An AI-powered legal assistant PoC in 10 days - It is possible!

Overview

We’ve partnered with AILA, an AI-powered legal admin startup to develop an intelligent assistant PoC, capable of processing legal inboxes, drafting responses using legal documents, and raising Jira issues to streamline workflow. The solution needed to seamlessly integrate with existing email and internal tools, without disrupting the established legal workflows.

This was a Proof of Concept (PoC) aimed at quickly validating the product-market fit for the client’s AI-powered solution, while ensuring the system was lean, secure, and capable of supporting rapid iterations based on user feedback.

Problem

The client, an AI-powered legal admin startup, faced a significant challenge within its legal teams. Their experts were overwhelmed by routine tasks such as inbox management, follow-ups, and issue tracking, with no central agent to automate or streamline these processes. Specifically:

• Legal inbox overload: Legal teams spent substantial time managing and responding to routine emails, often losing focus on high-priority legal work.
• Disconnected systems: There was no central solution to connect emails, legal documents, and Jira-based work tracking, making it difficult to manage the volume of tasks efficiently.
• Need for a fast MVP: The client wanted to ship a working MVP in under two weeks to quickly test product-market fit and gain valuable feedback from users.
• Integration challenges: The solution needed seamless integration with existing systems (email, Jira, document management) to avoid disrupting established workflows and ensure that legal professionals could continue to use the tools they were familiar with.

The project needed to address these pain points with a simple yet scalable AI solution that could be deployed quickly while being secure and extensible.

Solution

To meet the client’s needs, we designed a modular architecture that utilized cutting-edge AI tools and cloud services to automate routine tasks and integrate smoothly with the client’s existing systems.

Implementation Process:

1. Integration with Google Inbox: We connected the system to the client’s Google inbox using the Gmail API, enabling the AI assistant to automatically fetch and process incoming emails.
2. Jira REST API: Integrated with Jira to allow the assistant to automatically create, update, and track issues from legal emails and responses.
3. Document Retrieval: Azure AI Search was used to retrieve relevant legal documents and templates, which were then used by the AI assistant to draft responses.
4. Serverless Architecture: To minimize overhead, the entire solution was deployed using serverless Azure resources. This allowed the system to scale rapidly as usage increased, without the need for complex infrastructure management.

The modular design of the system allowed for rapid iteration, with the flexibility to adjust and add new features based on feedback from legal professionals.

Impact

Delivery: The PoC was delivered in just 10 days - a rapid turnaround that exceeded expectations. The solution was fully integrated with email, Jira, and document management tools, and was tested thoroughly to ensure that it met the client’s needs.

Efficiency: The AI-powered assistant dramatically improved the efficiency of the client’s legal teams by automating routine tasks, reducing the time spent on inbox management and follow-ups. With a human-in-the-loop supervision model, legal professionals could quickly review and approve draft responses, enabling them to focus on more critical work.

User feedback and iteration: The client was able to test the MVP with internal users immediately, gaining valuable insights that would shape the future iterations of the AI assistant. The assistant’s ability to learn from early feedback ensured a rapid cycle of refinement and improvement, positioning the solution for future scaling.

Scalability: The architecture was designed with scalability in mind, using serverless Azure resources and a modular framework that allowed for easy addition of new features as needed. The PoC set a solid foundation for scaling the AI assistant to handle more complex legal workflows in the future.

Key takeaways

This AI-powered legal assistant PoC demonstrated the power of leveraging modern AI frameworks, cloud-based architecture, and seamless integration to solve a real-world problem in the legal field. By freeing up legal experts from non-substantive tasks, the solution significantly improved internal efficiency while supporting human oversight.

In just two weeks, we delivered a lean, effective, and secure solution that met the client’s goals of rapid MVP deployment, seamless integration, and scalable architecture. The project set the stage for future iterations based on user feedback and positioned the client for successful product-market fit in the competitive legal tech industry.