In mid-2024, Thomson Reuters conducted a global survey, asking 2,200 legal professionals from more than 50+ countries to share their opinions regarding the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on legal work. Here are some interesting findings from this survey and its Future of Professionals Report:
- 77% of respondents believe that AI will have a big impact on their work over the next five years.
- 72% of them view AI as a force for good in the legal profession.
- 59% say that AI-powered technologies can help deliver greater value in effectively handling large volumes of legal data.
- Another 41% are excited about the potential of AI to help them improve client response times, while 33% plan to use AI-powered analytics to guide their decision-making.
- Unsurprisingly, AI implementation is the highest priority for 50% of surveyed AI professionals and leaders.
All in all, the survey found that the general attitude of legal professionals is increasingly positive and optimistic. Furthermore, many of them are now enthusiastically embracing AI as a force for transformation in their practices.
So how can AI support and enhance your legal practice?
How can you benefit by adopting legal AI?
And what are some of the AI-based tools that you can adopt in your practice today?
This article and the rest of this eBook will answer these questions – and more.
The Benefits of Legal AI for your Legal Practice
It’s not an exaggeration to say that AI technologies and tools can really transform the legal profession. And this transformation can take on many different forms: from productivity improvements and cost savings, to streamlined workflows, higher billable hours, and stronger client relationships.
Let’s start with the most obvious benefit of AI – time savings. AI tools can automate many repetitive tasks in a legal professional’s workflow. While these tasks are necessary – they wouldn’t have to perform them otherwise – they are often very time-consuming. As a result, they monopolise a great deal of a professional’s day-to-day work.
One example of a time-consuming legal task is document drafting.
Consider the most common type of legal documents – contracts.
When drafting a contract, a lawyer or paralegal typically needs to search for information, cut and paste relevant text, delete unnecessary or outdated text, and edit the document. Only after all these activities are completed can they finalise the contract. The problem is that these tasks make for a complex process that takes most human beings several days or even weeks to complete.
Why waste all this time when the process can be automated? AI-enabled tools can automate the entire document drafting process, making it less tedious and more efficient. These automations enable legal pros to create accurate, high-quality documents within just a few hours. They save lots of time and can finalise documents faster.
Similarly, NLP-based tools are available that provide real-time and accurate language translations, allowing lawyers to communicate with clients who speak other languages. In this way, AI creates opportunities for law firms to expand their client base. Some AI-enabled tools can also answer lawyers’ queries, identify key clauses and other useful information in contracts, automatically complete legal documents and forms, and accelerate eDiscovery, again allowing them to save time and improve their productivity.
Then there are specialised legal research tools that can find relevant precedents and citations from huge law databases, summarise key information from many different sources, and deliver highly accurate insights. These tools also allow lawyers and their staff to save valuable time and effort. In addition, these specialists can use the auto-generated summaries and actionable insights to inform their work, to counsel clients, and to make better decisions.
Legal professionals can use the time saved to work on other, higher-value tasks that require uniquely human capabilities, like creativity, emotional intelligence, strategising and critical thinking. In doing so, they can not only do more meaningful work, but also find new ways to deliver value and service to clients.
How much time savings are we talking about?
According to the Future of Professionals Report mentioned earlier, AI can help legal professionals to free up 4 hours of time per week. In a 50-week year, this could translate to almost 200 hours freed up per person. In addition, AI could potentially generate $100,000 in new billable time per lawyer annually. Multiply these numbers by the number of professionals in your practice and you can easily see how much of a tangible impact legal AI can have on your organisation.
In addition to time savings, AI can also bring many other positive benefits for legal professionals and firms. Automations will deliver consistent, accurate results and thus reduce human error. Fewer errors translate to better-quality output and happier clients.
Another benefit: AI can easily handle large volumes of legal data. In doing so, it reduces the sense of overwhelm for workers, thus helping to improve their mental health and work-life balance. They also get more time to learn new skills. These skill-building opportunities can improve their workplace well-being and motivate to do more for the firm’s and its clients’ success.
Some AI systems can perform real-time complex analyses. And this has another huge benefit for legal practices – risk mitigation. These products run on data-rich models and algorithms that can independently perform data analyses for many different use cases. They can analyse multiple data points simultaneously and identify patterns that allow legal practices to easily validate customer identities, identify fraud, and more. In doing so, they can mitigate many risks that may otherwise damage their business and its reputation.
Increasingly, AI is also proving beneficial for compliance. AI systems are built to learn and improve through experience. This self-learning capability allows them to keep improving over time in many different areas, including regulatory compliance. These tools continuously monitor the regulatory landscape and automatically flag potential compliance issues. As laws change (and they often do), AI can evolve as well. It thus keeps the legal practice updated on its compliance responsibilities, which ensures that the firm maintains a strong compliance posture and reduces the risk of costly mistakes.
AI-driven automations also enable legal organisations to improve their resource allocation. As AI makes legal workflows more efficient, company management can allocate more resources on activities that can grow and strengthen the practice. These staff can wisely use their time to put together strong cases, build relationships with current (or potential) clients, and find innovative ways to add value to the business. They can better adapt to the evolving legal landscape and more agilely meet evolving client demands.
In summary, legal AI delivers all of these benefits for legal professionals:
- Automations save time and effort to simplify repetitive, tedious tasks and legal workflows
- The time saved can be used for higher-value activities like strategic planning and client interactions
- Real-time complex analyses enhance human decision-making
- Positive impact on employee well-being and workplace motivation
- Mitigate the risk of fraud
- Improve and maintain regulatory compliance
The Applications of Legal AI: Where Does it Fit into Your Practice?
AI is a broad umbrella term that encompasses numerous technologies and tools. Many of these tools are specifically designed for use in the legal industry, giving rise to the term Legal AI. Legal professionals have the flexibility to choose from a wide range of tools from many legal technology specialists like Litera, Clio, Everlaw, Legalyze.ai, Briefpoint, LawToolBox, and more. While these tools differ in terms of specific features and capabilities, they all have one thing in common: they are built to automate and enhance various legal processes and augment the intelligence and capabilities of legal professionals.
Most AI-based legal tools fall into one of the below categories:
- Contract review and analysis: These tools use NLP (natural language processing) to analyse contracts and other documents, extract key clauses, find anomalies, and flag areas that need human legal attention. Litera Kira is one of the best AI-powered contract review tools available today. contact Team Prime Infotech Solution for Discovery Call .
- Automated document drafting: Tools like Litera Draft provide AI-powered proofreading, styling, and document repair to simplify document workflows, save time, and improve document quality.
- Legal data research: AI-driven knowledge systems perform intelligent deep dives into information and documents to provide useful insights for legal workflows and professionals.
- eDiscovery: AI technologies like NLP and machine learning can quickly sift through large amounts of electronically stored information for legal cases, reducing the time and cost of discovery.
- Client service bots: AI-powered chatbots answer FAQs, allowing a firm’s clients to quickly get the information they need, without having to wait for a human’s response.
- Predictive systems: AI-driven software analyse many types of public data (judge rulings, settled cases, success/failure of appeals, winning/losing arguments, etc.) to provide actionable insights with minimal need for manual research.
- Intelligent triage systems: Law firms can use outward-facing AI tools to prioritise cases and client communications, and improve response times and billable hours.
The Future of Legal AI
The list of legal AI systems highlighted in this article is by no means exhaustive. There are numerous other tools that don’t fit neatly into these categories. And more are emerging nearly every week for different legal applications and use cases. Many of these innovations are spearheaded by respected legaltech vendors like Litera, with the support of their authorized vendors like Prime Infotech Solution.
In the coming years, we expect a massive expansion in the real-world uses of legal AI systems. These innovations will offer significant benefits to law firms and in-house teams. Busy legal professionals will leverage AI-based legaltech tools to save time and avoid doing tedious grunt work. The time saved will empower them to provide more value to clients, which in turn will boost the financial and reputational position of their legal practice.
