Episode 6. Copilot for legal is on by default, what law firms do.

0:08 On Thursday a contract review tool arrived in thousands of law firms, and almost nobody in those firms decided to allow it.

0:16 Microsoft switched on legal skills inside Copilot in Word for every business customer that already pays for Copilot.

0:24 If your firm is one of them, your fee earners can now ask Word to mark up a client's agreement against a playbook, and the tracked changes will look like anyone else's.

0:35 Good morning, and welcome to The Legal AI Brief, the Monday round of the AI news that matters to smaller law firms.

0:42 I am Saqib Khan. My legal career began in large commercial law firms and includes fourteen years as an owner of a law firm and four years as a fee-paid county court judge.

0:54 I run Adliora, an AI consultancy that helps small and mid-sized firms adopt AI safely, profitably and within the rules.

1:04 Every Monday I take the developments from the past week, separate the noise from the parts that touch your practice, and set out in plain terms what a sensible firm does about them.

1:15 Let us get into the week.

1:18 Three things worth your attention, in a quieter week than most.

1:22 Microsoft made Copilot for legal generally available on Thursday the fifteenth of October, with more than twenty legal skills in Word and in Cowork, its agent for work that runs across several files.

1:36 The Word half is switched on by default. That is the main story.

1:41 On Wednesday the fourteenth, Legal Futures reported a LexisNexis survey of five hundred and forty three UK lawyers and legal professionals, carried out in July.

1:52 Almost one in five were unable to name anyone who owns AI governance where they work, and the share was higher in small firms.

2:01 LexisNexis sells AI research tools, so weigh it accordingly, but the finding matches what I see in firms of every size.

2:11 And on Friday Legal IT Insider reported that Hogan Lovells Cadwalader has set up an AI board to decide what the firm builds and what it buys, and signed with both Harvey and Legora.

2:25 You are not Hogan Lovells. The point to take from it is the board, a named group with the authority to say yes or no, which is the thing the LexisNexis survey says one firm in five lacks.

2:41 Here is what Microsoft released. Copilot for legal is a set of more than twenty skills that sit in two places.

2:50 In Word, Copilot can now review an agreement against a playbook, draft from the approved templates and precedents you keep in SharePoint, and propose its revisions as ordinary tracked changes.

3:03 In Cowork, the skills reach across a collection of documents.

3:08 They pull out obligations and deadlines across a set of contracts, compare one agreement with another, and build case chronologies from the files, the emails and the meeting records.

3:20 The skills grew out of something Microsoft called Legal Agent, which it ran as an early programme.

3:25 Microsoft says that more than eighteen hundred users made nearly a hundred thousand edits with it and kept roughly seven in ten of the suggestions.

3:34 Those are the vendor's own figures from its own trial. I would put the other half of that sentence in front of your team, because three suggestions in ten were thrown away by people who looked at them, and the value of the tool depends on someone in your firm looking.

3:50 Microsoft has also lined up partners whose systems will plug into Word and Cowork, among them iManage, NetDocuments, Harvey, Legora, Docusign and Bloomberg Law, announced as in development rather than ready.

4:06 Neither LexisNexis nor Westlaw appears on the research list Microsoft named, so a firm that researches English law on those services gains nothing on that side yet.

4:17 Now the part that matters most to a firm of your size. Microsoft's own admin page, updated on the day of the launch, says this.

4:27 Within Word desktop, the legal plugin is enabled for all Microsoft 365 Copilot commercial subscribers by default.

4:37 Cowork works the other way round, since each user has to add the legal plugin before it does anything there.

4:44 So if your firm bought Copilot last year as an office assistant, for email, meeting notes and first drafts, the same licence reviews contracts from this week.

4:54 Nobody had to buy anything, install anything, or agree to anything.

4:59 The partners who approved Copilot approved a different product from the one now sitting on every fee earner's screen.

5:06 Microsoft makes three promises about the data, and they are worth reading with care.

5:11 Copilot works only with content each user can already open. It honours sensitivity labels.

5:18 And it does not use your prompts, its responses or your documents to train the underlying models.

5:25 The second and third promises are reassuring. The first one cuts both ways, because Copilot sees whatever your SharePoint and OneDrive permissions allow.

5:35 If a trainee can open every matter folder in the firm, Copilot working for that trainee can reach every matter folder in the firm, and it now compares agreements in bulk.

5:46 Artificial Lawyer asked on launch day what the fallout would be, and its best guess was that the impact will land hardest on lawyers who are not heavy users of legal AI and want an easy answer.

5:59 Read that description slowly, because it describes most small firms.

6:04 The firm that has already chosen a specialist tool has thought about the question.

6:09 The firm that has not is the firm whose first legal AI tool has now been chosen by default.

6:16 Last week on this programme I talked about a paralegal who drafted grounds of appeal with ChatGPT and a supervising solicitor who had not taken responsibility for the work.

6:27 A consumer chatbot is something a firm can ban. Copilot inside Word is the software everyone already trusts, it carries the firm's own branding on every document, and its suggestions arrive as tracked changes that look exactly like a colleague's.

6:43 That makes supervision harder rather than easier, because nothing on the screen tells the supervising solicitor which changes a person proposed and which a machine did.

7:01 A word about what I do. Adliora advises small and mid-sized law firms on adopting AI without falling foul of the rules that govern you. Where to begin, which tools earn their place, what your duties on supervision and confidentiality mean in practice, and how to write a policy your people will follow. If this subject sits on your desk and nobody in the firm owns it, that is the problem I am paid to solve.

7:35 For a smaller firm, Thursday's release lands in four places.

7:39 The first is the decision itself. Your duty to supervise the work done in your name, and to keep client information confidential, does not change because a vendor set a default.

7:50 A tool that reviews contracts is a tool the firm has to have chosen, tested and written into its policy.

7:57 If the partners have not made that choice, the default has made it for them, and a setting chosen by a vendor is no answer to a regulator asking who in the firm decided.

8:08 The second is permissions. Many small firms run SharePoint and OneDrive the way they ran the shared drive, with everyone able to open almost everything because it was easier.

8:20 Ethical walls resting on habit rather than on permissions were always fragile.

8:26 A tool that searches and compares across every document a user can open turns that fragility into a live risk.

8:35 If you act for both sides of anything, or hold files for a client in dispute with another client, look at who can open what before anyone runs Cowork across a folder.

8:46 The third is supervision. A tracked change proposed by Copilot carries no more authority than one proposed by a first seat trainee, and the solicitor who accepts it owns it.

8:59 The difference is that you know when the trainee drafted something.

9:03 Decide now how your people will mark work where Copilot proposed the changes, so the person checking knows what kind of check it needs.

9:12 The fourth is your playbook. Copilot reviews an agreement against the playbook you give it.

9:17 A firm with a written playbook for its common contracts gets a reviewer that applies the firm's own positions.

9:23 A firm without one gets a reviewer applying whatever it is given on the day, or nothing at all.

9:29 If you want the benefit of this tool, the playbook is the work that comes first, and it is work your best commercial lawyer has carried in their head for years.

9:39 Start with a question to whoever runs your Microsoft 365 account, whether that is a member of staff or an outside IT provider.

9:48 Ask whether a policy called Legal Skills in M365 Copilot in Word has been set in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin centre, and whether the plugin called Legal for Cowork is allowed on the Agent Tools page in the Microsoft 365 admin centre.

10:06 Write down the answers. Then take it to the partners as a decision rather than leaving it as a setting.

10:12 There are three sensible answers. Leave the skills on for everyone, switch them off until you have tested them, or run them for a small pilot group on documents that hold no client information while you compare the output with your own precedents.

10:28 Any of those is defensible if the firm chose it and wrote it down.

10:33 None of them is defensible if nobody chose. Next, look at permissions.

10:39 Ask your IT provider for a plain list of who can open which matter folders, and close anything wider than the work requires before a tool starts reading across them.

10:50 And put a line in your AI policy, dated, that names Copilot's legal skills and says what the firm decided.

10:57 Google did the same thing inside Gemini Enterprise in August, so expect to make this decision again for the next platform.

11:04 Here is the one instruction to take from today. Before Friday, find out whether the legal skills are switched on in your firm's Word, and put the choice to keep them on or turn them off in front of the partners in writing.

11:19 The bench note this week comes from the Master of the Rolls, Sir Geoffrey Vos, speaking at the Legal Geek conference on Wednesday, in his last three weeks in the post.

11:29 He set out four facts as he sees them. Almost everyone with a legal problem asks a chatbot before going near a lawyer.

11:37 Many lawyers routinely use a chatbot or a legal AI tool for their work.

11:43 Judges in England and Wales have a ring fenced version of Microsoft Copilot on their computers.

11:50 And judges in South Korea, Kazakhstan and China use AI to help them decide cases.

11:57 He described a court in Shenzhen where a judge told him she can do six cases in the time one used to take.

12:05 And he said the line between a machine summarising the facts and a machine deciding the case is far easier to state than to define, because a judge short of time will be tempted not to check what the machine left out.

12:20 Read it as a judge reads it. The most senior civil judge in the country has told you that the client asked the machine first, that the judge has Copilot too, and that the risk is the human who stops checking.

12:32 That is the same risk as Thursday's default, seen from the other side of the bench.

12:44 And a word about my technological venture, so you know where I stand. Bracton is a case management system for firms in England and Wales with agentic AI designed in from the ground up, rather than bolted onto software written twenty years ago. Overnight it reads every live matter, so the morning list is waiting with the action drafted and the research carrying a source you can open. A person signs everything off. Bracton legal dot co dot uk.

13:15 That is the week. If you take one point from it, take this. A person in your firm has to own what these tools produce, and that will not change whatever the tools cost or how capable they become.

13:29 If you want an honest view of where your firm stands, there is a two-minute readiness check on the Adliora site, and you are welcome to send a short message and talk it through with me directly.

13:42 I am Saqib Khan. This has been The Legal AI Brief, and I will be back next Monday with the week that was.

13:49 Thank you for listening.

13:50 The transcript of this episode, with a timestamp on every line, sits beside the two minute readiness check at adliora dot com. Have a great week.