5 Top Legal AI Tools: How to Use Them Together to Turbocharge Your Firm | Gavel

5 Top Legal AI Tools: How to Use Them Together to Turbocharge Your Firm

Learn how you can use 5 leading AI tools together to streamline research, e-discover, and document automation and boost your law firm's efficiency.

By the team at Gavel

Published:

Dec 20, 2023

| Last updated:

Feb 3, 2026

Cut drafting time by 90%

Easy intake and document automation to auto-populate your templates.

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Being a lawyer is quantifiably one of the most stressful jobs around, with lawyers reporting that they experience burnout more than half of the time they’re working. Put simply: it’s a tough job.

While legal work is never going to be easy, there are ways to make your job easi er. AI technology has finally reached the point where integrating it into your legal practice can save you hours of work and loads of stress. A recent survey by Clio found that 79% of law firms have started integrating AI into their workflows. So, consider this your official notice: it’s time to work smarter, not harder.

With so many new legal tech tools on the market, it can be tough to get your bearings. To help, we’ve put together what we consider to be the best AI legal tool stack for today’s legal professionals. These aren’t just the “best” tools, they’re the tools that work the best together, each filling the other’s gaps. We’ll give you an overview of each tool, where it shines, and then finally give you a brief overview of how you can use all of these together to become the AI-powered lawyer of the future.

Gavel

Best for: Client intake, document automation, and an AI Assistant (Gavel Exec) directly in Microsoft Word

How to use it: Streamline your client intake and document drafting with powerful automation that can save you hours of work on tedious legal tasks.

Gavel is a legal document automation tool that helps you save time on time-consuming and repetitive tasks, like processing client intake forms and drafting the same types of documents (e.g., engagement letters, court forms, etc.). Even complex documents, like living trusts, can benefit from Gavel’s automation technology. Attorneys who use Gavel can save over 20 hours per week and improve efficiency thanks to the tool's powerful automation features.

Let’s break down what that means in practical terms. Imagine you need to draft an engagement letter for one of your clients. Instead of manually going through an existing template and finding and replacing variables, like pronouns or names, Gavel's questionnaire allows your clients' one-time answers to a prompt to auto-draft the correct references throughout the resulting document in seconds.

But Gavel goes deeper than single line items: it can dynamically adjust form parameters based on client input. For example, check out what happens when the client selects a different marital status on this client intake form. Gavel automatically adds in the relevant questions and then drafts up a finished Word document or PDF based on that information.

It’s a fully set-and-forget system: set up your documents once and let Gavel handle the rest from there on out. If it can be repeated, it can be automated.

Gavel Blueprint takes things even further with AI-driven functionality. If you’re transitioning to Gavel and already have your document sets in Word or fillable PDF form, then Gavel Blueprint can automatically read those files, turn them into workflows and questionnaires, and even suggest other parameters you may want to include. Once the initial conversion is complete, you can manually edit anything you want to change. Plus, you don't even need to have your own templates — Gavel offers attorney-vetted, pre-built templates and court forms across many practice areas and jurisdictions.

“As an employment lawyer, I used Gavel to streamline my client intake process and automatically generate document sets, no matter how complex,” said Dorna Moini, attorney and CEO of Gavel.

If you're interested in trying out Gavel, start a 7-day free trial or schedule a personalized demo before you sign up for a subscription.

Casetext CoCounsel

Best for: E-discovery, case law research, and document analysis

How to use it: Get answers to legal research and case law questions with sources from Westlaw Precision’s database. Speed up your e-discovery process and finetune your deposition preparation.

Casetext has been a staple in the legal professional’s toolbox since its release in 2013. Originally marketed as a crowdsourced law library, Casetext began augmenting its capabilities with artificial intelligence starting in 2016 with CARA AI, making it one of the first AI legal tools on the market.

In 2023, Casetext released CoCounsel, a fully-fledged legal AI assistant developed in cooperation with OpenAI. CoCounsel aims to solve those problems with a GPT 4 model that is specifically designed for legal use and, just like Gavel, accessed via separate servers to prevent client data from being used for training. Following CoCounsel’s release, Casetext was acquired by Thomson Reuters, which owns Westlaw, adding some extra credibility to the product.

CoCounsel has the following AI “skills”:

CoCounsel isn’t limited to just Westlaw’s database — you can use it on your own legal data and databases, making it an essential tool for e-discovery. Instead of reviewing thousands of emails and documents on your own, you can ask CoCounsel to search for anything relevant to a specific topic, and it will return the results you need.

If you need to review a contract, get a summary, or extract key data points, CoCounsel can use its advanced research skills to do that for you as well. It’s a must-have for legal departments everywhere.

If you're interested in trying out CoCounsel, the company offers a free trial.

Harvey

Best for: Answering questions about internal documents

How to use it: Get answers to questions about your own legal documents.

Like the other tools we’ve covered, Harvey is based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT LLM and uses a separate server to maintain privacy and data security. However, whereas Gavel’s Blueprint focuses on using AI to prepare document-generation workflows and CoCounsel aims to offer an all-in-one legal assistant, Harvey concentrates on leveraging AI-powered legal research to provide you answers to questions you might have about your own documents.

To use Harvey for its main use cases, you type in a request, upload relevant documents, and then you’ll get the results on the right-hand side of the interface:

One particularly useful feature of Harvey is its prompts library. When it comes to AI, the precise way you ask a question can greatly impact the answer you receive — learning to ask questions the right way, aka “prompt engineering,” is a skill in itself. To help you out on this front, Harvey includes a library of preset prompts for common requests.

If you need to comb through large amounts of data and extract a summary Harvey can help you there too.

“I could see myself using Harvey during contract reviews to pull out key clauses or summarize terms, especially when working against tight deadlines,” said Moini.

You can reach out to Harvey's team to learn more.

Blue J L&E

Best for: Tax code questions

How to use it: Get answers to tough tax code questions and summarize the answers in memos to other attorneys or to your clients.

Blue J L&E is unique among legal research tools in that it’s designed exclusively for tax code questions. By now, you probably understand the basic gist of how it works: you have a chat screen, you ask it a question, and it gives you an answer.

At the end of each response, Blue J will provide you with a few questions that you might want to ask Blue J if you want to go deeper into the topic.

If you're interested in learning more about Blue J L&E, you can book a demo via their website.

ChatGPT

Best for: General questions that could impact your cases

How to use it: Draft emails and get answers to broader questions.

Most of these tools are based on ChatGPT, so it may seem redundant to include it as a separate tool. However, these tools’ specialization are both their strengths and their weaknesses.

One more note: your data isn’t fully private on ChatGPT. Don’t use it for any sensitive client data that needs to stay private.

The basic version of ChatGPT can be accessed for free, you'll just need to make an account.

Honorable mentions

There are lots of AI-powered tools on the market, so we had to be discerning with our picks. However, these other tools also deserve your consideration:

Putting it all together

So there you have it: 5 of the best AI legal software around today. If you want to boost your productivity with AI, here’s what we recommend:

With all that in your toolbox, you’ll be ready to move you and your legal team into the future of law.