Artificial intelligence has officially become a practical tool in everyday legal work, not just for litigators but also for transactional lawyers. A recent American Bar Association article, How Lawyers Are Using AI to Draft Better Contracts Faster by Megan Mulligan (Oct. 7, 2025), offers a useful snapshot of how lawyers are already incorporating AI into drafting and review and what that means for efficiency, quality, and risk management. The takeaway is not that AI is replacing lawyers. It’s that AI is quietly reshaping how contract work gets done.

As Mulligan explains, AI first gained traction in litigation analytics and eDiscovery, but contract drafting has quickly become one of the fastest-growing use cases. That shift makes sense. Drafting is foundational to legal practice, yet it is often repetitive, time-consuming, and vulnerable to human error.

AI tools now assist lawyers by accelerating those early drafting stages. Instead of manually assembling language, lawyers can generate structured drafts quickly and then focus their time on judgment calls, negotiation strategy, and client-specific risk analysis.

Mulligan explains that generative AI tools trained on legal language can already perform several drafting and review tasks effectively, including:

• Generating boilerplate clauses tailored to jurisdiction and risk profile.
  
• Comparing proposed language against internal standards or playbooks.
  
• Flagging deviations or inconsistencies.
  
• Summarizing obligations and key terms.

A lawyer might prompt an AI system to draft a mutual NDA under a specific state’s law and receive a usable first draft in seconds. As one law firm partner quoted in the article noted, AI allows lawyers to focus on “the critical thinking part of it, instead of the data management part of it.” That distinction is important. It emphasizes the point that AI enhances legal judgment but does not replace it.

One of the more compelling sections of Mulligan’s article is where she highlights recent U.S. studies comparing AI performance to that of human lawyers in contract drafting and review:

• In the LawGeex NDA study, AI reviewed NDAs with 94% accuracy compared to 85% for lawyers and completed the task in seconds rather than over an hour.
  
• LegalBenchmarks 2025 found AI produced reliable first drafts more often than human lawyers.
  
• A 2025 Forbes study reported that lawyers using AI completed higher-quality work in roughly half the time.

These results suggest that for structured, repeatable tasks, AI can already match or exceed human performance. But the article is clear that human oversight remains essential, particularly for complex transactions, negotiation strategy, and enforceability concerns.

It is essential to remember that lawyers remain responsible for the content of documents they produce, regardless of whether those documents were drafted by a human, an AI tool, or both. In 2024 FEO 1, the North Carolina State Bar made clear that using AI implicates a lawyer’s duty of competence under Rule 1.1. In practical terms, the opinion reminds lawyers that AI tools may be used, but lawyers must understand how they work and their limitations. Lawyers remain fully responsible for AI-assisted work product. And lawyers must make sure that when using AI, they protect client confidentiality.

As Mulligan’s article illustrates, AI is already helping lawyers draft contracts more efficiently, standardize language, and integrate legal work more smoothly into business workflows. Used thoughtfully, it allows lawyers to spend less time assembling documents and more time exercising judgment. But speed and efficiency must always be balanced with ethical oversight. AI may assist the process, but competence, accountability, and professional responsibility remain firmly human obligations.