How Corporate Lawyers are Using AI in Legal Work

The legal industry, traditionally cautious with new tech, is now rapidly embracing AI to enhance efficiency in corporate and transactional practice. In fact, AI adoption in law firms skyrocketed from 19% in 2023 to 79% in 2024, signaling that even conservative legal teams are jumping on the AI bandwagon. For mid-sized law firms handling corporate transactions, AI tools can automate routine tasks, analyze complex documents, and free up lawyers to focus on high-level strategy and client service. This article explores the top AI tools lawyers are using in 2025, especially those tailored for transactional attorneys. From contract review and drafting assistants to practice management AI, this is how they help corporate lawyers work smarter and faster.

Top AI Tools for Transactional Lawyers in 2025

1. Gavel Exec – AI Assistant for Contract Drafting & Redlining

Gavel Exec is an AI-powered legal assistant built specifically for transactional attorneys and works seamlessly inside Microsoft Word - helping with contract analysis, redlining, negotiation, and drafting.

It functions like a “senior associate” in Word, helping lawyers draft, revise, redline, and analyze transactional documents with ease. Unlike many simple “ChatGPT in Word” plugins, Gavel Exec uses proprietary AI agents that consider the full context of your document (including defined terms, deal documents, and firm guidelines) before suggesting edits. This context awareness leads to highly relevant contract revisions and a high acceptance rate of its suggestions, especially for redlines. In other words, the tool isn’t just autocomplete; it’s making intelligent, legally informed edits that match your firm’s style and standards, which is why so many lawyers have found it to be powerful.

Key Features of Gavel Exec:

• Smart Redlining: Instantly spot risky clauses or deviations and propose revisions based on your playbook or market standards. The redlines are remarkably accurate, correctly handling definitions and complex provisions. This saves significant time in contract review and negotiation.
• Context-Aware Drafting: Need to draft a new clause or rewrite a section? Gavel Exec generates language with domain-specific knowledge in corporate law (and even real estate), producing quality clauses that rival an experienced attorney’s work.
• Interactive Q&A: Lawyers can ask the AI questions about the document, and get answers grounded in the document’s full context and the firm’s own precedent documents. It’s like having a knowledgeable colleague on call to explain or analyze contract sections.
• Playbook Automation: The tool lets you apply rule-based playbooks to your contracts. You can use built-in playbooks or customize your own with firm-specific rules, and Gavel Exec will automatically apply those standards to any contract to ensure consistency.
• Custom Training (Projects): Perhaps most powerfully, you can train Gavel Exec on your firm’s past deals and templates. By uploading your own documents and guidelines, the AI learns your firm’s style and “DNA,” giving you tailored suggestions that reflect your preferred language and clauses. Your data stays private to your firm, so the model isn’t training on anyone else’s data.

Why it’s great for transactional lawyers: Gavel Exec meets lawyers directly in their workflow (right in Word), so you don’t have to switch apps or copy-paste text elsewhere. It’s designed to tackle the nitty-gritty of contract negotiation – from detecting subtle risks in an agreement to suggesting alternative wording that aligns with market norms. By using Gavel Exec, mid-sized firm attorneys can punch above their weight, handling contract reviews and edits with a speed and precision that impresses clients. And unlike some enterprise AI tools, it’s very accessible – you can try it without a lengthy sales process. Anyone can get started instantly, with a free trial (15 AI runs included) to see its impact first-hand. If boosting your contract workflow efficiency is a priority, Gavel Exec is a must-try AI assistant.

2. Casetext CoCounsel – Legal Research and Drafting Assistant

Casetext’s CoCounsel (now part of Thomson Reuters) is an AI legal assistant that has become an indispensable partner for many lawyers in both litigation and corporate practices. Built on a secure implementation of OpenAI’s GPT-4, CoCounsel can perform a range of tasks: it expedites legal research, scouring case law or regulations; it helps draft documents faster (from memos and briefs to contracts); and it can analyze contracts or other documents with precision. All queries and data are handled securely, so confidential information stays protected.

Key benefits of CoCounsel include:

• AI-Powered Legal Research: Instead of manually crafting Boolean searches, lawyers can ask CoCounsel complex legal questions in natural language. The AI will sift through the vast legal database to provide precise, contextually relevant answers and even point to the specific cases or statutes supporting the answer. This drastically cuts down research time.
• Drafting Assistance: CoCounsel can generate well-structured drafts for various documents (e.g., contracts, client advice memos) which lawyers can then refine. This “first-draft” capability saves valuable time on rote drafting tasks.

Another advantage is customization – firms can adapt CoCounsel to their practice needs and jurisdictions. This means the AI’s output can be tuned (within bounds) to be more useful for, say, California corporate law versus New York, or to follow certain style guidelines. In summary, CoCounsel is a powerful general-purpose legal AI that augments a lawyer’s capabilities across research, drafting, and review, making it a popular choice for firms adopting AI.

3. Lexis+ AI – Advanced Legal Research Platform with Generative Drafting

LexisNexis, one of the giants of legal research, has introduced Lexis+ AI, which represents a quantum leap in how attorneys conduct legal research. This tool combines Lexis’s vast library of cases, statutes, and secondary sources with cutting-edge AI. Lawyers can pose complex legal questions in plain English and receive precise, context-aware answers drawn from authoritative sources. In other words, Lexis+ AI acts like a smart research librarian that understands your question and fetches the exact legal points you need.

Notable features of Lexis+ AI include:

• Natural Language Q&A: The intuitive interface lets you ask questions (even very specific ones about, say, “What is the standard for piercing the corporate veil in Delaware?”) and the AI will provide a targeted answer with citations. This saves time compared to manually wading through search results.
• Brief Analysis: You can upload a legal brief or memo, and Lexis+ AI will analyze it to identify missing precedents or weak points. It suggests additional relevant cases you might have overlooked and even checks the validity of citations. For transactional lawyers, this can be useful when reviewing legal opinion letters or memos – ensuring nothing critical is missed.

By combining reliable legal data with AI, Lexis+ AI gives transactional lawyers a research and drafting edge. You can quickly get up-to-date answers on corporate law questions, check your work against a database of thousands of precedents, and generate initial drafts – all on one platform. This tool underscores how AI can enhance the quality and speed of legal analysis for corporate attorneys.

4. Harvey – Generative AI Trained for Legal Work

Harvey is a buzzy AI platform that gained notoriety as a GPT-powered “lawyer AI” for elite law firms. For transactional lawyers, Harvey can serve as an intelligent assistant that analyzes contracts, conducts due diligence, and even helps with legal research and drafting, all through natural language interactions, and uses OpenAI's AI models.

What makes Harvey notable:

• Built on GPT-4: Harvey leverages advanced generative pre-trained transformer models (like GPT-4) but they claim it's augmented with legal-specific data such as case law and regulatory content. This means its answers and outputs are intended to be more grounded in legal reality. If you ask Harvey to analyze a contract or draft a clause, it has some understanding of legal context, but it's unclear if that will be better than using ChatGPT since the tool has been in a closed environment and is not available to all firm sizes yet.
• Bespoke to Each Firm: If you have time to set things up, a key feature is the ability to train Harvey on a specific firm’s work product and templates. Over time, Harvey can learn from your firm’s past contracts, memos, and style preferences.

Harvey is currently used at some top firms as a pilot and is expensive, but worth trying to benchmark against others if you have a budget.

5. Clio Duo – AI for Practice Management and Operations

Not all legal AI is about substantive law – some of it greatly eases the administrative and operational side of running a law practice. Clio Duo is an AI add-on to the popular Clio practice management platform, and it’s designed to streamline law firm operations for busy lawyers. Powered by Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI (GPT-4) technology, Clio Duo acts like an administrative assistant that can automate routine tasks and help manage your day-to-day schedule and communications.

How Clio Duo helps transactional lawyers and their firms:

• Intelligent Scheduling and Calendaring: A big pain point for lawyers is scheduling meetings and tracking deadlines. Clio Duo understands calendar conflicts and court deadlines, and it can propose optimal meeting times by considering everyone’s availability. If you have a contract closing deadline and a filing due date, Clio Duo will avoid those when slotting meetings. This AI helper ensures you never double-book or miss an important date.
• Data Extraction and Case Management: Clio Duo can read documents and emails to extract key details and update your case files accordingly. For example, if a client emails saying “let’s push the closing to Nov 15,” Clio Duo could detect that date change and update the timeline in your deal checklist or calendar. It keeps your matter information current without manual data entry.
• Predictive Analytics: An interesting feature is the use of data to predict outcomes or suggest actions. Clio Duo can analyze historical case data to forecast case outcomes (more relevant in litigation) or to give insights like, “Matters of X type typically take 3 months and $Y budget”. For a transactional practice, this might help in scoping deals or understanding where inefficiencies are.
• Client Communication Aids: The AI can even draft initial responses to common client inquiries and send automated updates on case status. Let’s say a client emails asking for an update on a due diligence report – Clio Duo could draft a polite update pulling information from your latest work, which you can quickly review and send. It’s like having a virtual receptionist/assistant watching your inbox.

By incorporating Clio Duo, mid-sized firms can handle many back-office tasks with less human effort, reducing overhead and response times. Transactional lawyers benefit by being able to focus more on negotiating and advising, while the AI handles the firm management stuff in the background. It’s a great example of AI not only improving legal work but also improving how lawyers run their business.

6. MyCase (with AI) – Practice Management Enhanced by AI

MyCase is another widely used practice management platform (often favored by small to mid-sized firms), and it has integrated AI features to help lawyers be more efficient. The AI capabilities in MyCase target some of the most time-consuming administrative chores and provide insights into practice operations. For transactional attorneys, especially at smaller firms, these tools can be a quiet productivity booster.

Some AI-driven features of MyCase:

• Practice Insights (AI Analytics): The platform offers AI Insights that analyze case files, billing records, and client communications to identify trends and recommendations. For instance, it might notice that certain types of deals are often delayed at the same stage and suggest where processes could improve. Or it might analyze your billing to tell you which matters are most profitable versus time-consuming, helping you make strategic decisions.
• AI-Powered Time Tracking: Capturing billable time can be tedious. MyCase includes an AI time-tracking tool that automatically logs time spent on activities like drafting documents or reading emails. It can detect that you spent 2 hours editing a contract in Word and draft a time entry for you. This reduces missed billables and the end-of-month scramble to reconstruct timesheets.
• Smart Email Management: Another helpful feature is an AI-driven email organizer. It can categorize and prioritize your emails – for example, flagging client emails that need quick responses or grouping all emails related to a specific deal together. It helps attorneys stay on top of important communications and maintain clear records without manual sorting.

For transactional lawyers juggling multiple deals and clients, these MyCase AI enhancements act like a support staff behind the scenes. They ensure that administrative tasks (like filling out forms, tracking time, and managing inboxes) don’t eat into your day. Instead, you can devote more attention to substantive tasks like deal negotiations or client advice. Moreover, the data-driven insights can highlight inefficiencies in your workflow, allowing continuous improvement. In sum, MyCase demonstrates how AI can modernize a law firm’s operations on the administrative side, complementing the legal work being done.