Taylor: Commercially realistic rates
A business law firm is offering SMEs contract reviews conducted entirely by artificial intelligence (AI), costing just £17.50 for simple agreements.
Users will receive a red/amber/green (RAG) analysis from 360 Business Law’s AiLa system, highlighting potential risks, deviations and clauses requiring closer scrutiny when judged against a playbook developed by the firm’s lawyers.
More detailed feedback can be given through a Word plugin, while those who want human legal advice can then request a fixed-fee quote.
AiLa is initially available through 360SmartReview for sales or purchase agreements, supplier contracts and non-disclosure agreements, with others being added soon, such as employment contracts. The next development will be generating contracts from scratch.
A simple agreement costs £17.50 plus VAT and a more complex one £87.50. Users can buy credit bundles, starting at £165 for 10. The Word plug-in costs £15 a month or £150 for a year.
The move extends an offering that 360 Law Group has built out over the past year for its enterprise clients, after integrating legal AI company Lexical Labs’s contract review system, Tiro AI, into its proprietary LawLink case management system.
In an attempt to challenge other law firms, it prices AI work with just a “small” mark-up.
The virtual group, based on a fee-share model, explicitly offers clients a regulated law firm, an alternative business structure (ABS) called 360 Law Services, to handle reserved legal work, and an unregulated firm, 360 Business Law, for everything else, with professional indemnity insurance premiums one of the reasons for how it operates.
It has more than 700 lawyers in over 100 jurisdictions worldwide. AiLa is currently only available through 360 Business Law but the plan is to make it available through 360 Law Services for documents such as wills and leases.
Robert Taylor, founder and general counsel at 360 Law Group, told Legal Futures that the system had worked well with enterprise clients, with large companies always going for lawyer review if they did not have an in-house lawyer in the jurisdiction but otherwise not.
The group has also developed bespoke playbooks that reflect specific clients’ risk appetites.
He explained that the analysis provided through the Word plug-in was more sophisticated, such as offering alternative clauses, than the RAG report – and every client has gone for the plug-in to date. It was too early to identify trends among SMEs.
Confidence in the quality of the output has consolidated as the system has been used, Mr Taylor said – he put his own office lease through it.
SMEs were turning to AI, putting contracts through ChatGPT and similar systems, he said, but their output would be inferior to AiLa, which has the best-practice playbook to guide it. “While [ChatGPT] will give you the obvious, it won’t come back in the way a lawyer would.”
He added: “I founded 360 Law Group to make first-class legal services accessible at commercially realistic rates by removing unnecessary overheads. The launch of 360SmartReview alongside AiLa represents another major step forward in that mission, giving clients direct access to advanced AI legal technology.”
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