The AI Glossary
for Legal Professionals
Discover the most useful AI terms for legal professionals explained in simple language covering core concepts as well as the EU AI Act
Legal AI draws on three overlapping vocabularies: computer-science terminology, vendor language used to describe and differentiate products, and legal-tech concepts that connect AI capabilities with legal workflows and professional responsibilities. This glossary brings them together in a shared, plain-English reference for legal teams.
The document covers 40+ terms across 8 categories, from foundational concepts like Natural Language Processing and AI Agents, through prompting techniques, search, performance and quality control, to legal-specific territory like EU AI Act risk tiers and Human-in-the-Loop review.
Each terminology follows the same structure: what the term means, how it works, where it shows up in everyday legal work, and why it matters. Keep it open during vendor calls, internal AI discussions, or the next legal AI article that assumes you already know the vocabulary.
40+
AI terms explained in plain English, from foundational concepts to LegalTech-specific applications
8
categories, from how AI models work to how to keep them compliant under the EU AI Act
EN/DE
available in both English and German for legal teams
In this Whitepaper
Core AI Concepts & Models
- Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- AI Agents (single-agent and multi-agent)
- Embeddings and embedding models
- Multimodal AI
- Context window and tokenization
Learning Approaches
- In-context learning
- Fine-tuning
- Zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot prompting
Prompting Techniques & Strategies
- Prompt engineering
- Chain-of-thought and tree-of-thoughts prompting
- Role-based prompting
- Prompt chaining and negative prompting
Search & Retrieval
- Semantic search
- Vector databases
- Chunking
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
Performance & Quality Control
- Hallucination
- Guardrails
- Prompt and performance monitoring
- Temperature and perplexity
Data Formats & Structures
- CSV and other structured data formats
Security & Encryption
- TLS encryption
- AES encryption
LegalTech Applications & Methodologies
- Legal technology and compliance
- No-code automation
- EU AI Act risk tiers
- Human-in-the-loop review