Oct 03, 2024 | AI

Contract Express has long been a market leader in creating complex suites of documents. Yet our customers sometimes found it difficult to use Contract Express for simple documents.

To address customers’ pain points, my team has spent the last year improving useability for both complex and simple contracts by using the power of generative AI. Now that Contract Express customers are using our innovative solution, I wanted to share how it’s helping legal professionals better support their clients.

Document automation challenges

For context, lawyers routinely draft similar types of contracts, so they create templates that can be easily updated with customer-specific data like names and addresses. Document automation is about making it quicker and easier for legal professionals to create and update these templates for every case.

Yet a frustration with document automation is that it’s time-consuming to manually create and customize contract templates. It requires a human author to enter code or syntax into a document, line-by-line. The manual process leaves room for error, and errors can lead to compliance risk.

How generative AI is revolutionizing document automation

This is where generative AI is changing the game. We’ve found that generative AI makes document automation significantly faster!

With the power of generative AI, Contract Express can now work much faster than human authors to generate documents. It eliminates the need to manually enter code; generative AI does the work, dramatically simplifying the authoring process. We estimate that a three-page contract takes about 30 to 60 minutes to complete manually, but Contract Express can automate that contract in about two minutes.

Customers who participated in our beta program were pleased with the time-savings our automation delivered. A senior developer at a large UK law firm told us that document automation takes “the drudgery out of that first-stage creation.”

A director at a UK-based legal automation consultancy said Contract Express “was noticeably different in terms of the sophistication in the suggested fields,” compared to other document automation offerings, and would save time, “especially where you have a document where there are a lot of obvious questions.”

My team and I are incredibly proud of this innovation, and I’m grateful to my colleagues for working so hard to make this happen for our customers.

Generative AI-powered document automation is available to Contract Express Cloud and HighQ customers. CoCounsel Drafting customers who also subscribe to Contract Express can access this functionality within CoCounsel Drafting in the United States; in the UK, CoCounsel Drafting will be available in Q4. Practical Law customers should have access by the end of 2024.

This is a guest post from Mark Cullen, senior director, Product Management, Thomson Reuters.