChatGPT’s generative AI capabilities to draft up an email based on these answers:
"ChatGPT is a helpful brainstorming tool for general questions that come up in cases. For example, you can use it to draft outlines for client memos or to research emerging legal trends before diving deeper and checking the citations yourself," said Moini.
One more note: your data isn’t fully private on ChatGPT. Don’t use it for any sensitive client data that needs to stay private.
The basic version of ChatGPT can be accessed for free, you'll just need to make an account.
There are lots of AI-powered tools on the market, so we had to be discerning with our picks. However, these other tools also deserve your consideration:
So there you have it: 5 of the best AI legal software around today. If you want to boost your productivity with AI, here’s what we recommend:
With all that in your toolbox, you’ll be ready to move you and your legal team into the future of law.
Here are 5 of the best estate planning software tools that you can use together to create a comprehensive estate planning tech stack, boost your firm’s efficiency, and improve your client relationships.
Watch Gavel's CEO and CTO, Dorna and Pierre, share what's coming in 2025 and celebrate the biggest product updates of 2024 during Gavel Innovate 2024.
Recommendations and Tips for Probate Lawyers Who Are Using AI
