NetDocuments Brings Responsible AI to the Legal Sector with ndMAX

Global News

25
Jul
2023

Editor

NetDocuments, a trusted native cloud content management and productivity platform that helps legal professionals do their best work, has released ndMAX, a series of generative AI-powered products designed to streamline the entire legal workflow.

Thoughtfully embedded throughout the NetDocuments platform, ndMAX enables law firms and legal teams to securely and responsibly apply cutting-edge AI to their own documents and data in order to extract business intelligence and generate novel content.

“At NetDocuments, responsibility and innovation are deeply ingrained in our DNA. ndMAX reflects our commitment to safeguard and empower our customers through a solution that unites the power of generative AI with the security of the NetDocuments platform while utilizing client and firm specific content,” stated Josh Baxter, CEO NetDocuments. “This unique combination will enable legal professionals to leverage AI responsibly – conforming to a firm’s security, compliance, and best practice regimes – and integrate seamlessly with the workflows and productivity tools that firms rely on every day.”  

The first product to be released as part of ndMAX is PatternBuilder MAX, which is built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, including its GPT4 series of models. The new product enhances NetDocuments’ native, no-code document assembly and workflow capabilities by enabling firms to create custom generative AI automations tailored to the needs of specific practice areas. PatternBuilder MAX makes it easy to automate many common legal tasks with generative AI and supports key use cases like:

• Generating draft documents based on internal precedents and playbooks
• Extracting information from documents—including discrete entities, as well as complex insights—and saving extracted data to a database
• Running contract playbooks to compare third-party contracts against a firm’s own contracting policies and standards
• Instantly summarizing documents like depositions and complaints and saving those summaries into a workspace
• Turbocharging document review and editing by contextually surfacing a firm’s generative AI workflows directly inside of Microsoft Word.

PatternBuilder MAX is currently live in production and available to select customers including Cuatrecasas, Husch Blackwell, Lewis Silkin, and Nelson Mullins, and will be released widely in the Fall of 2023. 

David Worth, CIO of Nelson Mullins, whose firm has PatternBuilder MAX early access, said: “Right now the legal market is flooded with generative AI products, and it's hard to separate fact from fiction. The beauty of PatternBuilder MAX is we don't have to pick a solution; we will have a tool to build our own customized generative AI workflows, whenever we want, in minutes. And each workflow we build will sit securely inside the platform we trust to store and manage our content every day.” 

Kim Konotchick, General Manager, Azure Mid-Market Data & AI, US West Region at Microsoft, stated: “We are thrilled by what NetDocuments is establishing with ndMAX. It is the prototype of what we encourage – which is leveraging our groundbreaking AI technology with a purpose-built, responsible AI solution that industry experts can best bring to market for their customers.” 

Customers shaping the future of legal AI with NetDocuments

NetDocuments listened closely to the concerns and expectations of customers during the development of ndMAX. Several themes emerged regarding responsible use of generative AI by legal professionals, and those became essential requirements for ndMAX:

• Protecting client confidentiality by ensuring that client data is excluded from the LLM’s model training
• Using existing security controls to manage the availability and use of AI inside the organization
• Avoid moving documents to other applications and instead intelligently embed AI capabilities where they are already working in NetDocuments. 

Blake Rooney, CIO of Husch Blackwell, another PatternBuilder MAX user, said: "New initiatives like ndMAX are one of the key reasons we chose the NetDocuments cloud platform in the first place. Bringing new capabilities and innovation to market with tremendous care and foresight, securely and reliably, natively within the platform, address our current and future needs and technology ambitions.”

Dr. Alex Bazin, CTO of Lewis Silkin, shared: “At Lewis Silkin we aspire to be at the forefront of using technology in innovative ways to help us better serve our clients. Generative AI has the potential to reshape the legal services market – which is why we’re excited to partner with NetDocuments on the launch of ndMAX. These capabilities will allow us to responsibly use our precedents and other written expertise to be more responsive to client requests and significantly improve matter efficiency.” 

For more details on how legal professionals can leverage ndMAX click here.