Below are several popular general-purpose generative AI tools, along with a curated selection of specialized legal AI tools.
UC Davis law school faculty and students currently have access to generative AI features within Lexis, Westlaw, Practical Law, and Bloomberg Law. A few of these tools also offer free access or educational discounts.
Please remember that, regardless of the tool used, all AI-generated content should be independently verified for accuracy by the user.
For a more in-depth exploration of the different categories of AI models currently available—including recent developments in agentic AI and deep research and reasoning models—and to understand how these systems work and what they can (and cannot) do, please visit the Generative AI Tools and Resources for Law Students guide.
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a general-purpose generative AI tool based on the GPT model (Generative Pre-trained Transformer). It generates text by analyzing large datasets and predicting likely text sequences. ChatGPT is used for tasks such as drafting documents, answering questions, and engaging in text-based conversations.
OpenAI offers three versions: a free option, ChatGPT Plus ($20/month), and ChatGPT Pro ($200/month). For updates on ChatGPT news and enhancements, visit OpenAI's ChatGPT-Release Notes webpage. See the pricing page to learn more about the features of each plan.
Please visit the UC Davis IET for more information on its features and limitations.
Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered chat companion to Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, and is embedded in Edge, Microsoft’s preferred web browser. Copilot with GPT-4 is now available to users at UC Davis at no direct cost. Visit UC Davis IET to learn more about Copilot's features and how to access it with your UC Davis email.
Google Gemini is a family of multimodal AI models designed to process various data types, including text, images, audio, video, and code, and is the successor to LaMDA and PaLM 2, powering Google's generative AI chatbot.
Gemini is free to use for personal Google accounts and Google Workspace accounts where admins have enabled access. Log in with your personal Google account at: https://gemini.google.com/. Gemini Advanced is available to personal Google accounts for a monthly fee (see here for features and pricing). Gemini also offers a student discount.
According to UC Davis IET, Gemini will soon be available in the UC Davis Google Workspace. For the latest updates, including its features and limitations, please visit UC Davis IET.
Claude is a generative AI tool built by Anthropic that helps edit, rewrite, summarize, classify, extract data and do conversational Q&A.
Currently, Claude offers two tiers (see here for details):
Perplexity AI is a search engine and research tool founded in 2022. It uses generative AI to process user queries in natural language and generate responses based on web sources, providing citations within its answers. The platform offers both free and paid versions. The free version uses Perplexity's own language model, while the paid "Pro" version provides access to additional AI models like Deepseek R1, OpenAI o3-mini, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Sonar, and more.
Features include the ability to ask follow-up questions, analyze uploaded files, and use specialized search modes for academic research or specific websites. Perplexity AI allows users to refine searches through conversational interactions, aiming to provide more targeted results than traditional search engines.
Lexis+ AI is a conversational generative AI tool that Lexis launched in 2023, designed to assist with tasks such as answering legal questions, generating drafts, summarizing cases, and uploading documents for analysis.
Protégé is a personalized generative and agentic AI assistant within Lexis+ AI, introduced in a commercial preview in August 2024 and made available to law school faculty and students in early 2025. Protégé offers enhanced features, including the ability to draft full complaints, motions, and agreements. It also includes a "draft mode" for editing forms and documents directly within the AI interface. The updated upload function allows users to create interrogatories, deposition outlines, and timelines. Additionally, Protégé provides a secure "Vault" for users to upload and store documents for easy access.
In late March 2025, Lexis announced several new features for Protege, including voice-enabled chat and advanced agentic AI capabilities. These include a Planner Agent that breaks down complex legal questions into steps, an Interactive Agent that allows user modifications for tailored results, and a Self-Reflection Agent that refines its work for superior document drafting. These features will become available in the coming weeks.
Visit the Faculty Lexis+ AI page for additional information such as guidance for effective prompting and sample exercises. On-demand AI-related webinars, including recent demonstrations of Protégé's new enhancements, are available on the Faculty Training site (Lexis login required).
CoCounsel is a generative AI tool originally developed by the legal research company Casetext and launched on March 1, 2023. After Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext in August 2023, CoCounsel's capabilities were further developed and integrated into various Thomson Reuters products, including Westlaw Precision, Practical Law, and platforms like Microsoft 365.
On-demand lessons and webinars are available on the GenAI Resources webpage (Westlaw login required).
Bloomberg Law is a legal platform that covers primary and secondary legal content, as well as chart builders and legal news for various practice areas, including litigation, corporate, and tax, to name a few. In recent years, Bloomberg has introduced AI-powered features, such as analytics for litigation and corporate deals. Below are some of the generative AI tools released by Bloomberg Law in 2024-2025, which are available to UC Davis law students and faculty.
VitalLaw is an online database by Wolters Kluwer that includes treatises, cases, statutes, regulations, and chart builders on topics such as Corporate Governance, Cyberlaw, Securities, and other business law areas. In September 2024, the vendor released a GenAI-enhanced virtual assistant called VitalLaw AI, which helps answer legal questions and generate summaries and first drafts of compliance checklists, client letters, and more. Currently, this AI feature is only available to commercial clients such as law firms. Visit the Using VitalLaw AI page to explore its features, use cases, and prompting strategies.
LawDroid Copilot is a legal assistant that is capable of briefing cases as well as summarizing, correcting grammar, brainstorming ideas, and translating. LawDroid offers free educational access to students and faculty (must register with .edu email address).
Paxton AI is a generative AI legal assistant that helps law professionals with regulatory intelligence. It automates legal research, answers questions about regulations, and drafts documents such as research memos, emails, and legal briefs, and also includes a Boolean search composer.
Discover the latest updates from Paxton here. Paxton provides a free 7-day trial, and a variety of subscription plans, including a student plan of $25/user/month. For more details on pricing options, click here.
See here for an overview of the product's capabilities, which includes a recorded demo.
Spellbook uses GPT-4 and other large language models to help lawyers' draft and review documents. Spellbook offers a free educational AI access program open to all law school faculty and students. The product includes features such as ‘Missing Clause Review’, ‘Directed Draft’, ‘Find Conflicting Terms’, and ‘Missing Boilerplate’.
Reggi (formerly known as RegIntel) is a free generative AI-powered solution meant to help attorneys, law firms, law librarians and in-house professionals find answers to laws and regulations and synthesize complex regulatory information. The free version of Reggi covers laws/regulations within US Federal and all 50 US states while the paid version include an alert feature to monitor bills, regulatory changes, and agency updates, and also includes global jurisdictions. See here for more information between free and paid version, including pricing information.
Midpage is a single, generative AI platform for litigators to research caselaw, organize notes, and draft based on their own research.
On the research side, midpage uses generative AI to extract information from each search result, with tools like drop-down summaries, fact comparisons, customizable prompts, and also helps you organize your research into a "notebook."
On the drafting side, midpage lets you use generative AI to help you synthesize your own research, drawing from the hand-selected cases and quotations you saved to your notebook. With midpage, the litigator is in the loop every single step of the way. Midpage also offers a browser extension that works on all legal research platforms, and a ChatGPT plugin.
Currently, Midpage offers a 2-week free trial for law students (registration requires an .edu email address). After the trial, the student plan is $10/month.
descrybe.ai uses artificial intelligence to summarize judicial opinions. The tool enables users to search using natural language, without having to match exact words, and the search results can be sorted by relevance or date, show paragraph-long summaries of matching opinions. An opinion tracker within descrybe.ai shows the progress it has made in summarize opinions. So far, the tracker indicates it has summarized 3.3 million opinions.