How AI Legal Document Review Drives Faster Case Prep

What is AI legal document review?

AI for legal document review uses artificial intelligence to quickly analyze, sort, and identify key information from legal documents. It streamlines the review process and allows for improved accuracy by using AI to automatically take care of the most time-consuming review work.

AI for legal document review can automate legal document review, enhance your eDiscovery process, quickly find relevant case law or legal opinions, analyze vast legal databases in minutes, and more—ultimately saving you time while helping you build a substantial, well-supported case.

While there are many different tools available to facilitate the process, AI for legal document review typically uses AI technologies to identify patterns and relationships between documents and categorize documents. These may include:

• Machine learning for uncovering patterns and connections between documents
• Natural language processing for analyzing and interpreting text
• Optical character recognition for turning scanned or handwritten content into searchable digital text
• Retrieval-augmented generation for improving the quality of LLM-generated responses by grounding the model on external sources of knowledge

Types of AI legal document review

There are two primary types of AI for legal document review: technology-assisted review (TAR) and generative AI.

Technology-assisted review (TAR)

Technology-assisted review (TAR) is currently one of the most widely adopted applications of AI for legal document review, particularly in eDiscovery. It uses software and machine learning to help lawyers review, analyze, prioritize, and identify large quantities of documents to save lawyers time. In Canada, courts recognize the use of technology in eDiscovery through the Sedona Canada Principles, which state that a party may use electronic tools and processes to satisfy its discovery obligations—including TAR—as part of a proportional and defensible discovery process. 

For example, when using TAR, a lawyer may tag documents in a sample set as relevant or not relevant. Learning from these examples provided by the human input, the TAR program will predict the relevance of the remaining documents in the set.

While TAR can help legal professionals speed up the process of document review, which can, in turn, reduce the cost and time spent on manual review, it does have limitations.

For one, the strength and effectiveness of TAR’s output depends on the quality of the initial training set. For another, TAR is focused primarily on structured text-heavy documents for review, like emails or Word documents. This means it can’t accommodate other common types and mediums of data that need to be reviewed, such as videos.

Generative AI

While the technology is still emerging, legal teams are increasingly adopting generative AI tools, which can generate content like text and images based on certain prompts or inputs, to assist with document review.

Generative AI can do more than categorize and prioritize text-based documents. Generative AI tools can process, analyze, and review many different types of data, such as documents, text messages, and social media posts. It can also generate summaries, assist with document drafting, and offer a more in-depth interpretation of content.

Still, generative AI also has its limitations for legal document review. As an emerging technology, it’s less widely accepted by courts than TAR tools. It’s also prone to AI hallucinations, which can produce plausible but inaccurate or unsupported outputs. 

Canadian courts have already seen the consequences firsthand. In Zhang v. Chen, 2024 BCSC 285, a lawyer filed materials citing two cases that turned out to be fabricated by ChatGPT, resulting in a personal costs award against the lawyer. A similar pattern arose in Ontario in Ko v. Li, 2025 ONSC 2965, where a lawyer submitted a factum containing fictitious AI-generated case citations. 

These rulings make it clear that human oversight is essential whenever generative AI is used in a legal context.

Some examples of AI tools for legal document review include:

• Clio Work is an AI legal research, analysis, and drafting platform that helps lawyers find, understand, and apply the law faster. It draws on a firm’s matters, documents, and case details, along with a library of over one billion legal documents, cases, and journals, to surface key precedents, extract insights, and build stronger arguments in less time.
• Manage AI helps you accelerate your casework, from completing everyday tasks to transforming information into actionable insights. It automates routine tasks, prioritizes your day, and helps you work smarter within Clio Manage, all while keeping client data within your firm’s existing permissions rather than using it to train external models.
• Clio Draft combines automation and AI to make document creation faster and more accurate. From intelligent templates and questionnaires to AI-assisted drafting and review, Clio Draft helps legal professionals generate precise, polished documents in minutes, all while staying connected to their Clio Manage workflows.
• Kira, founded in Toronto and now part of Litera, is an AI-powered contract intelligence platform built on machine learning trained specifically for contract review, making it a strong fit for due diligence work on M&A and real estate files.
• Blue J, also founded in Toronto, uses AI to help lawyers predict how tax and employment law issues are likely to be decided, drawing on Canadian case law and legislation.
• Logikcull, which integrates with Clio, is an eDiscovery platform that can assist with automated document review, eDiscovery, and document organization.
• Everlaw is an eDiscovery software that uses AI to automate document review and administrative tasks, create document summaries, and assist with case narratives.
• Harvey AI is a broad AI legal platform for legal professionals and their workflows. While it’s not specifically focused on legal document review, Harvey can help generate insights, recommendations, and predictions based on data.

How does AI legal document review help with case prep?

Case prep takes time, but AI can assist with some of its most labour-intensive parts by streamlining legal document review and analyzing large volumes of documents with speed and precision. This frees up more time to focus on creating a winning case for your clients.

Using AI makes it easier and faster to sift through documents to:

• Conduct efficient eDiscovery: AI tools, like TAR, can speed up and streamline the eDiscovery process by automating the identification, classification, and prioritization of electronic documents used for evidence in legal cases. This makes it faster for lawyers to retrieve, identify, and review relevant documents needed for eDiscovery under provincial rules of civil procedure. Plus, AI tools can classify documents automatically and extract entities, such as names, dates, and places, so you get information quickly and accurately.
• Create document summaries: Lawyers can use AI tools to pull key points from long documents and turn them into quick overviews. By reading these concise summaries instead of every document in full, you can better prioritize and streamline document review for case prep.
• Generate and draft documents: Generative AI tools can analyze existing documents, find patterns, and use that information to create initial drafts of legal documents like pleadings, statements of facts, and responses. Clio Work grounds these drafts in your matter facts and cited legal authority, so lawyers get started faster while freeing up time for revisions and customization.
• Translation: By quickly and efficiently translating legal documents, AI translation tools make it more accessible to work with documents in multiple languages, an especially useful capability in a country with two official languages and a large multilingual client base. This saves time and expense with manual translation and helps reduce communication barriers.
• Build case narratives: AI can assist with creating case narratives by analyzing case files and documents, extracting relevant facts, and organizing them into an easy-to-understand narrative. This helps lawyers build case arguments and prepare for trials more quickly (and, in case you didn’t know, Manage AI also builds timelines from legal documents).

Best practices for implementing AI for legal document review

AI offers plenty of big benefits for streamlining legal document review, but, as with any AI solution for lawyers, it also comes with unique risks and ethical considerations.

Before leveraging AI technology for legal document review, it’s essential to be up-to-date on the relevant ethical issues. Provincial and territorial law societies across Canada have each published their own guidance on generative AI, and our comparison of law society AI guidance by province is a good place to start. And, if your firm doesn’t have a structured AI policy, create one; this guide to Canadian AI legal compliance can help.

You’ll also want to consider the following best practices for using AI for legal document review:

• Establish clear guidelines for usage: Create straightforward standards for exactly how and when AI tools will be used for document review at your firm. You should know what types of documents should and shouldn’t be reviewed using AI and how the AI outputs will be managed.
• Ensure a human is always checking the work: It’s one of the most important things to remember when using AI in law: No matter how advanced AI technology may be, human oversight is always essential to ensure accuracy and reliability. For legal document review, this means always reviewing the results and double-checking source material and citations against a source like CanLII to spot any errors and nuances that AI may not pick up on. The cost consequences in Zhang v. Chen and Ko v. Li are a reminder of what’s at stake when that step is skipped.
• Put privacy and security measures in place to protect sensitive legal data: For lawyers, the duty of confidentiality and to keep sensitive legal data safe is non-negotiable. This means being cautious about what client information is entered into an AI tool, understanding where that data is stored, and verifying whether it will be used to train the provider’s model.

Futhermore, when a platform is hosted outside Canada, firms must evaluate how privacy legislation—such as the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) or Quebec’s Law 25 applies to that data. It’s important to be proactive when working with tech tools like AI by implementing strong privacy and robust security protocols.

• Adhere to legal ethics: Be sure to vet AI tools to ensure they comply with ethical standards for the legal industry and the rules set out by your law society. The Federation of Law Societies of Canada’s Model Code of Professional Conduct provides the shared baseline that provincial codes are built on, covering competence, confidentiality, and supervision.
• Implement training programs: It’s one thing to have good policies and procedures set up for AI tools, but they’re only effective if everyone using them knows how to use them and is up to date, which can be challenging as AI technology is always improving. Ensure there’s ongoing training on the limitations, capabilities, and best practices for AI tools.

Things to consider when evaluating tools for AI legal document review

If you’re ready to implement an AI solution to help with legal document review, it’s important to vet your options carefully. In addition to evaluating potential tools for their security, cost, and customer reviews, you’ll want to consider the following:

• What does your firm really need? How much document review does your firm do, and what review tasks could you use the most help with? Consider the typical volume and complexity of documents you work with so you can look for tools that can handle what you need. For example, choose tools with advanced natural language processing and machine learning capabilities to assist with tasks like eDiscovery and look for tools with generative AI to help generate summaries.
• How much will it cost the firm? AI tools have the potential to alleviate a law firm’s workload, but the cost of these tools is considerable depending on their use.
• Is it easy to use? Look for AI tools with a user-friendly interface that everyone on your team can navigate. You can also consider if you may need any custom features or options to adapt the tool to your firm’s specific requirements, such as the ability to tag certain types of documents, custom reporting, or advanced search capabilities.
• Does it work with your existing systems? Choosing tools that integrate seamlessly with your existing software and systems (such as case management software like Clio) can unlock further time savings and improve overall efficiency in your day.
• Where is your data stored, and who can access it? Ask how a provider collects, stores, and processes client data, whether that data trains the provider’s models, and what security controls and audit trails are in place. This matters for every firm, but it carries added weight when a platform stores data outside Canada, where foreign access laws may apply.

No, AI won’t replace lawyers

Rest assured, AI is not coming for legal professionals’ jobs: AI assists human legal work rather than substituting for it.

In fact, not embracing the potential of AI technology may leave you at risk of being left behind by your competition. According to Clio’s Legal Trends for Canadian Law Firms report, 95% of Canadian law firms are already using AI in some capacity, and 66% of legal professionals who use it say it has improved their firm’s revenue.

AI is shifting the structure of legal work by using AI technology to automate mundane tasks and handle large document volumes with document review. This enables lawyers to focus on higher-value and strategic work. Over time, this shift improves efficiency, productivity, and client outcomes.

Final thoughts on AI legal document review

AI has the power to transform legal document review by automating monotonous processes and extracting valuable insights from vast data sets. Instead of spending hours poring over emails, contracts, or discovery documents, you can focus on strategy and client advocacy. The result: faster case prep, reduced costs, and improved outcomes.

Ready to work smarter on document review?

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Can AI analyze legal documents?

AI can analyze legal documents in several ways. Certain AI tools can quickly and efficiently review, categorize, and pull key information from large quantities of legal documents like case files and discovery documents. This analysis may include summarizing content, flagging inconsistencies or potential risks, or identifying relevant details. As with any AI output used in a legal context, Canadian law societies expect a lawyer to verify the results before relying on them.

Is there an AI tool to create legal documents?

Many AI tools are designed to create drafts of legal documents like contracts and pleadings. These tools typically analyze existing data and use natural language processing and machine learning to quickly create initial drafts, which legal professionals can then review and revise in line with their professional obligations to clients and the court.