Legal drafting
A Practical Starting Point for Legal AI Drafting
May 1, 2026
By Stephen Walther, founder of DraftWorks, former Microsoft product manager, and State Bar of Texas approved MCLE sponsor.
How Texas firms can move from ad hoc prompting to repeatable drafting workflows with attorney review built in from the start.
Legal AI works best when it is aimed at a narrow drafting problem instead of being treated as a general replacement for legal judgment.
A practical starting point is to identify one repeatable document type, define the inputs a lawyer already reviews, and use AI to produce a first pass that remains subject to attorney control.
The goal is not to let the system decide what the document should say. The goal is to reduce friction around structure, issue spotting, consistency checks, and revision passes.
Firms should write down the workflow, define who reviews the output, and make clear which uses are not allowed. That discipline matters more than the specific prompt used on day one.