Microsoft has officially announced a new AI tool called Legal Agent for Microsoft Word. This new tool will streamline contract reviews and legal workflows for professionals. According to the blog post, the feature is based on agent-based AI tools and is intended to handle structured, repeatable legal tasks more consistently and accurately.
Unlike other AI assistants, the Legal Agent is designed specifically for legal use cases and operates on predefined workflows, similar to how legal teams review agreements, including clause-by-clause analysis against internal playbooks. The new tool will assist you in identifying risks, comparing contract versions, and highlighting obligations, while also linking its recommendations directly to the source text for verification.
The tool can even create negotiation-ready edits with tracked changes, allowing lawyers to draft precise revisions without disrupting the document’s formatting. It is also designed to work with existing documents that have already been edited.
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According to the company, the Legal Agent makes use of a specialised engine that understands the structure of Word documents beyond just the visible text, such as tables, lists and formatting. This enables it to make consistent edits while decreasing reliance on traditional large language model outputs for each change.
The company also stated that the feature works within the current Microsoft 365 environment. This means that the legal workflows are still protected by enterprise-grade governance controls.
In terms of availability, the feature is only available to users in the United States through Microsoft’s Frontier program and can be accessed directly from within Word using Copilot. Before gradually introducing it, the company will seek legal professionals’ feedback.