How GenAI Is Changing Legal Drafting

The limits of traditional document automation 

Legal drafting remains slow, complex and difficult to standardise. While document automation has helped in specific, repeatable scenarios, its impact has often been limited to a small subset of documents. 

Traditional approaches tend to work best where drafting can be reduced to fixed rules and predefined choices. Once a document requires judgement, adaptation or context, those systems quickly reach their limits. This gap between automation and real drafting work is a recurring theme throughout the report — and it sets the stage for the shift now underway. 

These limitations are directly addressed in the report. As Pierre Zickert, Legal Technology Manager at Hengeler Mueller, explains: 

“Our KM work and our document automation work before was rather static and rules-based, you covered the most-used documents, and you could automate a few types or categories of use cases, but that’s it.” 
(The Future of Legal Drafting, p.4) 

As a result, drafting work that required judgement, adaptation or contextual nuance often fell outside these systems and reverted to manual processes. 

This created a persistent gap between the promise of automation and the realities of legal practice. 

Generative AI changes the drafting paradigm 

Generative AI introduces a fundamentally different approach to legal drafting. 

As Pierre Zickert (Hengeler Mueller) notes: 

“With Gen AI, you can create much more individualised agreements.” 
 

Rather than relying solely on predefined rules and decision trees, generative AI enables lawyers to move beyond fixed templates and work more flexibly from existing precedents. 

The report makes this shift explicit. As Pierre Zickert further explains: 

“This was not possible before Gen AI – you either could create a document based on an automated template or not. Now you can do both.” 

•  From static knowledge to continuously usable firm intelligence 

Generative AI does not change the nature of legal documents themselves. What it changes is how firm knowledge is accessed, updated and reused during drafting. 

Instead of relying on static precedent collections or isolated templates, firms are beginning to treat their accumulated work product as an active knowledge base - one that can be searched, analysed and applied dynamically within the drafting process. This allows lawyers to work from existing precedents while adapting language to new facts, legal developments and context, rather than starting from fixed structures. 

The report describes how AI fundamentally changes the way firm knowledge is accessed and reused. As Idoya Fernández, Head of Knowledge and Innovation at Cuatrecasas, states: 

“With AI, this knowledge becomes a dynamic, living library that is constantly updated and easily accessible.” 
 

Drafting therefore becomes less about mechanical assembly and more about applying legal reasoning in context. AI supports this process while lawyers retain responsibility for judgement and decision-making. 

The report also highlights AI’s role in revising and improving clauses. As Joana Mascarenhas, Head of Knowledge Management at VdA, explains: 

“AI not only helps with drafting documents, it can also help amend and provide suggestions on how to redraft a clause.” 
(Joana Mascarenhas, VdA – The Future of Legal Drafting, p.4) 

Why lawyers immediately relate to this shift 

Drafting is one of the most time-intensive aspects of legal work, making improvements in this area immediately visible to lawyers. 

The report highlights a consistent expectation among lawyers: drafting tools should reduce friction, not add to it. Lawyers want relevant clauses and firm knowledge to surface when they are needed, without having to navigate complex folder structures or disconnected systems. The broader objective is simple - to allow lawyers to spend more time exercising legal judgement and less time searching for information.  

Crucially, this shift is not about replacing legal expertise with automation. It reflects a demand for technology that supports how lawyers actually work, enabling them to apply their expertise more effectively and with greater focus.