🖼️ Introducing The Legal AI Canvas

The Legal AI Canvas from simplexico is a way of creating a 1-pager to collate together all of the important and required information when creating a Legal AI use case. We are releasing the Legal AI Canvas under the Creative Commons Shared Attribution 4.0 license so anyone can use the Legal AI Canvas to design and deliver their own Legal AI use cases.

🧱 The Structure

The Legal AI Canvas is a way to structure your thinking around ideas of use cases where Legal AI could be used. It’s designed to help you go from a vague idea to a structured use case by making you think hard about key questions and considerations.

The Legal AI Canvas is made up of 4 sections:

1. 💾 Pre-AI
2. 💭 AI Enablers
3. 👨‍💼 Legal AI Job Description
4. 💿 Post-AI

💾 Pre-AI

Before even thinking about a solution or even talking about AI, let's get clear on the problem.

• What is the problem?

• Why is it painful?

• Why do even need to consider using AI?

The better grasp we are able to get on the problem in terms of describing and quantifying the pain, the easier it will be to find, measure and evaluate any potential solution.

👨‍💼 Legal AI Job Description

You wouldn’t hire someone just because they are popular. Why would we do the same with AI? If we want to hire Legal AI for a job, we need to get clear on the Legal AI job description. What do we want the AI to do and how do we want the AI to work with us?

• Legal AI Action - What the Legal AI should do e.g. Extract

• Legal AI Function - How the Legal AI should do the action e.g. Automate

• Legal AI Context - What is the context for the Legal AI job e.g. Legal Research

• Legal AI Job - A complete description of the job - Legal AI Action + Legal AI Function + Legal AI Context

Here’s an example of a complete Legal AI job description - Using Legal AI to automatically extract fields from a collection of contracts as part of a due diligence exercise for a M&A deal.

💿 Post-AI

What will things look like after AI has been implemented with a perfect solution

• What benefit will AI bring?

• What are some AI approaches that could be used?

• What does the perfect solution look like?

• How will we measure success?

💭 AI Enablers

There are enablers and disablers when it comes to AI. We want to get ahead and make sure that People, Data and Process are enablers for our work.

🤷‍♂️ How do we do Legal AI?

AI in legal is once again a trending and hot topic. There is lots of talk going on about how AI will transform legal, but most of these conversation don’t even offer a glimpse of an answer to the how question.

We know that AI will be transformative in legal. But how do we even get there? The Legal AI Canvas is the first step to trying to piece together an answer to the how question. By first structuring our thinking and getting clear on the Legal AI use case, we can then move to thinking about potential solutions and implementations.

Here at simplexico, we’ve been thinking hard about the how question. How do we educate legal professionals about AI? How do we give them the ability to identify and articulate their own Legal AI use cases? How do we build bespoke Legal AI solutions on internal data that are privacy compliant and secure.

Along with releasing the Legal AI Canvas, we are also offering a Legal AI Canvas Workshop for teams looking to learn how to use the canvas and make it part of their innovation practice. For more information on the Legal AI Canvas Workshop reach out to us at [email protected]

Happy canvasing!