The gold standard of legal technology information.
Draft Better Briefs by Adding AI and Automation to Microsoft Word
October 7, 2019
Today's TechnoLawyer Buyer's Guide report covers a Microsoft Word add-in that automates many of the tedious tasks involved in drafting briefs and transactional documents, including new AI technology that identifies potentially helpful cases you didn't cite and new tools for creating a table of authorities.
Draft Better Briefs by Adding AI and Automation to Microsoft Word
Notwithstanding the growing number of software products for the legal profession, lawyers still spend most of their computer time in Microsoft Word. Therefore, it makes sense to bring new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) into Microsoft Word.
Drafting Assistant resides in a toolbar on the Microsoft Word ribbon. Clicking the toolbar unfurls the Drafting Assistant panel to the left of your brief with Westlaw Edge Quick Check as a new option.
Quick Check uses AI to analyze your brief (or a model brief you plan to repurpose) to reveal cases you didn't cite that may provide more support for your arguments. It also analyzes the citations in your brief and warns you if any of those cases have negative treatment or have been implicitly overruled. The AI behind Quick Check features several breakthroughs in content analysis and draws from Thomson Reuters' vast collection of proprietary content such as KeyCite and the Key Number System. (See our prior article on Quick Check for more details.)
In Drafting Assistant, clicking Quick Check opens your web browser, automatically uploads the brief you're working on for analysis, and displays the resulting report after a few seconds.
The report contains three tabs — Recommendations, Warnings for Citated Authorities, and Table of Authorities. The Recommendations report organizes suggested cases using the headings in your brief. Westlaw's Copy with Reference technology ensures that any citation you copy and paste into your brief uses the correct citation style.
Drafting Assistant automates the process of uploading your brief to Westlaw Edge Quick Check for analysis.
Other Notable Features
While Quick Check provides a handy hyperlinked list of your brief's citations that you can share with a client or colleague, Drafting Assistant generates an actual Table of Authorities for your brief. The new TOA Builder offers more flexibility and enables support staff to fine-tune the TOA without editing the brief. You can even have TOA Builder scan only a select portion of a document for better results, skipping affidavits, caption pages, and other irrelevant material.
Initially, Drafting Assistant identifies the citations in the document for review. You can add missing case names, categorize unknown citations, reorder citations, apply italics or underlining, add websites as authorities, and more. The TOA Builder displays a preview of each edit before you finalize it. When you make edits to the brief, Drafting Assistant preserves your previous TOA edits if you desire, and highlights new citations so that you can quickly find and edit them.
Drafting Assistant makes it easier to get started on a brief with the new PDF Converter. This tool enables you to convert a scanned PDF (image) into Microsoft Word format with all the citations and formatting intact.
It's also easier and more foolproof to check your citations. The Flags & Links tool now includes Westlaw Edge's Overruling Risk flag in addition to other KeyCite flags. This AI-based technology identifies cases that rely on an overruled authority for the point you're asserting. If you subscribe to Drafting Assistant, WestCheck, which verifies your citations and quotations, can now limit positive or negative treatment by date or check only for new treatment since your last verification on a specified date.
What Else Should You Know?
Drafting Assistant also includes Deal Proof, a suite of tools for drafting transactional documents. Deal Proof finds discrepancies in defined terms, inconsistent numeration, invalid dates, cross-reference errors, non-conforming phrases, punctuation errors, non-matching signature blocks, and more.
Neil J. Squillante is the founder and publisher of TechnoLawyer, an award-winning network of free email newsletters for lawyers and law office administrators. Many consider TechnoLawyer newsletters the only ones they need. A Fastcase 50 award winner, Neil has a long track record of inventing successful advertising and publishing technologies and related best practices. Previously, Neil practiced commercial litigation at Am Law 100 firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher. He received his J.D. from UCLA School of Law and his B.A. from Duke University. At UCLA, Neil served as a Managing Editor of UCLA Law Review.
