From Inbox to Impact: AI-Powered Legal Drafting in Microsoft® Outlook® for In-House Legal Teams

In-house legal teams face the unrelenting challenge of delivering more support to business teams while maintaining accuracy and compliance standards. Research we conducted for a recent white paper found that 82% of legal leaders report feeling heightened pressure to deliver faster responses to inquiries.

In-house legal professionals are discovering that part of the solution to this pressure is to work smarter, not harder, directly within the technology tools they already use every day.

The Outlook® Inbox: A Hidden Productivity Drain for In-House Attorneys

In-house attorneys open Microsoft Outlook each morning to find a familiar scene: contract requests, compliance questions, vendor agreements and board resolution drafts scattered across dozens of emails. Each represents hours of manual drafting work to craft non-disclosure agreements from scratch, update employment agreements or create compliance documents.

In fact, LexisNexis® research found that 79% of attorneys identify legal drafting as one of the most time-consuming aspects of their practice and that roughly half of attorneys spend 50% or more of their time each week on drafting.

The problem is that, when drafting needs arise, the traditional workflow creates costly disruptions by jumping from Outlook to Microsoft® Word, then to legal research tools, then to the document management system, then back and forth until the draft is complete. Each context switch costs valuable minutes of refocusing time, multiplied across dozens of daily drafting requests. This drafting time diverts in-house legal professionals from high-value activities that substantially impact business outcomes.

Perhaps this is why an international survey of lawyers found that 56% cited the drafting of legal documents as a key use case for the application of AI tools to their daily workflow, the #2 response behind legal research.

Business executives across all sectors have gone all-in with AI adoption, but legal teams have learned the hard way that there are important risks of using general-purpose AI tools for helping to generate legal work product. The key is finding an AI tool that integrates seamlessly into existing workflows while maintaining the accuracy and security standards that corporate legal departments demand.

Transforming Microsoft Outlook into a Legal Drafting Powerhouse

Legal teams can transform their inbox from a source of overwhelming demands into a streamlined drafting environment by integrating an AI tool specifically designed for the rigors of legal work directly into Microsoft Outlook.

AI-Powered Legal Drafting Without Leaving Outlook. Imagine receiving a vendor contract request via email and being able to draft a thorough response—complete with appropriate clauses, risk assessments and compliance considerations—without leaving Outlook.

Access Clause Libraries, Templates, and First Drafts in Your Inbox. This kind of trusted integration would allow in-house attorneys to draft directly within email threads, access clause libraries and templates, generate first drafts right away and collaborate seamlessly with stakeholders who are also using Microsoft 365® tools.

Here are five essential capabilities that a legal AI solution for Microsoft integration must have:

• Trusted Legal Sources with Verifiable Citations: The AI must be grounded in curated legal sources (e.g., case law, statutes, regulations and secondary authorities, etc.), rather than unverified internet content, with linked citations that attorneys can verify.
• Enterprise-Grade Security and Compliance for Legal AI: The AI solution must comply with corporate security standards, keep client data isolated from model training, and provide audit logs for internal IT reviews.
• Seamless Integration with Legal Workflows and DMS Platforms: The solution must connect intuitively with existing DMS platforms, support customization with company-specific templates and clauses, and eliminate disruptive context switching between applications.
• Smarter Drafting with Built-In Quality Control: The AI must be responsibly developed in a way that allows it to review its own output, identify potential issues and refine content before presenting it to attorneys.
• Deliver Measurable Business Impact for Legal Teams: The solution must deliver quantifiable value, such as time savings, improved accuracy and/or reduced reliance on outside counsel.

Our team set out to build a product that would make all of this possible. The development goal at LexisNexis® was ambitious: to create a tool that enhances the speed, quality and consistency of legal work for every legal professional in the world by providing a thorough, intelligent legal drafting solution that leverages AI capabilities and flexible DMS integration, accessible within Microsoft 365 applications.

Lexis Create+: AI Powered Legal Drafting in Microsoft 365

LexisNexis has delivered this to corporate customers with the rollout of Lexis Create+, an advanced legal drafting tool that securely integrates authoritative content from LexisNexis, robust generative AI capabilities and internal work product—all within trusted Microsoft applications, where a majority of in-house legal professionals spend significant time.

Lexis Create+ combines the drafting and proofreading tools of the legacy Lexis Create product with two new technology innovations from LexisNexis: AI-powered drafting capabilities via LexisNexis Protégé™, a personalized Legal AI assistant; and secure integration with a user’s internal Document Management System (DMS).

The result of these innovations is a powerful, personalized legal drafting solution in Microsoft 365 that meets legal professionals where they work, delivering everything needed to draft high-quality legal documents in one place.

Lexis Create+: AI-Powered Drafting for In-House Legal Teams

AI drafting tools don’t replace legal expertise—they amplify it. By embedding AI capabilities directly within Microsoft Outlook, in-house legal teams can respond to business needs faster with a focus on accuracy and greater strategic insight. The inbox transforms from a source of overwhelming demands into a launching pad for impactful legal counsel.

Lexis Create+ transforms in-house legal drafting by integrating cutting-edge AI technology, trusted LexisNexis content and secure access to shared internal knowledge—and placing all of this at the user’s fingertips within the familiar Microsoft 365 environment. The tool pulls together all the legal content, proofreading and redlining tools needed to create brilliant legal documents, swiftly and securely. Explore Lexis Create+ for in-house legal teams.