Legal work involves two distinct skills: understanding what the law says, and explaining it clearly to someone who isn't a lawyer. Most of the time cost falls on the first part — reading through case law, cross-referencing statutes, reviewing contract language — before you can do the more valuable part of actually advising someone. askFinz Legal is coming to compress that research time, so more of the work stays at the level that actually matters.
The cost of legal reading time
A contract review or a case law search doesn't feel expensive until you add it up. Two hours reading through a forty-page agreement, another hour tracking down precedent, thirty minutes turning it into something a client can understand. The billable time is real; the useful output — the actual advice — is a fraction of it.
The friction isn't hard to name: legal information is dense, cross-referenced, and spread across many sources. Navigating it quickly takes either experience or time. Legal is designed to give back the time, so experience can do more with it.
What it's built to do
Research case law and legislation in plain language. Describe the legal question — what you're trying to understand, the jurisdiction, the context — and Legal surfaces relevant precedent and statutory material, with the key points distilled rather than buried. Every result stays tied to its source so you can cite it and stand behind it.
Review contract language for what matters. Upload or paste a contract and ask what you actually need to know: where are the unusual clauses, what does the limitation of liability actually say, what obligations are time-bound? Rather than reading start to finish, you work from the things that warrant attention.
Draft plain-English summaries. The output that clients, directors, or non-lawyer colleagues actually need is almost never the raw legal text. Legal helps turn a research finding or a contract review into something readable and shareable, without losing precision.
Build a searchable library. Precedents you've researched, contracts you've reviewed, summaries you've drafted — they stay in the workspace and become searchable. The next time a similar question arrives, the groundwork is already done.
Who this is for
Lawyers and paralegals who spend too much time on research and want to spend more time on the work that requires their judgement. In-house legal teams reviewing a volume of contracts who want faster triage. Business owners and founders who regularly encounter contracts and need to understand them without always having external counsel on hand.
Legal isn't a replacement for professional legal advice. It's the layer that makes the preparation and the communication faster and clearer — so the advice itself can be better.
One workspace, not a separate tool
Legal sits inside askFinz, which means the work you do there connects to the rest of the platform. Research that belongs in a client note, a contract summary that needs to become a team briefing, a question that turns into a document — it all stays in one place.
Legal is coming to askFinz. See what's available now and request early access.
Further reading
- On how the wider askFinz workspace handles research with citations attached: AI for wealth and finance teams.
- The research and drafting workflow in context: One AI workspace instead of ten browser tabs.
- The Law Society publishes guidance on the responsible use of AI in legal practice — worth reviewing for anyone applying these tools in a professional context.