Bryter Launches AI Agents For Legal Workflows

Bryter, which first arrived as a no-code company, has been busy building its own genAI capabilities. Today it formally launched a new product-suite: AI Agents, which can handle specific legal tasks. Artificial Lawyer got an update on the new product and spoke to CEO Michael Grupp about the company’s evolution.

First, the agents. Using proprietary, pre-trained AI, the Agents can help law firms and legal departments with very specific workflows, such as ‘speeding up the review of contracts using the Review Agent, [or] getting draft email replies to recurring requests from commercial teams directly in MS Outlook or Gmail through the Email Agent’.

As Grupp explained to AL, these AI programs are trained to operate within a particular context and are pre-set before implementation to carry out just that task. This focus means they can be put to work in a short time.

‘AI Agents have their own content, their own guidelines and are context aware to handle one task,’ he said.

To illustrate how they can deliver value, Bryter gave the example of how they have provided AI Agents to Bertelsmann, the German multi-national, in relation to surfacing HR information. The corporate had set the requirement that:

– ‘First, all AI-generated answers needed to include links back to the original source documents to ensure transparency and allow users to verify the underlying information.

– Second, they required a user-friendly solution with easily understandable responses.

– Third, the quality of the answers had to be exceptionally high, with no room for errors or hallucinations.’

Stefanie Briefs, Senior Legal Counsel and Lead of Legal Tech HR, at Bertelsmann, commented: ‘Bryter’s AI Agents met all of these requirements. We are optimistic that a tool like this could relieve our legal professionals from routine inquiries and empower our HR business partners and, eventually, all employees to access internal information 24/7 in any language.’

Now, after this and several other tests with corporates, such as Penguin Random House, over the last six months, Bryter is putting its AI Agents on general release. They are also offering a free trial version of the product so you can test it out.

No-Code Is Not Dead

Now, we can’t leave it there. As everyone who has been following legal tech for some years will know, no-code solutions and the several companies that pioneered them were all the rage just a couple of years ago. Bryter even did a $60m investment round in 2021, and a range of other companies from Betty Blocks to Neota Logic, and many others, were doing great.

Then came genAI, which simply superseded some aspects of what no-code products did. For example, one popular use case was to build a rule-based Q&A system to surface factual information. Now, with a genAI chatbot one can tap that information in a much more intuitive way.

Moreover, when it came to DIY projects, many law firms and legal teams wanted to see what genAI could do. In short, while the value of rules based systems – as can still be built with Bryter and others – remains, attention moved to other things.

This inevitably had an impact. Bryter re-sized and now has less staff. However, as Grupp told Artificial Lawyer they are now back on solid ground and are doing very well.

Grupp was also clear that no-code is still very relevant and in fact makes a perfect companion for genAI.

‘No-code is not dead. There are use cases where you need a rules-based system in order to have the most accurate and predictable results. So, you need to merge no-code and genAI nodes [in a workflow],’ he explained.

I.e. an LLM finds an answer, but then the next step is to trigger an action within the law firm because of that answer. That approval trigger is best done by a rules-based system that could be built with a no-code approach.

Grupp concluded: ‘Bryter had hands [as a no-code company], now it has eyes and a brain [with genAI].’

So, there you go. No-code is not dead, nor are its pioneers. They have simply adapted to the new world of genAI. And that’s great to see.