First Proper Look at ‘Doc Gen AI’ Spellbook + It’s Very Impressive

Artificial Lawyer highlighted Spellbook last week, and now has had a proper look at how it works and what it can do (see AL TV video below). What AL saw suggests that generative AI for contracting, i.e. ‘Doc Gen AI’, both for contract creation and review, has a realistic future and that future has already begun. Overall, Spellbook is very impressive.

How far it will go remains to be seen, but as you will observe in the video, it’s capable of things like completing a section of a contract by simply ‘reading’ the two clauses above it. Incredibly the text came from just the prompt ‘5.3’, referring to clauses 5.1 and 5.2 above it, and Spellbook produced a new clause that made perfect sense. Would that AI created clause need to be tweaked? Almost certainly, but it was relevant and would save a lawyer a lot of time.

AL also saw how an option to ‘explain the contract for a five-year old’ can reduce a multi-page contract into a paragraph of simple and direct text, which really explained things well. And one can see this being of interest to the growing ‘clear legal language’ movement and for inhouse teams that want to share key aspects of a contract with the rest of the business, but avoid legalese.

The video also shows a new chatbot function where you can type in natural language questions and get immediate answers about what is in the contract.

The best way to appreciate what it can do is watch the video below with CEO Scott Stevenson, which includes some questions at the end from AL.

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And here is how Stevenson, whose company Rally developed Spellbook, explained what he showed us in the video:

‘Spellbook is an AI contract review & drafting tool powered by the latest in large language model technology, GPT-3. It has seen thousands of contracts and uses the context of your contract to suggest new text

In this demo, we walk through a few examples of how to use Spellbook with a software sales contract:

1. With the Draft spell, we auto-generate sub-sections based on headings, notes and context
2. With the “Missing Clauses” spell, we highlight common terms that could be added to the contract
3. With the “Explain Section” and “Review” spells, we show how Spellbook can explain the contents of a contract

Finally, we give Artificial Lawyer an exclusive look at our beta chatbot mode which enables you do ask freeform questions about a contract, and even to ask follow-up questions! It’s not quite ready for release yet but it should give you an idea of what’s to come!’

(There is also a link here to the earlier AL story that explains a lot of other aspects about the product.)

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So, there you go! AL is very interested to hear what you think. Whether you are rightly sceptical or amazed, this does look like a technology that will now grow and grow in the legal field.

[ Note: this is an educational AL TV video. It’s going to be important for everyone to see this new development in legal tech. ]