Ed. note: This article first appeared in an ILTA publication. For more, visit our ILTA on ATL channel here.

It has been over two years since large language models (LLMs) burst onto the technology scene, giving many of us our first taste of AI and sparking our imagination about how it could transform the way we work and do business. The legal industry quickly recognized AI’s ability to streamline repetitive tasks, draft documents, categorize content, turbocharge ediscovery, and efficiently sift through large amounts of information. Today, almost every type of software used by lawyers incorporates some form of AI, as technology continues to evolve. Nearly every firm has made significant investments in AI tools.  

Have those investments been effective? The answer is yes and no. While the tools are improving exponentially, many firms are struggling with some fundamental questions: Which AI do we use? How can we get our lawyers to adopt it? What workflow improvements can we make? To effectively shape the future of legal practice with AI, firms must first identify the problems that need to be solved and define the strategic business outcomes they aim to achieve by implementing AI-powered technology.   

Successful AI adoption depends not only on the technology itself, but also on how strategically it is deployed. In this article, we examine four strategies that can help legal professionals optimize the return on their AI investments, ensuring that innovation translates into meaningful impact. 

Know Your Outcome 

Implementing an AI tool requires a clear understanding of expected returns on investment. Defining strategic outcomes at the project’s outset will simplify technology selection and guide implementation, including change management and adoption. It also sets realistic expectations for AI capabilities. 

The market for AI in the legal field is increasingly crowded. As with any new technology, AI capabilities are often misunderstood. It is essential to have a clear understanding of the various types of AI available.  

• Generative AI can summarize documents, create content, and is often paired with advanced search platforms.
• Agentic AI can act independently on your behalf by making decisions and performing tasks. These technologies can automate tedious processes for both lawyers and business professionals.
• Extractive AI identifies and extracts specific content from a document, such as deal terms or parties.

When selecting AI solutions, it is crucial to consider how the tools will access content, whether through integration with firm systems or uploading to vendor systems. The costs of some AI features can be surprisingly high. Comparing defined outcomes with available products and resources helps firms determine the feasibility of implementing a particular tool. 

Practice Productivity 

By efficiently sifting through large volumes of information and streamlining repetitive tasks, AI can help lawyers and legal professionals focus on more substantive and strategic aspects of their work. AI tools can generate content, summarize documents, and streamline the production of client work. When coupled with advanced search platforms, these tools enable legal professionals to quickly and accurately retrieve relevant documents and information, drastically reducing the time spent on manual searches. 

Agentic AI can take actions on behalf of users, make decisions, and perform tasks autonomously. This transforms how lawyers manage workflows, schedule appointments, and reduce data entry. Such technologies remove time-consuming tasks for both legal professionals and business staff, enhancing overall productivity.  

Knowledge management systems that incorporate AI and advanced search functionalities are becoming essential tools for creating work products. These tools often include workflows that allow legal professionals to work effectively with the document sets they retrieve, further simplifying the drafting process.  

Streamline Nonbillable Tasks and Improve Client Service 

There is potential for AI to enhance a lawyer’s workflow beyond document creation. Lawyers wear many hats in an organization. Partners manage their client relationships, ensure they are running a profitable book of business, supervise teams, and develop new clients, among other responsibilities. If that partner leads a practice, they have additional responsibilities. To be successful, lawyers of all types interact with numerous systems daily. Many of these tasks can be easily enhanced by leveraging various forms of AI. For example, rather than reviewing dozens of emails, a bot can be created to prompt the lawyer about key activities due across all the firm’s systems. In some cases, an agentic AI bot can monitor emails for potential issues and take action to resolve them without requiring lawyer intervention. Developing these AI assistants may have a significant impact on the lawyer’s job satisfaction and overall firm productivity by streamlining many individual tasks that distract and divert lawyers from their billable client work. 

Build a Strong Foundation for the Future 

Like any information-driven solution, AI is only as valuable and accurate as the content it leverages. This is why most AI solutions use a curated set of documents rather than the entire DMS. Therefore, creating a data platform with clean, well-governed data is essential. It ensures that the data feeding into the AI system is accurate, reliable, and up-to-date, thus enhancing the quality of AI outputs. 

Firms that have invested in and built knowledge banks, which organize and maintain the most valuable of a firm’s knowledge, will capitalize on their investments and likely achieve success with AI more quickly by feeding the AI with good, structured content to build upon. The combination of data work and a knowledge bank not only modernizes workflows but also empowers AI to make precise and informed decisions, ultimately leading to more efficient and high-quality legal services. 

AI is advancing at an incredible pace. Many technologies a firm chooses to invest in will eventually become obsolete, but the data and documents that drive AI solutions will always be key for any future AI innovation. 

Shaping the Future 

Taking all of this into account, the lawyer of the future is going to have different experiences in almost every aspect of the practice of law. Essential tasks required today, including matter management, monitoring health status updates, document consolidation, matter openings, and conflict checks, all have the potential to be either replaced or considerably enhanced by AI. Bots can be created to provide clients with basic answers to legal questions. The evolution of increasingly capable AI technologies will enable lawyers to focus on more sophisticated and complex client work that demands human creativity and legal expertise. 

Jim Tuvell is the Managing Director of Fireman, an Epiq Company, where he leads a team of experts in knowledge management and technology strategy for the legal industry. With over 25 years of experience, Tuvell has a proven track record of aligning technology investments with law firms’ strategic goals to drive efficiency, quality, and revenue.

Originally printed in ILTA’s summer issue of Peer to Peer Magazine.

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