3 Ways AI Can Impact Your Legal Team

1. Increase Productivity

According to the economists at Goldman Sachs, 44% of legal tasks can be automated by AI.

AI accelerates critical parts of legal services, including comprehensive document review and analysis, painstaking proofreading and rigorous legal research. Within minutes, AI can:

• Scan massive data sets with high precision, such as contracts or white papers, and simultaneously recognize patterns in the relationships between words or data to identify key information and find mistakes or inconsistencies.
• Assist with legal research. It can locate and analyze pertinent information from numerous sources, including articles, statutes, relevant case law, and many more. It finds the authoritative sources and can even rank them by relevance. It can extract key details, provide a summary of each document, or compare the documents according to specified data.
• Generate insights based on the information that will help legal professionals make better decisions.

All the valuable time saved means legal teams can focus more on strategic work that will move the greater business forward. Thanks to AI being able to function at a rapid speed, what once took legal team's hours, days, weeks (or dare I say longer) to accomplish, AI can have a response in seconds. In fact, GenAI is already saving legal professional's time.

According to a recent survey on legal professionals in the U.S. and U.K. about their experiences using GenAI tools to support legal work, more than three-quarters of respondents (77%) said GenAI tools save them six or more hours of work each month. A quarter (26%) said it saves them 11 or more hours per month.  As legal teams begin to increase their comfort in using these technology and it becomes further adopted and integrated into their day to day tasks, it’s likely that these time savings will increase further.

2. Give Legal a Seat at the Decision Table

Legal teams have had a fundamental shift in the way they are viewed by the organization. They are no longer seen as “The Office of No” and instead are “The Office of Know”. C-level staff turn to legal teams to provide strategic guidance on a wide variety of topics which help to increase the company’s bottom line, such as:

• Monitoring for revenue leakage: AI enables legal teams to provide insights on where revenue is taking place within the contractual processes through revealing revenue leakage from missed auto-renewals and expired contracts. It allows the organization to accurately track key dates of existing contracts, maximizing future business opportunities. This plays a major role in saving the company money and increasing efficiencies
• Accelerate contract negotiations: AI speeds up negotiations by offering proactive guidance based on past successes. It suggests clauses, terms, and redlines aligned with your company’s goals and proven strategies. This accelerates ROI through what is often a lengthy negotiation process, all made easier thanks to AI.
• Staying competitive: AI is quickly becoming a necessary tool to stay competitive in today’s legal industry and legal teams who adopt AI can are better positioned to bring value to the greater business. It allows legal professionals to practice law smarter by making more-informed recommendations and judgements based on data derived from AI tools.

Utilizing this proven, concrete data, legal teams can begin to form new strategies that will ultimately bring greater success to the company’s legal efforts. AI adds value to the legal team through these contributions to the greater business, making them a key player in driving the company forward and providing important decisions.

3. Increase Compliance

Compliance regulations - local, global, industry, internal, etc. - are constantly changing, which can cause complex issues within an organization if ignored or missed. AI offers powerful capabilities that continuously monitor regulatory changes and then associate them with any potential harm they could have on the business. The legal team can be alerted when updates and changes occur, allowing legal professionals to stay proactive with compliance requirements, minimize risk, make necessary adjustments quickly and ensure adherence to legal standards.

Artificial intelligence has made its way into nearly every industry sector and legal is starting to capitalize on its benefits. Companies are already recognizing the value AI can bring to their greater business through their legal team's implementation. As of January 2024, more than half of in-house legal professionals (51%) say their company’s leadership encourages legal departments to use GenAI tools, and more than a third (35%) require it.

According to a recent Wolters Kluwer report, nearly three in four lawyers (73%) say they plan to utilize generative AI in their legal work within the next year. Legal professionals will not only continue to embrace AI’s tools, they will learn even more ways to leverage the vast capabilities it offers to improve their productivity, precision and decision-making. AI’s powerful computer software and systems are capable of offering invaluable support to the legal profession and will continue to revolutionize their day to day work.

The future of law will undoubtedly rely on artificial intelligence.

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