Key AI concepts to understand in order to strengthen your practice and stay competitive.
Artificial intelligence is transforming how lawyers research, draft, and manage cases. This glossary explains key AI terms and concepts every attorney should know — from natural language processing to model governance. Whether you’re exploring legal tech for the first time or refining your firm’s AI strategy, this guide will help you understand the language of modern legal AI.
An AI ethics framework is a set of principles and guidelines that govern the responsible development and use of AI technologies. Law firms should establish clear ethical frameworks to ensure their AI usage aligns with legal professional standards and client interests.
AI governance refers to the policies, regulations, and ethical frameworks guiding the development, deployment, and use of AI technologies. Establishing robust AI governance frameworks is essential for ensuring responsible and ethical AI practices in the legal industry.
Degradation of model performance over time as data, precedent, or workflows change—requiring monitoring and retraining.
A limited rollout of AI tools to test value, risks, and workflows before firm‑wide adoption, with clear success metrics and guardrails.
Tools that let firms design automated, rule‑based processes—routing documents, triggering reviews, and standardizing tasks with AI.
NLP‑driven systems that search legal sources, analyze precedent, and surface relevant authorities more efficiently than manual search.
An API is a set of protocols and tools that allows different software applications to communicate with each other. In legal AI, APIs enable law firms to integrate AI capabilities into their existing legal software systems and workflows.
Adversarial AI involves techniques designed to deceive or manipulate AI systems. Law firms should understand these concepts to better protect their AI systems from potential attacks and ensure system reliability.
An algorithm is a set of rules or instructions designed to perform a specific task or solve a particular problem. In the context of AI, algorithms form the backbone of machine learning and deep learning processes.
Artificial Intelligence refers to the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. AI enables machines to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation.
An audit trail is a secure record of transactions, activities, or events that occur within an information system. Maintaining an audit trail is important for tracking data access, changes, and compliance with legal requirements.
AI bias refers to the systemic and unfair prejudices that can be present in AI systems due to skewed training data or algorithmic design. Addressing bias in AI is critical to ensuring ethical and unbiased decision-making.
In AI, a black box refers to a complex system or algorithm whose internal workings are not transparent or understandable to users. Black box AI models may lack interpretability, raising concerns about accountability and trustworthiness.
Uses machine learning to analyze historical cases, judge tendencies, and fact patterns to forecast likely outcomes, informing strategy and settlement decisions.
Cloud computing delivers AI services and storage over the internet rather than on local servers. Many legal AI tools operate in the cloud, offering scalability and accessibility while raising important considerations about data security and jurisdiction.
Compliance monitoring AI tracks and analyzes regulatory requirements, policies, and internal procedures to ensure organizations comply with legal standards and guidelines. This technology helps companies monitor and mitigate compliance risks effectively.
As with attorney-client privilege, confidentiality requires attorneys to protect privileged information shared between attorneys and clients. Upholding confidentiality is a fundamental ethical duty for lawyers and essential for maintaining trust with clients.
Contract analysis AI automates the review and analysis of contracts to extract key clauses, terms, and obligations. This technology saves time and reduces errors in contract management and review processes for legal professionals.
Automates creation of legal documents by proposing clauses, spotting gaps, and suggesting redlines based on precedent and firm standards.
Data encryption converts sensitive information into coded format to prevent unauthorized access. For law firms using AI tools, encryption is essential for maintaining client confidentiality and meeting ethical obligations.
Data privacy refers to the protection of sensitive and personal information from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. Ensuring data privacy compliance is crucial for law firms to maintain client confidentiality and trust.
Where data is stored and processed geographically—important for confidentiality, cross‑border matters, and regulatory compliance.
Data retention policies establish guidelines for how long different types of data should be stored and when it should be deleted. Law firms must carefully consider these policies when using AI systems that process client information.
Data security involves practices and technologies implemented to protect digital data from unauthorized access, corruption, or theft. Data security is not only about confidentiality, but also preventing other parties from misusing client information. Ensuring robust data security measures is essential for safeguarding sensitive legal information and maintaining privilege.
Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that uses multi-layered neural networks to analyze complex data patterns. Deep learning powers many sophisticated legal AI applications, such as advanced contract analysis and case outcome prediction.
Document review AI can be particularly useful for law firms that manage cases with extensive discovery. This AI function automates the process of scanning and analyzing legal documents to extract relevant information, identify key details, and categorize content efficiently. This technology streamlines document review tasks and enhances accuracy. AI can also catch things that human eyes might miss, especially when reviewing boxes of documents.
Automatically condenses long records, filings, or discovery into concise summaries without losing key facts or citations.
Due diligence AI automates due diligence procedures by conducting comprehensive reviews of business records, financial documents, and legal agreements. This technology enhances the accuracy and speed of due diligence tasks in legal transactions.
E-discovery AI assists in electronic discovery processes by analyzing and categorizing electronic data for legal investigations and litigation. This technology helps legal teams efficiently manage large volumes of digital evidence and streamline e-discovery workflows.
Edge computing processes data closer to where it's generated rather than in centralized cloud servers. This approach can enhance security and reduce latency for law firms using AI tools with sensitive data.
Numeric representations of text that capture meaning, enabling semantic search, document matching, and better retrieval in legal AI.
Entity recognition is an AI technique that identifies and classifies specific entities in text, such as names, dates, locations, or legal citations. This technology is crucial for extracting key information from legal documents.
Explainable AI focuses on developing AI systems that can provide clear and understandable explanations for their decisions and actions. XAI promotes transparency and accountability in AI processes, enabling users to trust and interpret AI outcomes.
Federated learning allows AI models to be trained across multiple locations without centralizing data. This approach can help law firms collaborate on AI initiatives while maintaining data privacy and confidentiality.
Fine-tuning involves customizing a pre-trained AI model by training it on specific legal datasets to improve its performance for particular legal tasks. This process allows law firms to adapt general AI models to their specific practice areas and requirements.
Generative AI refers to AI models capable of generating new data, such as images, text, or sounds. These models create new content based on patterns learned from existing data, enabling them to produce original and creative outputs.
In the context of AI, hallucination refers to a phenomenon where AI models produce inaccurate or misleading outputs that do not align with reality. Preventing hallucinations is essential for maintaining the credibility and reliability of AI systems. Hallucinations are a particular issue for attorneys, as several law firms have already been sanctioned for filing motions or other court documents with fake case information and rulings. This has happened in high-profile cases, illustrating the risks of AI hallucinations. Every law firm using AI for any legal documents must carefully edit and fact-check everything before using it in a case.
Methods that reduce fabricated outputs, including retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), human review, guardrails, and tuning.
Human-in-the-loop refers to a design approach that involves human oversight and intervention in AI processes. Integrating human judgment with AI systems helps improve decision-making, accuracy, and accountability in legal tasks.
The process by which a trained model applies learned patterns to new inputs to produce an output, such as a draft or prediction.
A structured network of entities and relationships that helps AI understand context across cases, statutes, facts, and parties.
Large language models are AI systems that process and generate human-like text based on the patterns and structures of language data they have been trained on. LLMs have significantly advanced natural language generation capabilities.
An AI tool that helps lawyers research, draft, summarize, and review documents while respecting confidentiality and ethical rules.
AI systems that monitor policies and regulations, detect compliance risks, and automate reporting to keep firms aligned with current rules.
Legal research AI leverages AI algorithms to streamline and enhance the legal research process. These tools can quickly search through vast amounts of legal information, analyze case law, and provide relevant insights to attorneys. It is always necessary to fact-check any legal research your firm plans to use in a case to prevent hallucinations.
Machine learning is a subset of AI that allows systems to learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. ML algorithms analyze data, identify patterns, and make decisions with minimal human intervention.
Automatically extracts events from medical records and builds a clear timeline to support personal injury and medical litigation.
Model validation involves verifying the accuracy, reliability, and performance of AI models against predefined standards and benchmarks. Validating AI models ensures their effectiveness and trustworthiness in various legal applications.
Multi-modal AI can process and analyze different types of data simultaneously, such as text, images, and audio. This capability is valuable for law firms handling diverse evidence types in litigation or investigations.
Natural language processing is a branch of AI that focuses on the interaction between computers and humans using natural language. NLP enables computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language, facilitating communication between machines and humans.
Neural networks are AI systems modeled after the human brain's structure, consisting of interconnected nodes that process information. These form the foundation of many advanced legal AI applications, including document analysis and legal research tools.
Predictive analytics involves using statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques to analyze current and historical data to make predictions about future events or trends. In the legal context, predictive analytics can help forecast case outcomes and litigation strategies.
Attorney-client privilege is a legal concept that protects communications between attorneys and clients from being disclosed to others outside the representation relationship. Law firms must consider how any AI usage might affect the attorney-client privilege regarding confidentiality, as many AI tools store and use data entered into the system. Firms should ensure to use AI with data protection, encryption, and restricted access to maintain confidentiality in the attorney-client relationship.
Prompt engineering involves designing effective prompts or input queries for AI models to generate desired outputs. Crafting precise and relevant prompts is crucial for leveraging AI systems effectively in various tasks.
Regulatory compliance entails adhering to laws, regulations, and ethical standards set by governing bodies in the legal field. Compliance with regulatory requirements is critical for law firms to operate ethically, avoid penalties, and maintain professionalism.
Practices that ensure AI is ethical, transparent, fair, and safe—aligned with professional conduct rules and client protection.
RAG is an AI approach that combines document retrieval with text generation. Instead of generating answers from memory alone, the model retrieves relevant documents first and then crafts a response. This technique improves accuracy and reduces hallucinations in legal research and drafting.
Risk assessment AI utilizes AI algorithms to evaluate and predict potential risks, threats, and vulnerabilities in legal matters or business operations. This technology enables proactive risk management and decision-making for law firms.
Sentiment analysis uses AI to identify and extract emotional tone and opinions from text. In legal contexts, this can help analyze client communications, witness statements, or public opinion regarding cases.
Supervised learning is a machine learning approach where AI models are trained using labeled datasets with known correct answers. In legal contexts, this might involve training models on contracts labeled with specific clause types or case outcomes.
Synthetic data is artificially generated data that mimics real data patterns without containing actual sensitive information. This can be useful for training legal AI systems while maintaining client privacy and confidentiality.
Tokenization is the process of breaking down text into smaller units (tokens) such as words or phrases for AI processing. Understanding tokenization is important for law firms to grasp how AI systems process and analyze legal documents.
Training data comprises the datasets used to train AI models and algorithms. High-quality and diverse training data are essential for ensuring the accuracy and generalization capabilities of AI systems.
Transfer learning applies knowledge gained from one AI task to a related but different task. Law firms can benefit from this approach by adapting AI models trained on general legal data to their specific practice areas.
Unsupervised learning involves training AI models on data without pre-labeled answers, allowing the system to identify patterns and relationships independently. This approach can help discover hidden insights in legal documents or case patterns.
A database optimized to store and search embeddings for fast, semantic retrieval of relevant documents and passages.
Version control systems track changes made to documents and AI models over time. This is crucial for law firms to maintain accurate records of document revisions and AI system updates for compliance and audit purposes.
Workflow automation uses AI and technology to streamline and optimize routine tasks, processes, and operations in legal practices. Automating workflows enhances efficiency, reduces manual errors, and increases productivity for law firms.
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