Bloomberg Law Launches Two GenAI Features

Bloomberg Law, which is hoping to take market share in the legal tech and research fields, has launched two genAI products: Bloomberg Law Answers and Bloomberg Law AI Assistant.

The huge US company had already been exploring what genAI can do for some time, but is now clearly seeking to build up its profile and capabilities in this area.

So, what can these tools do?

‘ – With Bloomberg Law Answers, legal professionals can get quick, precise answers to their legal questions, drawing from a comprehensive range of legal sources available on the Bloomberg Law platform. [It] leverages generative AI and authoritative content to provide a brief but meaningful answer to a user’s search right on top of their regular results, with no need to learn a new tool. Each answer generated includes citations and links to the Bloomberg Law authorities and source documents used to generate it, including select primary and secondary sources.

And,

‘ – Bloomberg Law AI Assistant is a chat-based research tool that allows users to generate summaries of legal documents, as well as ask targeted questions to identify specific information from those documents. [It] allows customers to generate summaries of primary content and select secondary content. Generating summaries saves users significant time in their research by providing clear, easy-to-read overviews of documents. Users can also ask the AI Assistant specific questions about the document to quickly identify the information they are looking for.’

The company added that both are now available within the Bloomberg Law platform at no additional charge, but are still in beta and will be refined.

They also added that the current iterations of these tools ‘have been refined to incorporate suggestions received from Innovation Studio participants, demonstrating Bloomberg Law’s commitment to utilizing a customer-centric approach to developing new features’.

Bobby Puglia, chief product officer, Bloomberg Industry Group, commented: ‘The launch of Bloomberg Law Answers and Bloomberg Law AI Assistant are the latest examples of our commitment to leveraging innovative technologies to address attorney workflow challenges. Feedback from Bloomberg Law customers who participated in its Innovation Studio has resulted in enhanced accuracy and trustworthy results from these new tools.’

Is this a big deal?

Well, it all goes back to the convergence point Artificial Lawyer made last year, i.e. genAI allows multiple legal tech companies to offer very similar collections of ‘skills’, from research to contract review. The challenge then is which to use.

In this case, Bloomberg is hoping – like Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, and vLex – that you’ll stop by for the legal research and then stay for the genAI-based summaries, additional insights and document analysis.

But, will people use those bonus genAI skills? Or will they grab the data they want from X provider, then chuck that into the genAI tools offered by Y provider?

It’s too soon to tell whether the convergence play will be a net gain for legal research companies, and/or which ones will be the winners. Clearly great UI/UX and high accuracy will be key aspects to lawyer choice either way.