Microsoft could hold an advantage with Copilot for Legal

Microsoft is out with its own AI tools for the legal industry.

And while the vendor’s release of legal plugins is late compared to rivals’ offerings, the tech giant may well have a competitive edge because many in the business are already using the ubiquitous Microsoft 365 office productivity software suite.

Microsoft introduced Copilot for Legal on Oct. 15. It includes more than 20 legal AI skills and plugins built directly into the Microsoft 365 environment.

The product is really an advancement of what Microsoft previously introduced as Legal Agent in April. With the new legal plugins, Copilot for Legal supports extensive document work in Word. In Copilot, legal professionals can assign work across agreements, emails, meetings and files. The new capabilities let legal teams quickly draft agreements and memos, review and negotiate agreements and develop analysis into structured guidance, Microsoft said.

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But Copilot for Legal is belated, as Microsoft is the fourth big AI player to release legal tools.

Generative AI vendors first targeted AI for the legal field in January, when Anthropic launched its initial legal plugin for Claude Cowork, followed by Claude for Legal in May. In August, Google released Gemini Enterprise for Legal. And in September, OpenAI launched its Astra for Law platform.

Microsoft embedded in law firms

Despite Microsoft's late start, it could be in a good strategic position because so many lawyers rely on Microsoft products, said Michael McCready, owner of McCready Law in Chicago.

“They have that distribution advantage of being embedded in so many workflows,” McCready said. “They don’t even need to have the best legal AI. It must be good enough that lawyers feel they never have to leave Word, and that can be an enormous competitive advantage.”

Microsoft does not appear to have any additional or new features in Copilot for Legal compared to the competition.

However, since lawyers are traditionally slow to change their workflows and Microsoft owns much of the working environment lawyers use, including Word and SharePoint (where many lawyers and firms store their institutional knowledge), integration would be easy for lawyers, he added.

And although Microsoft competitors boast refined models and AI applications for lawyers, lawyers need more. They also have to be able to connect the apps they use, such as Copilot or Microsoft Word, to legal tools like Westlaw, Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis.

“I don’t think that just the AI application is enough,” McCready said. “These LLMs have gotten so good. AI has gotten so good at law. Now it's a matter of connections, and then the ability to build out agents based on those connections.”

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And even though Microsoft and Anthropic are rivals in the AI sphere, they are also partners: Claude is integrated with the Microsoft environment, enabling law firms to access the model if they choose to, while also using Copilot for Legal.

Despite any gains Microsoft might realize because of its pervasive presence in law, the AI market moves swiftly; Anthropic, OpenAI or Google could come up with a better product, more features or better pricing.

“We're getting to the point now that it's not so much the functionality of the LLM as it is the connectivity and just being able to access everything seamlessly, to give a lawyer the best output,” McCready said.

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