How the GitHub legal team used Copilot CLI to streamline their workflows

In a compelling account from GitHub's legal team, it is revealed that the company utilized Copilot CLI to significantly streamline their workflows. Despite the team members not being engineers, they were able to build their own tools using their practical knowledge and experience. Two individuals, Ngandu Kasuku and Jesse Geraci, shared their personal experiences with this implementation.

Ngandu Kasuku, a Principal Product Counsel, faced a situation where each new partnership deal was unique, making it difficult to maintain consistency in his work. By using Copilot CLI, Kasuku was able to create a contract drafting tool called "terms-ai," which helped to streamline his process. The tool incorporated an internal drafting style guide and stored key documents in a repository, leading to a notable reduction in review and drafting time.

Furthermore, terms-ai is open source, allowing other legal professionals to benefit from its features.

Jesse Geraci, Online Safety Counsel, encountered a different challenge when he needed to analyze source code rapidly for Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices. Initially, Geraci created a set of GitHub Copilot instructions for recurring tasks. Through this approach, he managed to turn messy one-off prompts into repeatable workflows that his legal team could rely on.

As his tool evolved, Geraci integrated external data sources and eventually developed a desktop app that offered a clean interface for running predefined legal workflows. In the end, Geraci's breakthrough lesson was that a legal team could build AI-powered tooling even without extensive technical knowledge or support.