On Thursday, contract lifecycle management provider Ironclad announced the launch of its generative artificial intelligence legal assistant Jurist.

Jurist’s public launch comes six months after Ironclad’s release of Ironclad Signature, an e-signature solution offering click-to-accept functionalities, approval chains and executive summaries. Ironclad also earlier this year released Custom AI, a set of features allowing users to improve the quality of their AI results.

What it is: Jurist is a gen AI legal assistant focused on streamlining the CLM process by automating contract summarization, editing, translation and drafting.

Jurist allows users to create and edit contracts with benchmarks and upload past precedents.

It’s also doc.x native, meaning users can also download and work on Microsoft Word documents while using Jurist.

“I think the key is this integrated experience, the conversational agent completely connected into this multi[document] environment and what we hope to do is help that lawyer be massively more productive,” Ironclad chief product officer Michel Feaster said.

Jurist also provides background on its answers, citing articles and prompts it used to produce them.

Why it’s needed: Feaster said Ironclad’s customers wanted an AI assistant tied to the company’s platform.

“We've been in this space for 10 years, we have hundreds of thousands of lawyers on the platform, we tried to build not just an assistant, but literally the most purpose-built, assistant optimized to help lawyers do their work better and faster,” she said.

After consulting with law firms and in-house lawyers, Ironclad also found that users wanted transparency around AI tools. Feaster noted that Jurist’s ability to cite its answers was a significant feature that could enforce that.

“This kind of transparent, iterative prompting where we're literally showing you everything we're doing, I think that's just critical for the legal profession because we're not trying to replace lawyers, we're trying to make them more productive, and they have to trust how a Jurist is getting to its answers,” Feaster explained.

Under the hood: Jurist was built and is powered with Rivet, a visual programming environment on the back end that assists Ironclad in building generative AI tools. Rivet was also used to build Contract AI, released in May.

“One of the challenges with modern LLMs is they're not super predictable, you can type in something and they don't give you the same response,” Feaster said. “We've built this multiagent architecture where the UI of Jurist actually has all of these little miniagents optimized for doing particular legal tasks like feed text in to get a red line or search for precedent or annotate the contract. And these agents actually control the LLM, that's how we communicate to the LLM.”

Competition: Gen AI-powered legal assistants are not a new concept for CLM providers.

In 2023, ContractPodAi released AI legal assistant Leah. CLM provider Lexion released its own AI contract management capabilities with AI Contract Assist back in 2022.

Feaster noted that Jurist’s doc.x native feature is what sets Ironclad’s AI assistant apart.

“We essentially have a doc.x native word environment literally embedded in the browser and in many other assistants, those are two different technologies, they're completely disconnected,” she said.