Secret combo and prompt for drafting documents faster with AI
My secret combo for drafting legal documents 50% faster.
Caveat: if you do any kind of document prep, writing, etc., this will apply as well. Heck, you could even use it for things like blogging.
Caveat #2: not 10 or 20 times faster, but about twice as fast.
Legal work doesn't lend itself very well to AI (yet) because the devil is in the details, and we need to be reviewing/editing almost everything anyway, but saving time is saving time, so I’m not complaining.
The mistake I see most people make is they take a page or two of notes, or some text their client has emailed them, or they write a quick sentence, slap it into chatgpt and write "draft this into a letter" or “turn this into a blog post”.
Wrong.
And no surprise that the output is crap.
If you just ask AI to “write me an email about X” or “draft me a blog post about Y”, without much more context, don’t be surprised if the output isn’t that good.
Here's my no-longer-so-secret combo to draft just about anything that is high quality, sounds like me and saves me a lot of time compared to writing it from scratch.
Note: I’ve been using it mostly for drafting legal letters/affidavits, so you may need to take this and adjust it based on your needs.
The combo is: Using a Custom GPT + working 1-2 paragraphs at a time.
Let’s break it down by step:
1) Custom GPT
The first step is building a custom GPT with the exact context and examples I need once, that I can use over and over again.
I won’t go into full detail on building custom GPT’s because I did extensively in this blog post (that you should read, or re-read, if you don’t have experience with custom GPT’s yet), but trust me when I say that custom GPTs are extremely powerful.
Why? Because AI is only as good as the prompts/context you give it, so if you spend some time upfront creating a great custom GPT, it will save you SO much time down the road.
And as I’ve mentioned in other posts, I now have a ton of custom GPT’s for specific tasks, like drafting affidavits, emails, converting blogs into social media posts, and more.
In this case, since I’m talking about drafting affidavits, I built a custom GPT (in my case, Gem, since I use Gemini, but you can use any GPT as long as you can customize it) with a very specific prompt for one specific action.
And since I’m way too nice, I’m just going to give you the exact prompt here, keeping in mind it’s probably not perfect and I continue to tweak it over time as I notice room for improvement:
“Please take the text given and re-write it so it can be included in an affidavit in the first person. This means it should be concise, use proper grammar and spelling, and avoid vague or unprofessional words. Focus on including the most important details that might be relevant. If any information seems redundant, feel free to remove it or shorten the amount of words relating to it.
I am including a few samples below that you can rely on for writing style, but only use the facts and names you are given in the chat itself.
Example 1:
Example 2:
Example 3:”
Notice a few things:
it’s specific in the output I want;
I try to give it enough instruction, but also not too much;
I always try to give example text, this can be really powerful. In this case, I gave it 3 example paragraphs;
This is not the first draft. I usually start with a prompt, then test it a few times, and based on the output, I tweak it as needed. I’ve edited this one 2-3 times and it’s working quite well for me now.
Boom, now I have my custom Gem setup with exact instructions that I don't have to re-write each time I want to use it.
2) Work 1-2 paragraphs at a time
Pretty self explanatory but I think this is another place where people go wrong, for certain types of work. I don't take pages of text and feed it into the AI and ask it to draft entire documents.
At least, not for legal writing where I need it to be really good and also accurate.
Instead:
take 1-2 paragraphs, maybe a few more if it's all on the same topic;
wash the information (ie. remove any personal info - last names, DOB, address, etc.);
paste it into the custom Gem from above;
take the output, READ EVERY WORD OF IT, and edit to my liking;
Once it’s ready, add it into my final document.
Reminder: always, always review any AI output. I will note that using this system and with the right prompt, I rarely ever get a hallucination, but still. Review!!!
If I was applying this to something like a blog post, I’d do it similarly:
I’d maybe start with the topic of the blog post, and maybe also including the topics I wanted to cover, and first ask the AI to come up with the heading/subheadings for the post;
Then, I’d take those, finalize the headings I want, and ask it to draft text one heading at a time. For example, “Can you please draft the introduction focusing on A/B/C?” and then move on to the next section;
That's it.
Once the document is done, I will of course do another full review and edit because that's my job and I want to ensure it reads well from start to finish, but this has allowed me to draft documents that would have taken me 2 to 3 hours manually, in 30-60 minutes.
If you've struggled to leverage AI in the past, and/or spend a lot of manual time drafting documents, give it a try?
Or if you have any questions or feedback, just hit “reply” and let me know, especially if you’d like more AI content/guides like this.
Have a great day,
- Josh Schachnow
Canadian lawyer, CEO at Visto.ai
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