With Digital First Draft, UnitedLex clients get AI-powered first drafts for repeatable, high-volume legal work. Digital First Draft reduces response time to legal drafting, including demand letters and claims, to under 48 hours, with up to 60% cost savings versus traditional drafting, and no disruption to technology stack or workflows. In this interview, Cody Gavalier, VP at UnitedLex, talks about how Digital First Draft is transforming the way legal departments and law firms work.
Cody, tell us a little about your background and what brought you to UnitedLex.
After I got my law degree, I began practicing at a boutique law firm. I’ve always been interested in technology, and I started to notice the shifts driven by technology entering the legal field. I decided to join UnitedLex in 2013 for the opportunity to work on cutting-edge tech-empowered legal work. My career has grown and changed along with legal tech in general. The most exciting part has been how AI is now empowering us to help clients better address their most persistent challenges, including with products such as Digital First Draft.
What does Digital First Draft do, and how is it unique from other offerings in the marketplace?
Digital First Draft is an AI legal drafting solution for high-volume, repeatable claims or documents. It combines advanced AI with our team’s expertise gained through extensive experience with process optimization. The goal is to let lawyers focus on strategy rather than getting bogged down in generating huge numbers of simple documents. After extensive evaluation, we partnered with LegalMation to generate high-quality first drafts with AI, which greatly accelerates the process. And with our team controlling the process and confirming quality, risk is mitigated.
How did this offering originate? What was the need you saw in clients?
UnitedLex prides itself on looking into the future to understand what’s coming in order to help clients get ahead of—and take advantage of—trends through outcome-driven solutions. Clients needed to demonstrate progress in using AI to create efficiency. We are perfectly situated to leverage AI on behalf of clients to drive more efficiency without too much disruption. Finding the right tool was a critical first step. LegalMation was the clear choice to partner with on Digital First Draft. It was clear during our evaluation process that their technology not only set the standard but also allowed the customization our clients demand. We also saw many high-volume types of matters steadily increasing. Clients needed a way to effectively deal with this.
Can you give some examples of those high-volume scenarios?
Yes, Digital First Draft offers enormous advantages for activities such as consumer arbitration. It is the “antidote” to the increasing number of tools that are allowing consumers and plaintiffs to easily file lots of claims. For defendants, this is a problem caused by technology that, thanks to Digital First Draft, now has a solution driven by technology.
EEOC demand letters are another example. Responding to these EEOC charges has traditionally been a significant challenge for large, cross-jurisdictional corporations. But with Digital First Draft, a Position Statement can be assembled in minutes, drawing from a comprehensive case file, including the demand letter, investigation notes, HR files, and other factors. The UnitedLex team then reviews the draft for quality and accuracy. A turnkey draft is returned to the law firm or client within 48 hours, saving a lot of time and money—50-60% in some cases.
Digital First Draft is not only about freeing up attorneys and paralegals from rote tasks, but also delivers improved accuracy and strategic insights. In practice, aspects of legal drafting mean copying and pasting from prior work product. With Digital First Draft, they can create letters that are much more tailored to each initial demand and surface winning arguments, improving outcomes. Attorneys also recognize that the AI mandate is real, and law firms and legal departments are looking for ways to add AI to their processes to drive efficiency, particularly where firms are engaged in fixed fee agreements.
We’ve also heard from clients at law firms and corporate legal departments that Digital First Draft makes their lives so much easier and gives them time to focus on strategic elements or better balance their caseload.
Why do clients work with UnitedLex for this type of process, rather than buying their own tech or using a law firm?
Cost is one factor. A program like Digital First Draft allows for quickly implemented, cost-effective solutions for high-volume work, providing a great alternative to doing it in-house or having an expensive law firm do it.
It’s also a more frictionless approach. At UnitedLex, we have dedicated experts who can help manage the technology and processes, so that legal departments don’t have to evaluate, implement, and learn a new technology themselves or manage a law firm that is doing the work.
UnitedLex can provide insights into trends and help clients get ahead of risks in a consistent and holistic way. Often, legal departments work with a panel of law firms, and those firms may have variations in strategy and approaches. UnitedLex can standardize these approaches across matters and firms in a way that individual panel firms can’t. We deliver efficient results while working closely with the case teams, whether in-house or outside counsel, to add legal advice into the process.
How do you see this offering and partnership with LegalMation expanding to other areas of law?
We see countless opportunities in our work with LegalMation and AI generally, including in the mass torts and class action space. From matter profiling to medical summaries and transcription summarization, AI provides practitioners with a strategic advantage and massive time savings.
How can a current or new UnitedLex client get started with Digital First Draft?
They can find out more here and fill out the form to book a meeting so we can discuss their use case.
The process to start is extremely easy. We can begin with 30 samples of previously filed responses to run a pilot and compare the AI-drafted responses to the attorney-drafted responses. That allows legal departments to get a feel for what the results could be.
