Microsoft today announced a new Legal Agent in Word to help legal professionals review contracts, generate redlines, and compare documents using structured legal workflows.
Microsoft Word already has native Microsoft 365 Copilot integration, including an agent mode that can directly modify the contents of a document. This new Legal Agent is specifically designed for repeatable legal processes, such as reviewing contracts clause-by-clause against an internal playbook. To create this agent, Microsoft worked with legal engineers to understand how contracts are reviewed and negotiated in real-world legal teams.
The Legal Agent can analyze agreements, identify risks and obligations, suggest edits, and preserve negotiation history through tracked changes. It comes with a redlining engine that understands the structure of a Word document to preserve formatting, lists, tables, and tracked changes while applying edits more consistently. Instead of using an LLM to generate all the changes, a deterministic resolution layer is used to handle edits, including author-specific changes.
Microsoft highlighted that users can use the Legal Agent in Word for the following use cases:
- Understand complex legal documents: The agent can analyze full agreements, review specific clauses, compare versions, and highlight risks and obligations.
- Draft precise edits: Legal professionals can ask the agent to make changes, and it will generate negotiation-ready redlines with tracked changes while preserving formatting.
- Work with existing tracked changes: The agent can separate prior revisions from new proposals, helping legal teams maintain negotiation history.
- Review contracts against playbooks: The agent can flag provisions that do not align with internal standards and recommend edits based on approved language.
- Maintain control: Users can review citations, approve edits, and ask the agent to insert comments explaining changes.
The Legal Agent is now available in Word for Windows desktop through the Frontier program in the US. It appears in the agents dropdown menu inside Copilot in Word.