Best of 2023: On Taking Typing out of Litigation (Automating Legal Drafting with AI) Nathan Walter (CEO Briefpoint)
Dec 22, 2023
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Nathan Walter, founder of Briefpoint, discusses how his company is using AI to automate legal drafting tasks. They explore the time-consuming nature of copying and pasting from prior work and the potential of generative AI to eliminate typing in litigation. They also discuss the benefits of automation tools in litigation, finding a co-founder through a video game community, and the concept of law as a fractal. Overall, the podcast highlights the potential of AI in reducing legal fees and freeing up lawyers to focus on more complex tasks.
Briefpoint uses AI to automate legal drafting tasks, analyzing legal documents and generating preliminary responses to save lawyers time and effort.
Automating legal drafting with AI can reduce legal fees, free up lawyers to focus on complex work, and ensure consistency in document formats across cases.
Deep dives
Automating Routine Legal Drafting Tasks using AI
Nathan Walter, founder of Freepoint, discusses how his app uses AI to automate routine legal drafting tasks. The app analyzes legal documents like interrogatories and document requests to generate response templates, saving lawyers time and effort. By automating these tasks, Nathan aims to reduce legal fees and allow lawyers to focus on more complex work. The app prioritizes usability and attorney involvement in the document finalization process while leveraging AI to streamline the drafting process.
Stumbling upon the Concept of Law as a Fractal
Nathan discovered the concept of law as a fractal, a repetitive complex shape captured by a single formula, similar to the application of law to infinitely complex factual patterns. Inspired by this idea, he embarked on teaching himself coding to automate legal processes. Nathan tested various ideas through vaporware, fake programs, and received honest feedback from attorneys. Eventually, he found product-market fit with BriefPoint, which automates canned text and mechanical writing content, allowing attorneys to focus on bespoke writing and legal analysis.
Overcoming the Perception of Inefficiency and the Billable Hour
While efficiency tools in the legal profession are often met with skepticism, BriefPoint addresses the concern of the billable hour. By automating canned text and mechanical writing content, the tool aims to make attorney objections and document formats consistent across cases. This helps save lawyers time and effort, allowing them to focus on bespoke writing content, which is the key value they bring to their clients. BriefPoint's goal is to improve attorney adoption, streamline litigation processes, and reduce costs of discovery and other legal document drafting.
Roadmap for the Future: Automating the Entire Litigation Process
BriefPoint has a roadmap to automate the entire litigation process, from demand letters to appeals. Current and upcoming features include separate statement automation, supplemental responses, client verification, form templatization, and federal coverage. The company aims to incorporate district-specific drafting rules and ensure seamless formatting across jurisdictions. Nathan Walter, along with his team, continues to enhance BriefPoint's functionality, focusing on usability and attorney involvement while leveraging AI to streamline and improve the efficiency of legal document drafting.
In one of 2023's most listened to episodes, Nathan Walter, founder of Briefpoint, joins Technically Legal to explain how his company is using technology and artificial intelligence to automate routine legal drafting tasks.
A good portion of lawyers’ time and those helping them is copying or re-using prior work. This is especially true in litigation and especially in discovery.
Thankfully more and more apps have been developed that help automate the creation of legal documents. Historically, these programs have been form based and users populated documents by selecting choices from a menu.
But with advances in generative AI maybe form based software is unneeded. That’s what Briefpoint is banking on.
Briefpoint uses tech to analyze legal documents, like interrogatories and document requests, and then generates preliminary responses to give legal teams a head start on drafting.
As Nathan explains, if more legal processes are automated and augmented with AI, it will bring legal fees down and free up lawyers to focus on the complicated stuff rather than cutting and pasting prior work product.
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