What can AI automate for a General Counsel?

AI can help with: First-pass contract review and redlines against your playbook; Summarizing long agreements, regulations, and case law into briefings; Drafting routine NDAs, policies, and standard correspondence; Tracking renewal dates, obligations, and key terms across executed contracts; Sorting and triaging inbound legal and compliance questions from the business.

What stays distinctly human for a General Counsel?

Still human: Deciding how much risk the company should accept on a given deal; Negotiating directly with counterparties and outside counsel; Advising the CEO and board on sensitive or strategic matters; Judgment calls on novel legal questions with no clear precedent; Handling privileged matters, investigations, and ethical decisions.

AI for General Counsel: tools, prompts, and how the role is changing

The shift

How AI is changing the General Counsel role

AI now handles the first pass on contract review, flagging unusual indemnity, liability, and termination clauses against your playbook. It speeds up legal research and case summaries, drafts routine NDAs and policy updates, and helps triage the flood of compliance questions from the business. The result is faster turnaround on routine work so you can focus on negotiation, risk calls, and board-level advice.

What AI can take off your plate

First-pass contract review and redlines against your playbook
Summarizing long agreements, regulations, and case law into briefings
Drafting routine NDAs, policies, and standard correspondence
Tracking renewal dates, obligations, and key terms across executed contracts
Sorting and triaging inbound legal and compliance questions from the business

What stays distinctly human

Deciding how much risk the company should accept on a given deal
Negotiating directly with counterparties and outside counsel
Advising the CEO and board on sensitive or strategic matters
Judgment calls on novel legal questions with no clear precedent
Handling privileged matters, investigations, and ethical decisions

Tools

Five AI tools for General Counsels

Harvey

A General Counsel uses Harvey to review contracts against internal standards and to draft and summarize legal documents across practice areas.

Spellbook

Works inside Microsoft Word to suggest clause language and flag missing or one-sided terms while you redline a contract.

Ironclad

Manages the contract lifecycle and uses its AI to extract key terms, obligations, and renewal dates from executed agreements.

ChatGPT

A General Counsel uses it to draft policies, summarize long documents, outline arguments, and turn legal points into plain-language updates for business teams.

Thomson Reuters CoCounsel

Runs legal research, reviews documents, and prepares deposition and discovery summaries with citations to source material.

Prompts

Five prompts to try today

Paste these into Claude or ChatGPT and replace the bracketed parts with your own details.

1. Contract risk summary

You are my contracts reviewer. Read the attached [agreement type] and give me a one-page summary covering: parties, term, key obligations, liability caps, indemnity, termination, and auto-renewal. Flag any clause that deviates from a standard [vendor/customer] position and rate each risk as high, medium, or low.

2. Redline against playbook

Compare the attached contract to our playbook positions below: [paste playbook rules]. List every clause that conflicts, quote the current language, and propose replacement language that matches our standard. Note which items are deal-breakers versus negotiable.

3. Plain-language policy update

Rewrite the attached [policy name] for a non-lawyer audience of [employee group]. Keep it accurate but use short sentences and clear examples. Add a three-bullet summary at the top of what changed and what people need to do.

4. Litigation hold notice

Draft a litigation hold notice for a matter involving [brief description]. Identify likely custodians by role, the categories of documents to preserve, the date range, and clear instructions not to delete relevant material. Keep the tone direct and professional.

5. Regulatory question triage

A business team asked: [paste question]. Tell me whether this raises issues under [relevant law or regulation], list the two or three things I need to confirm, flag any deadlines, and draft a short holding reply to the team while I review.

A day in your inbox

This is the kind of brief a General Counsel gets, every weekday morning.

The Morning Current

Weekday morning

✦ Personalized for: General Counsel

Today's Tool

Reviewing a vendor master services agreement

Load the draft MSA into Spellbook inside Word so it flags missing limitation-of-liability and data-protection language as you read. Use Harvey for a deeper comparison against your standard customer position.

Today's Prompt

Run the risk summary first

Paste the agreement into the contract risk summary prompt to get a one-page view of liability caps, indemnity, and auto-renewal before you open the redline. This tells you within minutes whether the deal is close to standard or needs real negotiation.

Today's Trick

Keep a living playbook

Maintain one document of your standard positions and acceptable fallbacks, then paste it into the redline prompt every time. The AI catches conflicts consistently and you spend your time only on the terms that truly need a human decision.

AI for General Counsels