Raw material, not a product
An AI draft arrives looking finished. Numbered clauses, confident headings, tidy sentences. That appearance is the trap. A draft that looks complete invites a light read, and a light read is how an inconsistent defined term, a missing carve-out or a sentence that says slightly more than you meant ends up in a signed document.
The fix is a change of attitude rather than a new tool. Treat every AI draft as raw material: a pile of reasonable sentences you will select from, rewrite and assemble. You are still the drafter. The tool has saved you the blank page, not the thinking.
Everything in the earlier lessons still applies. Use only approved tools for client material, share only what the task needs, and never let a statement of law or an authority through without reading the source.
Start from your own material
The most reliable drafts start from something you already trust. Your firm's precedents, your own previous documents and your own notes on the deal or dispute carry your judgement and your house style. A draft generated from nothing carries neither.
So wherever your firm's policy allows, give the tool your precedent and your instructions, and ask it to adapt rather than invent. The change from "write me a clause" to "adapt this clause for these facts and show me what you changed" is the difference between reviewing a stranger's work and reviewing an edit of your own.
โ Weak prompt
Prompt
Draft a confidentiality clause for a consultancy agreement.
Output
A long, polished clause with its own definition of Confidential Information, a list of exceptions, a five-year survival period and a reference to injunctive relief.
Fluent and generic. It has introduced a new defined term that may clash with the rest of your agreement, chosen a survival period nobody asked for, and made drafting choices you now have to discover and unpick one by one.
โ Good prompt
Prompt
Below is our standard confidentiality clause and the definitions section of the agreement it will sit in. Adapt the clause so the obligations run both ways. Use only the defined terms already in the definitions section and do not create new ones. Do not change the survival period or the exceptions. After the clause, list every change you made, each with the original wording and the new wording.
Output
An adapted mutual clause using the existing defined terms, followed by a list of each change shown as original and new wording.
Starts from your own trusted precedent, constrains the tool to your definitions, and gives you a change list you can review line by line. Your drafting choices survive.
Checkpoint
Treat an AI draft as raw material, start from your own precedent where you can, and make the tool show you every change it made.
Review clause by clause
Reading a draft from top to bottom is how you review prose. Legal drafting needs a slower method, because each clause has to work on its own and with every other clause.
For each clause, ask four questions. What does it oblige, permit or prohibit, and who does it bind? Does it say exactly what you intend, no more and no less? Does it interact with any other clause, and does that interaction still work? Is every word there for a reason?
That last question matters with AI drafts in particular. Models tend to add: an extra qualifier, a reassuring phrase, a "for the avoidance of doubt" that creates doubt of its own. Each addition is a drafting choice you did not make. Remove what you cannot justify.
Check the mechanics too. Cross-references to clause numbers, schedules and annexes are easy for a model to get wrong, especially after it has added or merged clauses. Follow every cross-reference to its destination and confirm it points where you intend.
Keep defined terms consistent
Defined terms are where AI drafting most often goes quietly wrong. A model may use "the Services" in one clause and "the services" in the next, introduce "Supplier" where your document says "Consultant", or treat a defined term as if it had its everyday meaning. None of this looks wrong on a quick read. All of it can matter.
Check this systematically rather than by eye. Take the list of defined terms from your definitions clause and search the draft for each one, and for its obvious variants. Then search for capitalised words that are not on the list.
Below are the definitions section and the operative clauses of a draft.
Do not rewrite anything.
Produce a table with these columns:
defined term, clause numbers where it is used, any place it appears
with different capitalisation or wording, and any place a similar
undefined term appears that might have been meant to be the defined term.
Then list any capitalised term used in the clauses that is not defined.
Do not comment on whether any clause is legally effective.
Then check the table yourself against the document. The tool is helping you find candidates for review. It is not certifying consistency.
Keep your voice
Clients and colleagues know how you write. A letter that suddenly sounds like a brochure, all warm adjectives and rhetorical questions, is noticed. So is advice that hedges in a style you would never use.
Two habits help. First, give the tool a sample of your own writing and ask it to match the register, then edit out anything that still does not sound like you. Second, write the substantive parts yourself, especially anything that states a position, gives advice or makes a commitment, and use AI for the connective tissue: the opening paragraph, the summary of enclosures, the tidy list of next steps.
Here are two short examples of letters I have written: [paste examples
with client details removed].
Here is a draft that needs to sound like me: [paste draft].
Rewrite the draft in my register. Keep every factual statement,
figure, date and commitment exactly as it is.
Do not add new points, reassurances or qualifications.
After the draft, list any sentence where you changed the meaning
rather than just the wording, so I can check it.
A useful final test: could you explain, if asked, why every sentence in the document is there? If the only answer for a sentence is that the tool put it in, rewrite it or take it out.
Checkpoint
Review clause by clause, check defined terms systematically, and write the substantive positions yourself so the document stays yours.
๐ Quiz
Question 1 of 4Why is a polished-looking AI draft a particular risk?