NetDocuments AI Assistant: Three New Features Transforming Legal Document Workflows

NetDocuments has introduced three significant enhancements to its Legal AI Assistant that address common pain points in legal document work: verifying AI-generated content, maintaining consistency in routine tasks, and handling complex legal reasoning. These updates represent a major step forward in making AI a more practical and trustworthy tool for legal professionals.

Citations: Building Trust Through Transparency

One of the most significant barriers to AI adoption in legal environments has been the challenge of verifying outputs. The Legal AI Assistant now automatically includes citations that link responses directly back to source documents within your NetDocuments repository.

Why This Matters:

Citations transform the AI Assistant from a “black box” into a transparent research partner. When the Assistant summarizes a contract, analyzes case law, or extracts key provisions, you can now immediately see exactly which documents and passages informed each part of the response. This capability addresses a fundamental requirement in legal work: the ability to verify and validate information quickly.

Practical Applications:

• Document Review: When summarizing deposition transcripts or discovery materials, citations allow you to jump directly to relevant passages for verification
• Contract Analysis: Extract key terms and provisions while maintaining direct links to the source language in the original agreements
• Research Validation: Quickly confirm that AI-generated summaries accurately reflect the underlying documents before using them in client communications

This feature is particularly valuable when working with multiple documents simultaneously, as the Assistant can synthesize information from various sources while maintaining clear attribution to each one.

Prompt Library: Consistency Meets Efficiency

The new Prompt Library feature allows users to save, organize, and reuse their most effective prompts directly within the Legal AI Assistant. This addresses a common workflow challenge: recreating successful AI interactions that produced exactly the results you needed.

Two Prompt Types:

1. Static Prompts: Fully written prompts that can be deployed with a single click, perfect for recurring tasks that don’t vary
2. Dynamic Prompts with Placeholders: Templates that include variable fields, allowing you to maintain consistent structure while customizing specific elements for each use

Real-World Use Cases:

• Client Communications: Create a prompt template for summarizing case status that maintains your firm’s preferred format and tone
• Document Drafting: Save prompts for generating standard provisions, with placeholders for party names, dates, and specific terms
• Research Workflows: Build reusable prompts for extracting specific information types from different document categories

The Prompt Library essentially allows you to capture institutional knowledge about effective AI interactions. When a senior attorney develops a particularly effective prompt for analyzing contracts, that prompt can be saved and shared across the team, ensuring consistency and reducing the learning curve for new users.

GPT-5: Enhanced Reasoning for Complex Legal Work

NetDocuments has upgraded the Legal AI Assistant to leverage GPT-5 (currently available in the US, Germany, and the European Union), bringing substantial improvements in three critical areas:

1. Improved Reasoning

GPT-5 demonstrates stronger logical reasoning capabilities, which is particularly valuable when analyzing complex legal arguments, multi-party agreements, or interconnected document sets. The model better understands context, relationships between concepts, and the implications of specific legal language.

2. Stronger Summarization

Legal documents often contain dense, technical language that requires sophisticated understanding to summarize accurately. GPT-5 produces more reliable summaries that capture both the explicit content and the practical implications of legal documents.

3. More Reliable Drafting

When generating new content—whether initial drafts, provisions, or analysis—GPT-5 produces more consistent, appropriate output that better reflects legal writing conventions and requirements.

The “Think Longer” Toggle

A particularly interesting feature is the “Think Longer” toggle, which switches the Assistant from GPT-5 Low to GPT-5 Medium. This option allows the AI to take additional processing time on complex requests, resulting in more thoughtful and detailed responses.

When to Use “Think Longer”:

• Complex multi-document analysis requiring synthesis across sources
• Nuanced contract drafting where subtle language distinctions matter
• Research questions that require careful reasoning through multiple legal concepts
• Tasks where thoroughness is more important than speed

For routine tasks like simple document summaries or straightforward extractions, GPT-5 Low provides quick, reliable results. But when facing particularly complex challenges, the “Think Longer” option ensures the Assistant takes the time necessary to deliver high-quality output.

Integration Considerations for NetDocuments Administrators

These features work seamlessly within NetDocuments’ existing permission and security framework. Citations only reference documents that users have access to, ensuring that security protocols remain intact. The Prompt Library respects workspace boundaries, and GPT-5 processing maintains NetDocuments’ data residency and privacy commitments.

For firms considering these features, the biggest question is often about change management: How do we help our attorneys adopt these tools effectively? The answer typically involves:

1. Identify Champions: Start with attorneys who are already comfortable with the AI Assistant
2. Document Use Cases: Have early adopters share specific prompts and workflows that work well
3. Build the Library: Create shared prompts for common tasks in your practice areas
4. Iterate Based on Feedback: Continuously refine prompts based on user experience

The Bigger Picture

These enhancements represent NetDocuments’ understanding that successful AI implementation in legal environments requires more than powerful models—it requires transparency (Citations), consistency (Prompt Library), and flexibility (GPT-5 with Think Longer). Together, these features address the real workflow needs of legal professionals: verifying AI outputs, maintaining quality standards, and handling complex reasoning tasks.

As AI continues to evolve in legal technology, the firms that succeed will be those that treat these tools as collaborative partners rather than replacements, and that invest in developing effective workflows around them. The Citations, Prompt Library, and GPT-5 features provide the foundation for that kind of thoughtful, strategic AI adoption.

Have questions about implementing the NetDocuments Legal AI Assistant at your firm? Contact Optiable for expert guidance on optimizing your NetDocuments environment and developing effective AI workflows for your team