Introducing Lito Studio: Step Toward Automation, Stay in the Loop
AI Summary
This post is for associates, partners, knowledge management leads, innovation teams, and IT professionals evaluating how their firm creates and governs custom AI workflows. Most firms are still asking lawyers and knowledge management professionals to write AI prompts, a skill most don't have and shouldn't need. Readers walk away understanding what Lito Studio is, how it removes the prompt engineering barrier, and what questions to ask before the next high-volume review lands on the team's plate.
TL;DR
- Lito Studio is a no-code AI builder inside Lito, Litera's award-winning Legal AI agent, that lets non-technical users create custom skills and multi-doc grid review templates without writing a single prompt.
- Effective AI prompts for legal work are non-trivial to write. Lito does the prompt engineering: you describe what you want in plain language, test it on your own documents, and start using it or submit for admin approval for org-wide publishing.
- Governance is built in by default: every skill moves through a defined approval workflow with audit trail and role-based scope control before it reaches the lawyers.
- Lito Studio is included in existing Lito entitlements that ship with Litera Drafting and Kira subscriptions. No new contract, no per-seat fee.
- Generally available May 8, 2026.
In This Article
- What Is Lito Studio?
- Who Is Lito Studio For?
- How Does Lito Studio Work?
- What Can You Build With Lito Studio?
- What Is the Difference Between a Custom Skill and a Grid Template?
- How Does Lito Studio Handle Governance and Approvals?
- Is Lito Studio Included in My Litera Subscription?
- How Is Lito Studio Different From Other Legal AI Builders?
- Frequently Asked Questions
Most legal AI tools put a prompt box in front of a lawyer and call it empowerment. Lito Studio takes a different position: the best AI tool for legal work is one that doesn't require lawyers to become prompt engineers.
Lito Studio is a no-code builder inside Lito that lets knowledge management leads, innovation teams, and lawyers themselves create custom AI skills and multi-document review templates without writing a single prompt. You describe the task in plain language. Lito drafts the underlying agentic prompt. You test it on real documents, start using it immediately or submit it for admin approval to make it available across the organization in the tools lawyers already use.
The prompt engineering problem is real. Writing effective prompts for legal work requires instruction design, output formatting, reasoning structure, and edge-case handling. Asking a knowledge engineer or senior associate to become fluent in that, on top of their actual job, is a significant adoption barrier. Studio removes it.
What Is Lito Studio?
Lito Studio is a no-code builder inside Lito that lets non-technical users create two types of AI assets:
- Custom skills: Reusable conversational tasks that capture a specific legal workflow, such as reviewing a SaaS agreement against a playbook or generating a structured executive email summary.
- Custom Grid templates: Reusable, structured multi-doc review templates that extract specific data points across a document set, such as termination, renewal, and change-of-control terms across a portfolio of leases
Both run inside the Lito agent already embedded across Microsoft Word, Outlook, web, and Apple iOS. No new platform. No new logins. No behavior change required.
Who Is Lito Studio For?
Studio is built for three roles inside a law firm:
- Knowledge management and legal operations leads who maintain playbooks, precedents, and review standards
- Innovation and practice support teams who translate firm or legal team methodology into org-wide tools
- Lawyers themselves, particularly senior associates and partners who want their own review approach available to the rest of the firm or legal team
The product is designed for users who don't write prompts professionally. There's no code, no scripting, and no prompt engineering required.
How Does Lito Studio Work?
Building a Custom Skill
The build flow is straightforward:
- Describe what you want. Write or dictate your intent in plain language. For example: "I want to review SaaS agreements against our playbook."
- Lito drafts the prompt. Studio's prompt builder converts your description into a structured agentic prompt with appropriate instructions, output formatting, and reasoning steps. You can edit the prompt directly if you want to, but you don't have to.
- Select a model. Choose the underlying AI model for your skill.
- Preview and test. Upload a real document (a sample SaaS agreement and the firm's playbook, for instance), run the skill, and verify the output is what you expected.
- Name, describe, and save. Add a name, description, and category.
- Publish individually or submit for admin approval. You can start using the skill individually or submit a request to your admin to publish it org-wide. Every skill moves through three stages: Unpublished, Pending Approval, and Published.
- Run it org-wide. Once published, the skill appears in the Lito catalog and is available to every authorized lawyer in Word, Outlook, web, and iOS.
Building a Custom Grid Template
The flow is the same as above, with one addition: after you describe the review, Lito first generates the relevant topics or columns. You edit and reorder the topics, then Lito generates the detailed extraction prompt and best output type for each. You preview and test against real documents before saving.
What Can You Build With Lito Studio?
Examples of high-value custom assets a firm or legal team can build on day one:
- Executive Summary Email skill: summarize agreements and provide clean, circulation-ready email drafts
- SPA Negotiation and Review skill: review and make a supply agreement more favorable to the buyer
- Test my Argument skill: for litigation lawyers to stress-test legal arguments
- SPA analysis skill: Extract key deal terms from a share purchase agreement into a structured grid to support your review
- MSA Risk analysis grid: Extract and review key commercial and legal terms from vendor MSA into a structured grid for internal review and comparison
Studio supports custom skills and Grid templates across both the practice and the business of law.
What Is the Difference Between a Custom Skill and a Grid Template?
A custom skill is a single conversational task that returns an answer or structured output, such as a playbook review or a drafting assist. Lawyers run it inside Lito's chat experience, often with one or more document attachments, and receive a structured response.
A custom Grid template is a multi-question review framework that extracts specific data points from one or more documents and returns results in a side-by-side grid. Grid templates are designed for high-volume, repeatable document review, such as comparing terms across a portfolio of agreements.
Both are built in Studio. Both move through the same approval workflow. Both run inside the Lito agent.
How Does Lito Studio Handle Governance and Approvals?
Every custom skill and Grid template moves through a three-stage workflow:
- Unpublished: Visible only to the author and tenant admins
- Pending Approval: Submitted to admins for review
- Published: Available across the tenant
Standard users can author skills and start using them immediately. If they need the skill to be used by their practice group or the entire firm or legal team, they submit the skills or grid templates for approval — but cannot publish org-wide on their own. Tenant admins approve, decline, or directly publish. Studio also a complete audit trail on every transition.
Governance isn't a configuration concern in Studio. It's a required gate, built in by default. Tenant admins retain control over what scales across the firm or legal team, while still enabling distributed authorship by knowledge management and innovation teams.
Is Lito Studio Included in My Litera Subscription?
Yes. Lito Studio is part of Lito, which is included in the entitlements that ship with Litera Drafting and Litera Kira subscriptions. There's no new contract, no additional per-seat fee, and no separate procurement step required.
This is one of the most meaningful differences between Lito Studio and other legal AI builders on the market. Premium legal AI platforms typically charge several hundred to over a thousand dollars per lawyer per month for comparable functionality. Studio is already there.
How Is Lito Studio Different From Other Legal AI Builders?
| Factor | Lito Studio | Generalist AI Builders |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt engineering | Lito writes the prompt for you | User must write the prompt themselves |
| Pricing | Included with Litera Drafting and Kira entitlements | Typically several hundred to $1,000+ per lawyer per month |
| Governance | Approval workflow built in by default, with audit trail | Typically role-based permissions only |
| Where it runs | Word, Outlook, web, iOS, where lawyers already work | Often requires a separate platform or login |
| Training foundation | Built on 30 years of legal workflow expertise | General-purpose models with no legal-specific foundation |
Three differences stand out:
It does the prompt engineering for you. Most legal AI builders give you a prompt box and expect you to know what to put in it. Studio takes your description and writes the prompt. It's the difference between giving a knowledge engineer a hammer and giving them a finished house.
It's already included. No separate contract. No separate procurement step. No per-seat AI fee for the builder itself.
It's governed by default. The publishing workflow — with audit trail and role-based scope control — is a required gate, not an optional configuration.
See Lito Studio in Your Own Workflows
The fastest way to understand what Lito Studio can do for your firm or legal team is to see it run on your own playbooks, your own templates, and your own review frameworks. Our team will walk through how a custom skill or Grid template would work for your highest-volume use case — live, with your documents.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Lito Studio?
Lito Studio is a no-code AI builder inside Lito, Litera's award-winning Legal AI agent. It lets non-technical users at law firms and corporate legal teams create custom skills and Grid templates without writing prompts. Users describe a task in plain language, Lito drafts the underlying agentic prompt, and the author tests it on real documents before submitting for admin approval.
Who is Lito Studio for?
Lito Studio is designed for knowledge management leads, legal operations professionals, innovation teams, and lawyers who want to automate specific legal workflows without needing to write prompts or code. It's built for non-technical users.
How do lawyers create custom AI tools without coding?
Studio's prompt builder converts a plain-language description into a structured agentic prompt automatically. You describe what you want, Lito writes the prompt, and you verify the output against a real document before saving. No prompt engineering required.
Can law firms and legal teams customize their legal AI with Lito Studio?
Yes. Lito Studio is purpose-built for specific legal process customization — from playbook reviews to lease extraction Grid templates. Every custom skill and Grid template is governed by a built-in approval workflow before it reaches the firm.
How long does it take to build a custom AI skill?
A typical skill takes minutes to build. A Grid template with ten extraction questions takes under an hour, including testing.
Can I test custom legal AI on my own documents before publishing?
Yes, and it's required. Studio's preview-and-test stage requires authors to upload real documents, run the skill, and verify the output before saving and submitting for approval.
Is Lito Studio included in my Litera subscription?
Yes. Lito Studio is part of Lito, which ships with Litera Drafting and Kira subscriptions. There's no new contract, no per-seat fee, and no separate procurement step required.
How does Lito Studio handle governance and approvals?
Every skill and Grid template moves through a defined three-stage workflow: Unpublished, Pending Approval, and Published. Standard users can author, use individually and submit a request for org-wide publishing; only tenant admins can publish. Every transition is logged in a complete audit trail.
How is Lito Studio different from other custom legal agents?
Lito Studio is the only no-code custom AI builder included in an entitlement most law firms and legal teams already have. It removes the prompt engineering requirement entirely, includes governance by default, and runs inside Microsoft Word, Outlook, web, and iOS — where lawyers already work. Competing platforms typically require separate contracts and charge several hundred to over a thousand dollars per lawyer per month for comparable capability.
When is Lito Studio available?
Lito Studio is generally available May 8, 2026, inside Litera One. It's rolling out to existing Lito customers automatically — no installation, configuration, or contract change required.
Where can lawyers use skills built in Lito Studio?
Anywhere Lito itself is available: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, the Litera One web interface, and the Litera One iOS app.
Can I edit a skill after it's been published?
Yes, with admin approval. Edits move the skill back through the approval workflow.
Can I copy a published skill and modify it?
Yes. Studio supports duplicating skills and Grid templates as a starting point for new work.
