Artificial intelligence continues to reshape the legal sector at a rapid pace. In 2025, legal teams are adopting AI not as optional, but as an essential part of delivering higher-quality work, increasing efficiency, and reducing operational friction.

From research to drafting to workflow automation, today’s AI tools are more capable, more scalable, and more deeply integrated with legal practice than ever before.

Below, we explore the top categories of legal AI and the standout tools within each, helping legal professionals understand where each fits into the modern legal stack.

1. Legal Research Tools

AI has revolutionized research by dramatically reducing the time required to find relevant authorities and by delivering more comprehensive, reliable results. The leading research platforms combine retrieval, large-scale model reasoning, and domain-specific fine-tuning to surface accurate answers quickly.

Alexi

Alexi provides fast, highly reliable legal research through a system designed specifically for complex, multi-jurisdictional legal reasoning. It is one of the few research tools to undergo independent benchmarking (validation from the Stanford VALS (Validated Legal Answers) benchmark) demonstrating industry-leading accuracy and consistency in legal research performance.

Legal teams use Alexi to:

• Generate clear, well-supported answers to research questions
• Explore authorities with structured reasoning
• Speed up complex issue analysis
• Reduce research bottlenecks in litigation and advisory work

Other notable legal research tools

• Lexis+ AI – Integrated with LexisNexis research libraries, offering conversational search and drafting support.
• Westlaw Precision AI – Uses retrieval-augmented AI on top of Westlaw’s established legal database.
  
• Casetext CoCounsel / Thomson Reuters AI – Strong generalist legal assistant capabilities for research and drafting.
• vLex Vincent AI – Broad global library with multilingual research capabilities.

2. Legal Assistant Tools

Legal assistant AI tools operate as everyday productivity partners—summarizing documents, answering questions, generating checklists, and helping lawyers work faster without sacrificing accuracy.

Alexi

Alexi doubles as an advanced legal assistant, capable of interpreting questions, explaining concepts, and producing structured legal analysis. Its domain-specific reasoning capabilities allow it to operate with a higher degree of legal accuracy than generalist AI assistants.

Use cases include:

• Issue spotting
• Concept explanations
• Case-law overviews
• Legal strategy brainstorming
• Procedural guidance

Other tools in this category

• Harvey – Broad legal assistant capabilities for large law firms and in-house teams.
• CoCounsel Core – Provides generalist legal support across tasks and practice areas.
• Spellbook – Contract-focused AI assistant built directly into Microsoft Word.

Modern drafting tools combine AI generation with robust review features to help lawyers create accurate, consistent documents faster. Many integrate directly with Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or email environments to fit naturally into existing workflows.

3. AI Drafting Tools

Spellbook

Spellbook is one of the leading AI drafting tools for lawyers, designed specifically for contracts. Built directly into Microsoft Word, it helps users draft clauses, identify alternative language, and surface potential risks during the drafting process. Its tight integration and contract-focused capabilities make it a popular choice for transactional practices.

Other notable drafting solutions

• Alexi – Supports litigation-focused and research-backed drafting by generating structured analysis, summaries, outlines, and early-stage written materials.
• Harvey Drafting – Provides general-purpose legal drafting across memos, contracts, and correspondence.
• Juro AI Drafting – Assists with contract generation and clause suggestions within Juro’s contract platform.
• CoCounsel Drafting – Supports drafting of legal briefs, letters, and internal documents using guided AI prompts.

4. Workflow & Automation Tools

Workflow automation tools help legal teams streamline repeatable processes—from intake to approvals to document generation—while maintaining consistency and auditability.

Alexi Workflows

With Alexi Workflows, legal teams can connect research, drafting, and analysis tasks into end-to-end repeatable processes. This helps teams scale their work, reduce variance across matters, and ensure that legal output remains high-quality and standardized.

Workflows can be used for:

• Litigation research packages
• Internal guidance drafting
• Regulatory updates and monitoring
• Standardized client deliverables

Other workflow tools

• Ironclad Workflow Engine – Contract lifecycle automation for in-house teams.
• Adept / Legal OS – No-code tools for building custom legal workflows.
• Athennian – Entity management and workflow automation for corporate legal.

5. Review & Analysis Tools

AI-powered review tools help legal teams analyze contracts, litigation documents, and other legal materials with greater speed and consistency. These platforms often specialize in risk identification, clause extraction, and large-scale document analysis for transactional or corporate workflows.

LegalOn

LegalOn is widely recognized as one of the strongest AI-driven contract review platforms. Designed for in-house legal teams, it provides structured risk detection, clause-level analysis, and redlining support powered by attorney-built playbooks. 

LegalOn’s emphasis on actionable, practical guidance (rather than generic model output) makes it especially effective for teams managing high volumes of commercial contracts. Its pre-built rulesets help legal departments accelerate review cycles, improve consistency, and elevate the quality of contract risk assessment from day one.

Other notable review & analysis solutions

• Alexi – Provides research-backed review through detailed summarization, legal issue analysis, and comparative reasoning across complex documents.
• Luminance – Uses machine learning to support due diligence and contract analysis with automated pattern recognition.
• Kira Systems – A long-established contract analysis platform known for strong clause extraction and large-scale diligence support.
• Relativity AI – Focused on eDiscovery review, leveraging machine learning for classification, clustering, and relevance scoring.

Choosing the Right Legal AI Stack for 2025

Legal teams today rarely choose a single AI tool. Instead, they build a stack combining specialized solutions for research, drafting, workflows, and review. When assessing tools, consider:

• Accuracy and reliability, ideally validated by independent benchmarks
• Security and data handling practices
• Integration with existing IT and knowledge systems
• Jurisdictional coverage and practice-area depth
• Ease of adoption and training
• Vendor transparency in model behavior and limitations

As AI becomes more deeply integrated into legal practice, teams that adopt the right tools will see major performance gains, allowing them to deliver higher-quality legal work, more consistently, and at greater scale.