Legal AI is fast becoming a baseline expectation. This guide helps general counsel quickly assess which platforms are accurate, explainable and built for legal work.

Whether for drafting, redlining, or regulatory updates, General Counsels are increasingly expected to use legal AI. Boards, business teams, and regulators want to see that legal is using technology to deliver faster, more consistent outcomes. The question is no longer whether to use AI, but how to choose a platform that is safe, explainable, and fit for the legal work you do. This guide outlines what to assess.

Why legal AI due diligence needs structure

AI is embedded in a growing number of daily workflows across many legal and compliance functions. Over 90 percent of organisations report using it, and more than half rely on it several times a week. Yet only 18 percent have a fully developed AI policy or implemented governance framework.

This gap creates real risk. AI tools are already influencing legal decisions, suggesting redlines and reviewing high stakes documents. Without oversight, they may produce biased, inaccurate or opaque results. Shadow AI is also on the rise, where tools are adopted without formal approval, training or tracking. This can result in confidential data being processed in ways that breach data protection law.

Governance must move beyond high level principles. Due diligence needs to be operational, built into workflows, and technically supported. Legal teams need to know what the platform is doing, how it reaches its conclusions and whether it keeps data safe.

The difference between general AI and legal AI

Not all AI is suitable for legal work. Generalist platforms such as Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT are designed for broad use cases. They can help with summarising documents but are not trained to handle legal nuance, risk or confidentiality.

Legal AI platforms like LEGALFLY are built for the domain. The difference includes:

Legal accuracy

General purpose AI tools are not trained specifically for legal content. They may produce confident but inaccurate outputs, and often operate as black boxes. LEGALFLY is legally trained and also integrated with leading legal research providers like FromCounsel. Every output is grounded in a verifiable source, with explainable reasoning designed for legal professionals. This reduces hallucinations and builds confidence in the results.

Privacy and security

Legal documents often contain sensitive or regulated information. LEGALFLY anonymises every legal or financial document before any AI model sees the text. Names, financial data and business details are stripped out in milliseconds. This prevents exposure of confidential information and allows the platform to be deployed in highly regulated environments. Few vendors match this level of data isolation.

Workflow integration

Specialist legal AI needs to work where legal teams already work. LEGALFLY runs directly inside Microsoft Word and integrates with SharePoint. Outlook and Microsoft Copilot support are planned. This ensures adoption with minimal training or disruption. The focus is on augmenting existing workflows, not replacing them.

Ten questions to ask legal AI vendors

These ten questions can help assess whether a legal AI platform meets your needs. 

1. How does your platform ensure the confidentiality and privacy of sensitive data such as client names and financial information by preventing AI models from accessing raw, identifiable content?
2. Is your AI specifically trained on legal language and domain expertise to reduce factual errors and produce accurate, grounded outputs?
3. Does your system offer explainable outputs that show the reasoning behind suggested changes or flagged risks, rather than acting as a black box?
4. How well does your platform integrate with Microsoft 365 applications such as Word, SharePoint, Outlook and Copilot, in order to reduce workflow disruption?
5. What options does the tool have for customisation to internal policies, precedents and playbooks?
6. What are the main legal tasks and workflows the platform supports? For example, does it only support contracting workflows like review and drafting, or can it help with compliance tasks and legal research?
7. What onboarding and training does the provider offer?
8. What are the underlying Large Language Models (LLMs) that power the platform? Tip: maintain flexibility by looking for a provider that uses several.
9. What languages and jurisdictions are supported, in the knowledge base, AI responses and prompts?
10.  Can you demonstrate how your platform actually saves legal teams time, and in which workflows the time savings are most measurable?

Scoring guide 

Use this scoring system to rapidly assess potential vendors using the ten questions above. For each question, assign a score:

3 points: The vendor's platform provides a robust, direct solution that fully addresses the question.

2 points: The vendor's platform offers a partial solution, or requires significant customisation/workarounds.

1 point: The vendor's platform does not adequately address the question, or there are significant gaps.

0 points: Not applicable or not addressed at all.  

>>> Download the legal AI vendor checklist

Where LEGALFLY fits (and where it doesn’t)

LEGALFLY is designed to support legal professionals in delivering more value through AI, with a focus on safety, clarity and responsibility.

LEGALFLY fits for:

Automating repetitive tasks: LEGALFLY agents streamline contract review, drafting  and compliance, saving hours.

Specialist legal workflows: LEGALFLY offers dedicated agents for contract review and negotiation, regulatory compliance (including DORA), legal research, due diligence, litigation support and template drafting.

Compliance: LEGALFLY helps identify and address gaps in vendor agreements by automating reviews and recommending revisions. It supports the review of thousands of agreements in a short time for regulations like DORA.

Contract creation and management: Users can create contracts from any existing legal document in Word, with automatic field detection, formatting retention and clause-based conditional logic that controls which clauses appear.

Cross-functional adoption: Commercial and other non-legal teams including procurement, marketing, finance and sales can safely self-serve for routine contracts, while still adhering to legal standards and playbooks.

High volume, high stakes documents: LEGALFLY is built for scale, capable of handling large batches of documents for time-sensitive projects such as M&A or regulatory alignment exercises.

Privacy and explainability: All documents are anonymised before being processed. Every AI output is fully explainable and backed by a source.

Integration with Microsoft tools: LEGALFLY operates as a Microsoft Word add-in and integrates with SharePoint. Support for Outlook and Microsoft Copilot is also planned.

Multi-jurisdiction and multi-language support: LEGALFLY supports over 20 languages and 26 jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom, United States, European countries and Saudi Arabia. It maintains document formatting across translations.

Procurement support: LEGALFLY helps procurement teams with redlining, reviewing exclusions and clarifications, and ensuring alignment with internal standards.

LEGALFLY may not be the best fit for:

General use cases

LEGALFLY is designed specifically for legal work. It is not a general purpose AI platform for non-legal tasks.

Certain areas of compliance

Some subsectors, such as financial crime compliance or niche segments of the insurance market like Managing General Agents, may have different requirements that fall outside LEGALFLY’s current scope.

Replacing legal expertise

LEGALFLY is intended to support legal professionals, not replace them. Lawyers remain responsible for reviewing and approving outputs.

Making the right legal AI choice

A good platform protects sensitive data, reflects legal reasoning, and integrates with existing workflows. 

LEGALFLY helps legal teams operationalise AI safely, with built-in anonymisation, explainable outputs, and workflows designed for the way lawyers work.