Multilingual Contract Drafting with AI

Note: This article is just one of 60+ sections from our full report titled: The 2024 Legal AI Retrospective - Key Lessons from the Past Year. Please download the full report to check any citations.

Multilingual Contract Drafting

As many of the readers of this report will know, multilingual contract drafting can involve 2 columns, one column with terms from one language, and another column with terms from the other language. Presently, you can either use a law firm, ALSP/LPO or legal translator to expedite the process, at some expense, and with some delay.

Some organizations don't do this, perhaps they can't justify the expense or don't want the delay, and will instead either:

1. Translate it internally, badly (legally speaking)
2. Use an AI-translation tool to translate it, but adding words at the bottom of the document saying "The translation is only for reference and isn't legally binding, the legally binding text is the English one"

Both of these workarounds act as a plaster, and are not recommended. One firm we spoke to mentioned that half their contracts are in English, and for the other half they use workarounds like this.

If you had the option to put it into a Legal AI which could give you high certainty of a good legal translation, which can fill the other side of the document in the column of the translation, then you wouldn't need a workaround.

While Legal AI tools now offer advanced multilingual capabilities for contract drafting (Genie AI), they aren't yet fully integrated into translation workflows.

AI multilingual drafting tools have shown high accuracy in generating legal documents across multiple languages, facilitating international legal work.[48]

The authors of this report believe that firms using multilingual Legal AI for drafting will report cross-border work efficiency gains, whether dealing with 3rd parties, or simply intra-group.