AI in Summarizing Legislation

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.

Summarizing Legislation

We have increasingly heard of lawyers using NotebookLM to summarise the key points in new legislation. NotebookLM is a Google Labs project designed to help people understand complex materials. It's marketed as a virtual research assistant, with a 500,000 word limit (thankfully most legislation isn't that long, but some are, such as the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 is 5,593 pages)

While researching this whitepaper, no studies had been carried out on the accuracy of NotebookLM in the legal domain, but we maintain that it's worth trying for this use case. As of today, according to our proprietary research, it'll perform accurately if you upload one piece of legislation.

If you add many, however, it struggles to cross-reference sufficiently: We tried importing the Data Act, Data Governance Act (DGA), Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act (DMA), Cybersecurity (NIS 2), and eIDAS and asking it to pull out and reference sources across the set of documents and it didn't perform so well.

AI-Powered Document Review

Deloitte reported that AI-assisted document review reduced review time by 80% compared to manual methods.[32]