Over the past year, we’ve been working closely with our clients to identify the areas where generative AI can be most impactful to their businesses. Our clients have always been leaders in advancing their legal technologies, but many have expressed similar concerns over the security risks of AI and its potential misuse of their data.

Legal professionals everywhere are re-examining a technology that quickly became a trend to ensure it has staying power and can provide true value to their businesses. Many have made it clear that generative AI must be both purposeful and responsible in order to unlock more efficient ways of working.

As the industry continues to explore the use of AI, we wanted to share our approach to responsible AI development with you.

Our pillars of responsible AI development

1. An enterprise technology foundation

To us, responsible AI development extends far beyond the number of security certifications we offer (although we have plenty of those, too!). It’s a deep evaluation of the right AI technology foundation to ensure we protect highly sensitive legal information. 

The LLM you choose matters

We spent several months thoroughly researching the large language models (LLMs) available to select the model that most closely aligned with our pillars of safety, responsibility, and value. We’ve chosen the Claude 3 model family from Anthropic, which has set new industry benchmarks across a wide range of tasks. We selected Claude as it provides the optimal security and accuracy for the initial roadmap of capabilities we want an AI model to perform.

A closed AI model is important

Claude is also one of the many highest-performing models offered through Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that provides access within a single API. This means our entire AI application will be managed within the closed AWS cloud services, never exposing client data to the broader internet or other open AI models. 

This provides added privacy and security to our clients as well as consistency and accuracy in how our model will continue to perform over time.

Both Anthropic and AWS share our commitment to responsible AI development. They’re actively engaged in a number of organizations, including the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), the Partnership on AI (PAI), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to promote the safe development and deployment of AI.

Single-tenant architecture is more secure

At Litify, we’ve built our existing platform using single-tenant architecture, meaning each client has a unique cloud environment that’s walled off from other organizations. Powered by AWS and Anthropic, we’re extending this design and investing in single-tenant architecture for our AI features. As our clients gain access to Litify AI capabilities, the information they share with the AI model will remain inaccessible to other clients and external users, and won’t be retained by the model.

If you need a refresher on some of the terms and concepts used above, check out our Glossary of AI Terms For Legal!

2. A value-first approach

According to our VP of Engineering Andrew Heffernan, “Adding AI to your processes should be like adding salt to your dish. It enhances the flavor but isn’t the main ingredient — à la you shouldn’t always know it’s there.” 

AI needs a use case

This quote from Andrew captures our belief that AI isn’t a replacement for your existing workflows; it’s another tool for unlocking new value and powering more efficient ways of working. For AI to be most effective, you need to take a platform approach and embed it in your existing business processes. While there’s a lot of buzz around AI, we don’t believe in AI for AI's sake. There must be a business challenge that AI is the best technology to solve. 

One of those challenges we’ve researched with our clients is inefficiencies in data entry. While AI isn’t well-positioned today to engage in the art of case strategy, it is adept at lending a “hand” with manual tasks like this, which take up time that legal teams could spend on more impactful work.

AI should drive business efficiency, not replace lawyering

As we alluded to, we don’t believe in deploying AI to replace the art of law, which still requires a human touch. Just as AI isn’t a replacement for your existing workflows, it’s also not a replacement for your talented legal professionals. Instead, the features we develop are aimed at saving them time on the manual tasks that take up time in their day. In the long run, we believe in developing AI that helps drive the business of law forward with more streamlined processes and proactive insights than ever before — so your teams can focus on the practice of law.

3. An ecosystem of expertise

We’re also working closely with leading AI and technology companies to harness their expertise and best practices to build our AI capabilities thoughtfully and intentionally.

Litify joins Salesforce’s closed AI beta

Salesforce has been exploring the use of AI at scale for nearly a decade, and as their top legal technology partner, we have early access to start applying their AI technology to help impact the legal industry. Our experience lies in harnessing the power of Salesforce to change how legal work gets done, and for us, AI for legal is the next evolution of these efforts.

Litify announces responsible AI development with AWS & Anthropic

As we continue to partner with Salesforce to deliver our secure, cloud-based solutions, we’re also deepening our AI expertise by collaborating with software leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Anthropic to support the development of responsible AI solutions for the legal industry.

This approach was forged from the need to develop AI capabilities using appropriate precautions, given the sensitive nature of legal information and the need for enhanced data security.

Read more about our AI development with AWS & Anthropic in our official announcement!

With generative AI comes great responsibility

With this framework, Litify joins technology leaders like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Salesforce in our commitment to responsible AI development.

We hope you’ll join us on this journey

Our journey toward responsible AI development will be a shared one: we need to ensure that the technology we build is safe and that it is used safely. We highly recommend that you also develop strategies and guidance for the responsible use of AI within your organization. “Artificial intelligence” is an extremely broad term, so it’s likely ineffective to think about “wanting AI” in general. What kind of AI do you want? What do you need it to do for your business? And most importantly, how will you ensure it’s deployed and used safely within those parameters?

Introducing Litify AI!

We’ve released our roadmap of AI capabilities focused on driving efficiencies in document management this summer. This roadmap is the result of months of work with our clients to uncover the ways that generative AI can provide the most value to their businesses and collaboration with AWS and Anthropic to deliver those capabilities safely and responsibly.