Private Gen AI for legal teams: ten questions to ask before you buy
Generative AI can read a contract in seconds. Before it reads yours, know where the data goes, how answers are checked and who stays accountable. Ten questions to put to any vendor.
Legal teams were among the first to see what generative AI can do: summarise a contract, find a clause, compare a draft with a standard. They were also among the first to see the risk. Contracts are confidential, and an answer that sounds right but isn't can be costly.
Private Gen AI keeps the model and the documents inside your control. These ten questions help you tell a private deployment from a public one with a new label.
Data and privacy
1. Where do our documents go?
Ask exactly where documents are stored and processed: which cloud, which region, which accounts. "Secure" is not an answer; a location is.
2. Is our data used to train anything?
The answer should be no, in writing, for the vendor’s models and for any third-party model behind them.
3. Who can see our prompts and answers?
Logs are useful for audit and dangerous if shared. Ask who can read them and how long they are kept.
4. Can it run in our own environment?
For the most sensitive work, the model should run in your cloud or data centre, with nothing leaving it.
Quality and accuracy
5. How does it show its sources?
Every answer should point to the clause or page it came from, so a lawyer can check it in seconds.
6. What happens when it doesn't know?
A good system says "not found" rather than inventing a clause. Test this with questions whose answer is not in the document.
7. How was it tested on documents like ours?
Ask for results on contracts of your type, in your languages and jurisdictions, not on a generic benchmark.
Control and accountability
8. Who approves the output?
The tool should support review: a lawyer accepts, edits or rejects each suggestion, and the record shows who did what.
9. Can we set our own playbook?
Your standard positions, fallbacks and red lines should drive the review, not the vendor’s defaults.
10. What does it cost as usage grows?
Per-page and per-question pricing can surprise you. Ask for a cost at your real volumes.
A short test drive
Pick twenty contracts you know well. Ask the same questions of the tool and of a lawyer. Compare the answers, the sources and the time taken. That hour tells you more than any slide.
LawRence is our private Gen AI for legal teams, built to answer these questions well. See how it fits into contract review.