Providing the thinking time for lawyers to really strategise and add value on complex legal issues

Since the game-changing launch of ChatGPT near the end of 2022, the writing has been on the wall that many businesses including lawyers need to get on the forefront and understand, adopt, and correctly use AI-powered technologies or risk becoming irrelevant, says South African commercial lawyer Louis Stroebel. 

“This is particularly something I was concerned about as a boutique firm, where we don’t necessarily have the budget to adopt major tech from major players like large firms do,” says Stroebel, the Managing Partner of Stroebel Singh Theunissen Inc, better known as SST Attorneys, which serves a wide geographic area from its established practices in Pretoria and Sasolburg. “Unless you find something that really helps you stay relevant at an affordable price, I think you’re really at risk.”

Stroebel’s focus on where lawyers can best add value for clients, and how to harness advancing technologies to enable such vision, led to him scooping the Innovator Award at the Alliott Global Alliance world conference in Toronto in November last year, for his work on ground-breaking legal platform CortixaAI.

A bespoke system that’s AI-driven and focuses on legal drafting, CortixaAI is designed to go far beyond the capabilities of large-language models or other programmes, tailored to a law firm’s own precedents and knowledge base. 

“It’s my brainchild, but to really develop something that’s balanced, well-rounded, and performs the way it should, you need a team,” shares Stroebel. “So, our CortixaAI team includes myself as a corporate lawyer, a chartered banker, an IT security specialist, and we’ve teamed with a development house in South Africa that’s delivered AI builds for commercial banks, financial services, and JSE-listed boards. It made sense to bring in industry expertise together with proven AI development capabilities in order to create something that we believe and trust will really add real-world value to lawyers in drafting legal documents.”

Adding value is of critical importance to Stroebel, for both lawyers and clients. 

Repetitive drafting of legal documents can take a lot of time for legal professionals, who also need to have the ability to “sit and really think, strategise, and add value thinking about the complexities of legal concepts”, he says. 

Modern workplaces can feel so extremely busy, and clients aren’t necessarily willing to pay for ‘thinking time’, no matter how vital or valuable, that it can seem impossible for lawyers to find or dedicate such time. For Stroebel, well-tailored AI-powered technologies can “really loosen up your time to focus on the complexity”, and so CortixaAI is designed to not only speed up the drafting process and help lawyers rapidly identify compliance gaps, but to give that time. 

Not only a speed advantage, but a quality advantage.

With CortixaAI having performed well in prototype and extensive testing, the team is now pressing hard in development for commercial release, says Stroebel.

The platform gives lawyers the ability to record a consultation with a client, then use the transcript of that conversation alongside other supporting documents as the input into the system, which will identify the type of legal agreement/s required, the key terms, find the most suitable examples from the firm’s own precedents database, then prepare a tailored first draft legal agreement. 

“It gives you two key advantages,” says Stroebel. “It retains your tone of voice – what’s produced sounds exactly like you write, because it is trained to recognise and to write in your own style – and it is expressly designed to handle complex drafting and not just high-level drafting with one-line inputs and shallow outputs.”

Importantly, notes Stroebel, CortixaAI is not designed to replace lawyers, but to strengthen them, level the playing field with bigger players, and provide greater options to harness their skills and expertise, and remain relevant for longer. 

Louise Stroebel has over 15 years of experience in structuring, negotiating, and executing complex business transactions. He is the Managing Partner of SST Law, a proud member of Alliott Global Alliance, which has 240 member firms operating in over 100 countries.