Purpose
This article provides an overview of LegalOn Assistant (LOA) and answers the following questions:
What is LOA?
What is the core functionality of LOA?
How does LOA compare to a regular chatbot?
What are some sample questions I could ask LOA?
What limitations should I be aware of?
1. What is LOA?
With the power of GPT-4, the security of SOC2 compliance, and extensive training and testing by attorneys, LegalOn Assistant (LOA) is generative AI upgraded for legal professionals. You can check defined terms, locate critical clauses, draft revisions, and summarize a contract in seconds.
2. What Is the Core Functionality of LOA?
LegalOn Assistant (LOA) is available on the Preview, Review, and Editor screens of the LegalOn Web App.
LOA’s core functionality is Ask Me Anything (AMA). Users can ask questions about legal or business terms and receive contextual responses, subject to certain limitations (see “5. What limitations should I be aware of?”).
Types of Questions You Can Ask
Directly Related to the Displayed Contract
LOA can analyze and generate responses based on the contract currently displayed on the Preview, Review, or Editor screen.
Examples:
“What does Article 18 of this MSA mean in plain English?”
“Is this limitation of liability clause favorable to us?”
Unrelated to the Displayed Contract
LOA can also answer general legal or business questions not tied to a specific agreement.
Examples:
“What does force majeure mean?”
“As a customer reviewing an MSA, what terms should I pay closest attention to? And why?”
Sources LOA Can Use
Depending on your workspace configuration and subscriptions, LOA can generate responses using the following sources:
Displayed Contract – The agreement currently open on the Preview, Review, or Editor screen
Contracts in Your Workspace – Uploaded agreements, templates, and clause libraries
Web Sources – Publicly available information for general legal context (when enabled)
Matters – Information stored in Matter Management (requires an active Matter Management subscription).
Responses are limited to the sources available within your workspace configuration at the time of the request.
3. How does LOA compare to a regular chatbot?
As an AI Assistant, LOA is superior to regular chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude. Here are a few examples:
LOA can read and understand text from the contract being displayed (on Preview, Review, or Editor) without the user having to copy/paste the text of the contract as a prompt.
LOA can be leveraged for contract types that LegalOn currently doesn’t support. (For optimal performance, we strongly recommend using LOA on the Preview page.)
LOA is tuned for legal knowledge and vetted for quality and style by experienced attorneys.
LOA exists within the web app. Users won’t need to have multiple tabs or screens open.
LOA carries all of our web app’s data privacy and security protections (over contract and user data). Chatbots – such as ChatGPT, Claude, Bard, Llama – do not offer a comparable level of protection.
LOA can answer questions about appendices, addendums, exhibits, and other “post-contract” portions – so long as (1) the contract is open/displayed on Preview, Review, or Editor and (2) their contained in the same file as the open/displayed contract
LOA can read PDFs.
LOA can answer questions about business terms, not just legal terms.
4. What are some sample questions I could ask LOA?
Here are some sample questions that you could try with LOA:
For any contract type:
Summarize Article XYZ in simple terms
What is the term of the agreement?
What’s the most relevant part of Article XYZ for the [insert position]?
What are the payment terms in this contract?
Which provisions of the contract survive expiration or termination of the agreement?
How can this contract be revised to be more favorable to [insert position]?
Does the contract include an equitable remedies clause?
Where’s the choice of forum provision in this contract?
Can you summarize the exhibits?
Not specific to any displayed contract:
What does [insert legal term – e.g., force majeure] mean and why does it matter?
Give me an example of an industry standard termination clause for [insert contract type]
Re-write [insert clause] in a manner that is more favorable to [insert position] for [insert contract type]
5. What limitations should I be aware of?
LOA can only read one file at a time. For example, LOA cannot perform specialized skill requiring it to read and compare more than one contract.
LOA does not carry the chat over from page-to-page.
By design, LOA will occasionally tell the user that it isn’t qualified to answer a particular question.
For example, we don't want LOA giving predictions on who will win the Super Bowl. But there is a partial risk that LCP V1 will resist answering a legitimate question.
LOA provides citations/references to the contract in its answers, when relevant. The citation/reference accuracy is relatively strong (85-90% accurate) – but it’s not perfect.
LOA provides substantive legal answers to tough questions – but the overall quality is not perfect and will improve over time.
LLMs aren’t sophisticated enough yet to get every single question right, much like lawyers themselves don’t get every single question right.
LOA, by design, provides some answers that are specific to the contract at-hand and other answers that do not pertain to a specific contract.
At times, it isn’t entirely clear to the user whether LOA’s answer is contract-specific or generic (i.e., not specific to the contract at-hand).
LOA can read/digest saved redlines – but it does not read/digest unsaved redlines.