What is the best AI drafting tool for in-house legal teams?
What is the best AI drafting tool for in-house legal teams? For a team whose week is mostly contracts, vendor agreements and the markups that follow, it is the one that works inside Microsoft Word, drafts from your own playbooks and keeps what the lawyers learn as a record the business owns. Breadth across every kind of legal work matters less than fit for the work you actually do.
What in-house contract work really looks like
Most in-house lawyers are not running large discovery exercises or writing research memos every day. They are turning around NDAs, reviewing supplier terms, negotiating a commercial agreement under time pressure, and trying to keep the business moving without inventing a new position for every deal.
The bottleneck is rarely finding a clause somewhere on the internet. It is producing a first draft that already matches the company’s standards, spotting where the other side has moved you off those standards, and making sure the next person who handles a similar deal does not start from scratch.
What to look for before you buy
It should live where the work already happens. In-house counsel draft and comment in Word. A tool that sits in a separate portal tends to become a side project used by one or two enthusiasts. An add-in that works on the live document gets used on real matters.
It should draft from your playbooks, not generic text. A fluent first draft that ignores your preferred liability position or your approved data clauses still needs a heavy rewrite. A draft built from the templates and clause choices your team already uses starts much closer to something you would send.
It should remember what the team decides. Positions negotiated with a difficult counterparty often live in one lawyer’s head or in an email thread. A tool that captures clause choices and outcomes as matters close, and keeps them as knowledge the company owns, is worth more over a year than one that resets after every session.
A lawyer should stay in control. Suggested wording and suggested responses are useful. Sending anything back to the other side without a responsible lawyer’s approval is not.
The best in-house drafting tool is the one that starts from your positions, not from the internet.
How the broader platforms fit
Harvey and Legora are capable products, and both cover far more than drafting. Legora now markets to small and mid-sized firms and to smaller in-house teams as well as to the largest organisations. For a legal department that needs research, disputes support and many practice areas in one place, that breadth is a real strength.
Our view at Scriptum is that on broad per-seat legal AI, heavy research and litigation use can drive a lot of the underlying model cost, while contract work is often lighter and more repetitive. That is an argument, not a measured fact. For a team whose days are contracts, it is still worth asking whether you are buying a platform sized for every kind of legal work, or a tool sized for the work you do most.
Where Scriptum fits
Scriptum is built only for transactional work. It runs as a Microsoft Word add-in, drafts from your own precedents and templates, and captures clause choices into a library your organisation owns. It is aimed at firms of twenty to a hundred fee earners and at in-house teams doing the same kind of contract work. Pricing is published on our website, starting at £79 per user per month on the Starter plan, so you can put a figure in front of finance before the first conversation.
If your team spends most of its time on contracts rather than on every kind of legal problem, it is worth seeing what a narrower tool looks like on a live matter. Book a demo and we will walk through one with you.