How GitHub's Legal Team Streamlined Work with Copilot CLI

GitHub's Legal Team demonstrated that non-engineers, including lawyers and program managers, can use Copilot CLI to build their own tools for repetitive legal tasks. They quickly automated workflows by describing desired features in natural language and connecting to existing repositories.

Principal Product Counsel Ngandu Kasuku built a contract drafting tool called terms-ai. He managed guidelines, drafting materials, and workflows within the repository to ensure consistent results and configured it to leverage previously approved contracts.

terms-ai includes an internal contract drafting style guide that prioritizes plain language and a library of completed contracts. Sensitive contracts and information are stored in a controlled internal environment, while the tool's general workflows are open-sourced. Kasuku explained that after using this tool, the time spent on contract review and drafting was reduced by approximately half.

Online Safety Counsel Jesse Geraci created a legal workflow to quickly analyze source code for processing DMCA notices. He organized the one-off prompts that team members had previously written individually into a repeatable analysis procedure as follows:

• DMCA notice classification
• Code comparison
• License verification
• Circumvention review
• Analysis report generation

He used natural-language workflow instructions, policy references, and report templates instead of traditional source code to incorporate legal judgment into the workflow. He later added analysis modes for customers and lawyers, as well as external data sources, and the workflow evolved into a desktop application that executes predefined legal procedures.