Implementing Legal AI: The Complete Action Plan

Understanding AI Fundamentals

In order to understand what AI tools can offer your in-house team, you’ll first need to establish a basic knowledge of some of the key concepts surrounding the technology. Let’s cover some of the most common AI terms.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI broadly describes the ability of computer systems to process information the way humans do.

Whereas regular computing involves a computer acting upon strict rules regarding inputs and outputs, AI allows a computer to learn from the data it receives and dynamically apply those learnings to solve problems.

Machine Learning (ML)

Machine learning involves a computer learning from existing data and deciding how to respond to new, unknown situations.

Generative AI

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content—including text, audio, images, and video. Many generative AI tools can understand and respond to human prompts.

Legal AI

Legal AI refers to specially trained technology that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and applies it to legal work. Unlike general AI models, legal AI is built with an in-depth understanding of legal terminology and workflows, which allows it to assist more accurately with legal tasks.

What Are the Benefits of Legal AI Software Tools?

Increased Efficiency and Productivity

Artificial intelligence helps you automate time-consuming tasks, freeing your in house team to focus on more complex, value-adding activities.

AI’s ability to ingest and analyze immense amounts of data in moments allows legal teams to spend far less time doing things like analyzing legal spend, reviewing invoices, managing contracts, trudging through the discovery process, and researching past legal decisions

Improved Consistency

Legal departments can minimize the human error inherent in tedious tasks like invoice review and data entry by automating tasks with AI.

AI is also an effective tool for eliminating inconsistencies in how different legal professionals interpret information.

Reduced Legal Spend

In addition to automating routine tasks to save your in-house team time, the best AI tools—especially in legal spend management—also provide strategic insights into data that can result in better cost control.

Where Legal AI Tools Can Make the Biggest Impact

Now that we have a foundational understanding of what AI is—as well as its broader capabilities—let’s take a look at the specific categories of legal work where AI tools could benefit your in-house team the most.

E-billing and Matter Management

E-billing and matter management software streamlines the management of legal spend and centralizes matter information. This helps in-house teams gain complete visibility over legal work, control costs, and eliminate time-consuming tasks related to reviewing invoices, reporting, and searching for matter information.

AI-based efficiency is not new to e-billing and matter management. In fact, Brightflag has been using AI for a decade to automatically review legal invoices, saving legal teams time and allowing them to focus on higher-value work. Nowadays, AI can be applied to all areas of billing and matter management to supercharge legal team efficiency while generating increased savings on legal costs.

AI Applications for Legal E-Billing and Matter Management

Invoice Review: Brightflag uses generative AI to summarize the work performed on each legal invoice and delivers these summaries directly to your email inbox. If you’re happy with the invoice based on the AI summary, you can approve it from your email and move on with your day.

Reporting & Analysis: Generative AI tools like Ask Brightflag let any member of the in-house team request insights on their legal spend and matters, and immediately returns the information without needing to run a report.

Resourcing Strategy: AI has the ability to analyze historical spend and matter data to identify areas of overspend and identify cost-effective resourcing strategies. Brightflag’s Advanced Vendor Management functionality, for example, leverages AI to build vendor profiles for all your outside counsel firms based on their historical performance and cost profiles. This enables legal departments to resource every one of their matters to the best, most cost-effective firm—every time.

Contract Management

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) systems help to centralize contract information and speed up the process of contract review. Recently, most modern CLMs have released generative AI “co-pilots” to automate and streamline drafting. During the contract review process, the AI suggests clauses based on the contract type and highlights language that deserves a closer look from the legal team.

When assessing a CLM’s generative AI, it’s important to question whether the CLM provider developed the AI themselves, or whether they are leveraging a general AI model. General models are trained on data related to a wide variety of topics, and may struggle to interpret legal-specific terminology.

When deployed effectively, AI can speed up contract creation and negotiation and improve the accuracy and consistency of contract review.

E-Discovery

E-discovery refers to the process of reviewing evidence for legal proceedings in an electronic format. While your in-house legal team might not directly operate e-discovery software, understanding how your law firms or Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) use these AI powered tools as part of their workflow can save you money.

AI technology optimizes the e-discovery process by categorizing and prioritizing large volumes of documents, which makes it easier to retrieve relevant information.

AI also lets legal service providers search by concept, rather than specific keyword. That way they capture documents traditional search methods might have missed. By automating document review and identifying relevant documents more quickly and accurately than human reviewers, AI can significantly reduce the time and cost associated with discovery and document analysis.

Legal Research

AI has transformed legal research tools by making them faster and more comprehensive. AI tools sift through vast amounts of regulations, case law, and internal legal documents, to find relevant information in a fraction of the time it would take a human.

AI-driven insights also uncover trends and relationships between, for example, the type of matter at stake and how certain judges rule in those matters. That kind of analysis might not be immediately apparent to a human review, so AI can add a strategic edge to your legal analysis.

When using legal research AI, the steps your AI provider takes to prevent hallucinations and inaccuracies by the AI are key. Various lawyers have already been reprimanded by courts for using fabricated caselaw references created by general AI models, so it’s important your in house team is aware of and mitigates these risks.

IP Management

AI tools offer advantages in monitoring and analysis of patents and trademarks, and intellectual property strategy formulation.

AI can automatically monitor patent filings, trademarks, and other IP documents to ensure no one infringes on your company’s IP assets.

AI-powered IP tools can search and analyze vast databases of patents and literature, which helps identify prior art that may not have been found by a human review and assess the patentability of an innovation.

Additionally, you can use AI to analyze patent landscapes to identify trends, potential partners, or competitors and inform strategic IP development and protection decisions.

This proactive approach to IP management, facilitated by AI, secures a company’s innovative edge and contributes significantly to competitive positioning.

As with other areas, it’s critical to ask AI-enabled IP management providers what they are doing to ensure their AI is tailor-made to understand legal terminology, especially because terms in patents are so specific and technical. And because IP data is highly sensitive, it’s important to ensure your IP information is not used to train the provider’s model or shared with third-party providers.

Building an AI Roadmap

You’re now equipped with a broad understanding of how AI works and where it can be most effectively applied. And it’s likely that you have identified several areas where AI could help your in-house team. So how do you decide where to begin implementing AI? We suggest creating an AI technology roadmap.

What is a Technology Roadmap?

A technology roadmap is a step-by-step plan that helps you decide how to implement new technology like AI in the short, medium, and long term. It helps you prioritize use cases and pick a starting point for adoption, as well as chart a long-term strategy.

An AI technology roadmap is not only useful for planning—it’s a great tool to communicate your vision for AI transformation and gain buy-in from the rest of the in-house team and the broader organization.

Here we’ll walk you through five steps for developing your own AI technology roadmap.

Step 1: Identify the Legal Department’s Biggest Pain Points

Before deciding what cutting-edge AI tech to implement, it’s best to assess what work is draining your team’s resources so you can prioritize solving problems in those areas.

Schedule an open discussion with legal leadership and your practice area leads, or send out a survey to all members of the in-house team to gauge what they need the most help with. You’ll want to ensure the feedback you receive touches on these three questions:

What tasks do you do each week that you wish you didn’t have to?

Here at Brightflag, a common refrain we hear from in-house attorneys is: “I didn’t go to law school to spend my days analyzing and approving invoices.” There are various examples of this kind of work, which ends up falling to the legal team but eats up their time and drains their motivation.

AI won’t be able to take every mundane task off their plate. But when you survey your team, ask them to list out the work that they have the hardest time applying their strengths to. Because the more of this work you can address with AI, the more engaged your team will be— and the more value they’ll return to your organization.

What tasks take up the most of your time?

While AI can’t solve tasks that require deep legal expertise, processes within most high volume types of legal work are ripe for automation.

Take the process of reporting on legal spend and matters, for example. You’ll need a member of your in-house team who understands your business’s legal and financial objectives to ask the right questions, like:

• Are we adequately resourced on our highest-risk work?
• Are we getting good value from the outside counsel we engage the most?

However, creating the reports that answer these questions is often far more resource intensive than in-house teams would like. Legal ops have to struggle with understanding the field names in your reporting tool, try to apply the right filters, and check the results to ensure the right information is returned.

With the right AI technology, though, these mundane processes within this high-value task can be stripped out.

As you gather information on what tasks take up the bulk of each team member’s time, your legal team’s biggest inefficiencies will start to come into focus. And this will ultimately inform which category of AI tool can give your legal department the most time back.

Where can we better apply our resources?

From internal headcounts to outside counsel spend, the resources available to legal departments have stagnated—or even dwindled—in recent years. That means it’s more important than ever that every dollar in the legal budget is applied strategically.

If, when speaking with your legal team, they mention that they feel the department’s resources are over-stretched or could be better leveraged, there are AI solutions that can help.

Brightflag, for example, not only uses AI to automate the invoice review process. It also harnesses AI to surface strategic insights from your billing data. This allows legal teams to make the business case for internal hires with clear-cut data. With this increased clarity into spend, legal teams can rest easy knowing they’re being as efficient as possible with their legal spend.

Step 2: Prioritize Pain Points and Match Them to the Relevant AI Technology

Now that you’ve received your legal team’s feedback, the areas where AI could be most effectively applied to their workflows will come into sharper focus.

Prioritize pain points by how much time will be saved by solving each one, and where the greatest cost efficiencies come into play. You can also consider if there are quick wins related to user satisfaction: taking the most maligned tasks off your attorneys’ plates is a great way to build trust and show the benefits of AI transformation.

Once you do this, you’ll have a list of pains that need addressing. But how can you be sure which AI-enabled tools can solve them?

Here’s a brief reminder of the main categories of legal work that AI can be applied to, along with the associated tasks that AI tools are capable of assisting with:

Step 3: Outline Your AI Roadmap: Now, Next, and Future

At this stage in your journey, you’ll likely realize that your team would benefit from implementing multiple legal AI solutions. However, your budget will likely dictate that you can choose only one to implement in the near term. Build your roadmap around the framework of “Now, Next, and Future” to accommodate all the solutions that suit your team’s needs.

It’s important to note that innovation in AI technology continues to grow. As the explosion of new AI products and features in the last 12 months has shown us, this field is very much still evolving. That means if you pick the right vendor in each legal tech category, you’ll not only benefit from the latest innovations, but also from future features your vendor releases that will further unlock AI’s potential for your legal team.

Step 4: Present Your Roadmap to Your Legal Team

You’ve researched where your in-house team needs the most help, identified which legal AI tools best address those needs, and plotted your course for adopting those tools.

Now it’s time to present the fruits of all your roadmapping work to your in-house team.

This is a great opportunity to show your team that you paid close attention during your listening tour. Do so by illustrating how the AI tool(s) you’ve chosen to pursue will alleviate their most pressing pain points.

If the legal team highlighted that their biggest time-suck was legal invoice review, for example, you can underscore how your chosen solution leverages AI to automatically review invoices, removing this task from their to-do lists.

Your legal department should walk away from these conversations feeling just as excited about implementing your AI roadmap as you are. After all, the AI tools you’ve chosen will not only ease the burden of their workloads—they will also position your entire in-house team at the forefront of your organization’s journey towards AI-powered innovation.

Building a Business Case for AI with Key Stakeholders

Now that your in-house team is on board with your vision, it’s time to secure a budget for it with key decisionmakers in your organization—namely your GC and CFO. This step involves building a strong business case for your chosen legal AI tool that illustrates how much it will save your organization in terms of time, money, and headaches avoided.

It’s best to leverage clear-cut examples and data to build your case. Case studies from legal vendors can provide the evidence of success you need, while ROI calculators help you crunch the savings numbers specific to your organization.

Selecting an AI Provider

With your roadmap in place, it’s now time to embark on the final leg of your AI journey: selecting a legal AI provider.

In addition to an understanding of the level of support, implementation timelines, and degree of customer satisfaction that the software you’re considering offers, there are other key considerations you should be aware of before you fully commit to a legal AI provider.

Best Practices for Legal Tech Selection

There are a few best practices when it comes to evaluating legal tech solutions that will lay a strong foundation for ultimately making the right selection—regardless of whether the tool you’re considering has an AI component.

1. Get Review and Recommendations

One of the best sources of insight into legal tech tools is feedback from customers who use it every day. Independent review sites like G2 provide a glimpse at the day-to-day user experience and are a great source of information on how intuitive the software is to use. You can also reach out to legal professionals in your network who use the tool, or find new connections on LinkedIn. In our experience, in-house professionals are more than happy to share their thoughts with you. Message boards like that of CLOC are another great source of wisdom.

2. Ensure the Functionality Meets Your Needs

Which aspects of the different legal tech tools that you’re considering matter most to your legal team? Is it saving time? Then you’ll want to choose the tool that leverages AI to empower its automation capabilities. Is it important to ensure easy adoption by end-users? Then make sure you select an AI provider that has built a reputation for the ease of use of its software.

3. Think About Implementation and Support

A legal tech tool is only useful if you can smoothly and successfully implement it. Brightflag’s average implementation time is just 45 days. But others can take multiple years—and sometimes never get fully implemented. So make sure you have a clear timeline from your provider on how long the process typically takes.

Once you’re up and running, you’ll need a trusted guide to help you get the most from your AI tool. A responsive, engaged customer success manager can serve as an extension of your in-house legal team, helping you troubleshoot problems and use an AI tool to its full potential. Be sure to select a provider with a strong reputation for impeccable customer service.

Key Considerations When Choosing a Legal AI Provider

Now it’s time to sift through the finer details of each provider’s AI offerings and better understand how they differentiate themselves in a few key areas.

Model Training and Configuration

Ideally, the AI you decide to onboard will work right out of the box and won’t need your team to train it. That’s the case with Brightflag. However, some solutions will require training on your own data. If they do, you’ll want to know how long this training takes and what’s required from your team.

For example, will you have to send over all your contracts so the AI can be trained to find your key terms and clauses? This is good to know, as it allows you to plot out the logistics required to get the AI up and running, and establish a timeline for when you might begin seeing value from your chosen tool.

Accuracy

One thing you’ll want to know about the AI models you’re considering is how accurate they are—and how they remedy inaccuracies.

AI tools need specific legal training to approach an acceptable level of accuracy. They also need to have safeguards in place to ensure they appropriately avoid and/or react to errors. Supervised machine learning is an example of one such safeguard.

Supervised machine learning means that a dedicated human is on hand to effectively “teach” the AI what the correct outputs are until it learns to make decisions on its own. Another popular guardrail is user validation, where the AI repeats requests back to users to confirm it understands the request correctly before responding.

Privacy

Legal information is incredibly sensitive, so your legal department needs to have a full understanding of where the information shared with your legal AI tool is stored, and how it is shared.

It’s best to ensure that your in-house team’s data will be kept on servers within your preferred jurisdiction and that your data will not be shared with third parties.

This is an area where general AI models that aren’t built specifically for legal fall short, because they often pool all inputs that are entered into their system to train their model.

Data Security

How stringent are the security protocols of the legal AI provider you’re considering?

Leaks and external hacks can be devastating—and can open up your organization to increased liability. That’s why you want to ensure your legal AI provider is as vigilant as possible when it comes to data security.

The best AI providers will carry internationally recognized security certifications to give your legal team peace of mind. You’ll want to ensure your vendors are, at the very least, SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, and that they have ISO/IEC 27001 certification.

Your Provider’s AI Roadmap

Things move fast in the AI space, so the last thing you want to do is choose an AI vendor that can’t keep pace.

Having a sense of what a provider’s AI roadmap looks like will key you into how innovative and ambitious they are with their product offerings. The best AI providers deliver a world-class tool now while also striving to keep your legal team ahead of the curve by constantly adding new features.

Remember: AI is an investment, so the more a vendor prioritizes staying on the cutting edge, the greater value your legal team will receive from the product over time.

Conclusion

A recent survey found that the number of legal teams looking to implement a legal AI tool to help control costs has nearly tripled in the past year alone. And with good reason—as you’ve now seen, AI can have a transformative impact on what in-house teams are capable of.

We hope this guide has provided you with everything you need to navigate the hype and the overwhelming information surrounding legal AI tools, and set you on a path to securing the legal AI solution that’s right for your legal team.

And if that path leads you to exploring the possibilities of an AI-backed e-billing and matter management platform, let us know. We’d love to show you what Brightflag can do with a personalized demo, and join you on the next stage of your journey