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Artificial Intelligence, the Law, and the Legal Profession

AI Tools: Westlaw and Lexis

AI tools, including those offered by Westlaw and Lexis+, have implications for work undertaken by law school faculty, attorneys, and law students. For example,

  • AI tools can produce text, including draft agreements, briefs, or summaries;
  • AI tools can pull together information from a variety of sources, representing a kind of "legal research" aimed at answering legal questions of interest to students, attorneys, law faculty, and people seeking legal counsel;
  • Generative AI is being used to predict the outcome of cases, review contracts, for client billing, for e-discovery, as part of document review, to screen jury members.

You should always verify AI-generated results. As a legal professional, you -- not Lexis+ or Westlaw -- will be responsible for your work product. You'll need to review and assess any AI-generated content to ensure the outputs are accurate, current, and comprehensive.

AI tools and platforms, including Harvey, Jus Mundi, DraftWise, PointOne, and Gavel, are used by law firms to conduct research, draft and edit documents, summarize documents, review and build workflows, formulate strategies and negotiation options, create templates, manage cases, and more. Law school students will need to know how to use such tools, and they will need to understand the implications of relying on them. A suite of AI tools is available to Emory Law students and faculty, with Westlaw and Lexis adding new tools on an ongoing basis.     

Westlaw's CoCounsel and Lexis Protégé 

When might you use AI tools offered by Westlaw and Lexis+?

You might use Westlaw or Lexis+ AI tools to start your research on a specific legal topic you are not familiar with, to create a first draft of a letter, a brief or memo, deposition questions, a contract, or other types of documents, to summarize information from lengthy and complex documents, to improve the clarity or alter the style of your written work, to create timelines of events using several documents, or to transform handwritten texts or texts written in languages other than English to make those texts accessible.

Additional information and training resources for AI tools in Westlaw and Lexis+: