Legal AI Software Tools: An Introduction

Since the first LLMs took the world by storm, there’s been a lot of change in terms of how workers (and entire industries) operate. And like the rest of the world, in-house legal teams are having to adjust to the new reality of “AI everywhere”.

The good news? There are already dozens of AI tools worth having at your fingertips — including dedicated AI for legal teams. The best in-house legal artificial intelligence software helps legal teams operate more efficiently, saving time on everything from low-complexity, repeatable work to in-depth research.

The bad news? In a marketplace already buzzing with the “next best thing” in in-house legal software, it can be hard to separate noise from signal in terms of the tools your team actually needs.

With this guide, we aim to make it easier to narrow down your options. From automating legal billing review and vendor management to legal research, redlining, and drafting contracts, here’s what you need to know about using AI for in-house legal.

The Benefits Of Legal AI Software

Let’s start with a quick look at why these tools matter for your team.

1. Increased Efficiency and Productivity

AI helps you automate time-consuming tasks by ingesting and analyzing immense amounts of data in moments. That ability means legal departments that embrace legal AI software tools now spend far less time managing contracts, trudging through the discovery process, analyzing legal spend, reviewing invoices, and researching past legal decisions.

This, in turn, frees up your team to focus on complex, value-adding activities like risk management or developing a legal department strategy.

2. Improved Consistency

AI can also help minimize the human error inherent in tedious tasks like invoice review and data entry by automating them and completing them in seconds instead of hours.

This makes data available faster, allowing your team to access what they need at lightning speed. It also helps to eliminate inconsistencies in how different legal professionals interpret information.

For example, you can program AI systems to follow specific outside counsel guidelines. The tool then judges each invoice line item by the same criteria every time.

3. Reduced Legal Spend

The best AI tools, especially those used for legal spend management, also provide insights into data. They do this by analyzing how your law firms resource their work, what areas of a matter they spend more time on than others, and which practice areas they excel at.

Based on that information, they help your in-house team see who provides the best value for your legal spend. Using those insights, you can strategically assign work to the most capable firms, leading to better-quality legal work at a lower cost.

Legal AI software also saves costs by scaling with your organization. So you can handle increased workloads without needing to increase headcount.

Why In-House Legal Teams Need AI Tools

Despite the benefits listed above, a common question from in-house legal teams is: “Do we really need AI tools?”

In many cases, teams already have some form of software in place, and there can be some resistance to change.

The truth is that as business complexity increases, in-house legal workloads do too. At the same time, department heads are being urged to cut costs and in-source more of their legal work, while keeping headcount the same — a perfect recipe for legal team stress and retention issues.

The smart use of AI and other in-house legal tools can help teams plug this workload gap and empower them to become more strategic and better able to keep up with changing demands.

What To Consider When Integrating In-House Legal Automation Software

We’ve made the case for why your team needs legal software. Now, what should you look for when evaluating options? Here’s how to pick a tool that’s the best fit for your legal department’s workflows.

In-Depth Automation

Look for software that has the proper functionality to automate your team’s most high-volume, time-intensive tasks. Tasks such as invoice review, matter intake, and reporting are prime candidates.

Other tasks, like contract analysis, require natural language processing (NLP) to understand which clauses are used in each contract. Similarly, machine learning capabilities are essential if you want a system that can automatically classify your legal spend and apply your outside counsel guidelines to every invoice.

Rather than hunting down those capabilities separately, the best option is to find a tool that integrates everything you need into a single platform.

Built-In Integrations

Once you’ve identified a legal AI tool with the right features, the next step is to ensure it seamlessly integrates with your existing legal tech stack. For example, you need your e-billing tool to connect to your accounts payable system and any business intelligence tools you may have.

Robust Data Security Features

Since much of the data you work with will be confidential or otherwise protected, any software you choose must adhere to industry-standard data protection practices. Be sure your chosen tool complies with all necessary standards and regulations like GDPR, CCPA, CPRA, ISO/IEC 27001:2013, ISO/IEC 42001, and SOC1/SOC2.

Scalability and Reporting

Keep an eye on future needs by choosing a tool that can scale easily as demand or operations expand. The best in-house legal software and tools work across any team size and can easily be integrated with new tech acquisitions.

They should also come with built-in reporting and analytics features that are easy to use, and that can rapidly generate insights on any topic needed: whether it’s which firms are providing the best value for money, or which matters are eating up a disproportionate amount of your team’s time.

Intuitive Usability

Finally, you’ll want to choose a tool that is easy for your team to use. An intuitive interface minimizes the learning curve and facilitates rapid adoption of new tech, even better if your chosen solution includes capabilities like AI Copilots or assistants that make it easy to query data or check the status of matters.

Here’s Where Legal AI Software Can Improve Your Legal Department’s Efficiency

As you begin evaluating tools, it’s important to have a clear set of use cases in mind. Here are some key areas where in-house legal automation software and AI tools can add value for your team:

Legal Spend and Matter Management

Among the top use cases are in-house legal tools for e-billing and matter management. These streamline legal spend management and centralize matter information, giving teams complete visibility into legal work and budgets. The best tools leverage AI to transform day-to-day spend management workflows completely.

For example, Brightflag uses generative AI to summarize the work performed by outside counsel on each legal invoice and then delivers these summaries directly to your email inbox. If you’re happy with the invoice, you can approve it from your email and move on with your day.

Meanwhile, if the invoice requires more attention, you can open it in Brightflag, where our AI highlights issues for your review.

Generative AI can also be used to remove administrative work related to reporting and managing your matters. For example, our GenAI tool, Ask Brightflag, allows team members to instantly access insights into their legal spend and matters without generating a report.

Contract Management

Similarly, many modern Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) systems use generative AI “co-pilots” and NLP to automate and streamline drafting. During the contract review process, AI suggests clauses based on the contract type and highlights language that warrants closer review by the legal team.

This speeds up contract creation and negotiation and improves the accuracy and consistency of contract review. Additionally, the ability to recognize and analyze patterns allows AI systems to generate new contracts based on predefined templates and specific requirements.

E-Discovery

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

For example, while most teams don’t run e-discovery in-house, your legal service providers can use AI to search by concepts (like “contract breach”), rather than specific keywords. That way, they capture documents that 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 of discovery and document analysis.

Legal Research

AI tools can rapidly sift through vast amounts of legal documents, precedents, and case law to find relevant information in a fraction of the time it would take a human. In effect, this gives your lawyers a supercharged legal assistant that’s on-call 24/7. With more information at hand, your team can make better decisions.

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

IP Management

AI tools offer unparalleled advantages for monitoring, analysis, and the formulation of intellectual property strategy. For example, AI can automatically monitor patent filings, trademarks, and other IP documents to identify potential infringements or conflicting filings.

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

It’s also easier to manage your IP portfolio with AI. For example, you can set tools up to automatically track renewals and provide insights into a patent portfolio’s overall health and value..

Next Steps

Once you’ve decided on the right software and the most important use cases for AI tools, there are several additional steps to take to ensure you get the most value from your new tech.

1. Communicate clearly with your team about the benefits and changes AI integration will bring, and what’s expected of them. Some team members may be nervous about AI’s role in the workplace, so it’s important to be clear about how it will be used and what they can expect to get buy-in.
2. Gather baseline data on your team’s performance today. Depending on your goals, you might look for data about how accurately your team sets budgets or how long it takes to review the average invoice. This baseline will be used to evaluate the performance improvements resulting from your new tools.
3. Measure and report on your successes. A strong legal tool implementation should empower your team to deliver legal services more efficiently and effectively. If AI improves your chosen metrics significantly, you can use that information to secure funding for additional technology in the future.

Remember: Integrating legal technology into your workflow is an iterative, continuous process. You should establish channels for ongoing feedback to ensure the tech is meeting your team’s needs and to identify areas for improvement.

How Legal AI Software Tools Are Shaping the Future of In-House Legal Work

The use cases and efficiencies described above are just the starting point. Over the next few years, AI-powered tools will play an even bigger role in shaping everything from legal workflows to how decision-makers gather and assess data.

Most importantly, AI tools are changing the strategic value legal teams can deliver and aligning legal outputs with the broader business’s objectives.

For legal departments looking to transform their operations and achieve a competitive edge, the next step is clear: consider integrating a tool like Brightflag into your workflow.

Keen to see how it works? Schedule a demo and let our friendly team run you through the details.

FAQs

What is in-house legal software, and how does it work?

In-house legal software includes purpose-built tools and platforms that help legal teams to streamline everything from matter intake to spend management. The best tools integrate with the existing tech stack and use AI to automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks.

How can AI for legal teams improve efficiency in an in-house department?

By automating and streamlining previously manual workflows, AI can significantly speed up legal processes. This, in turn, improves legal service delivery and helps the legal department to play a more strategic role within the broader business.

What is the difference between in-house legal automation software and traditional legal tools?

Most legal teams already use software to handle or automate parts of their legal processes. For example, basic document management tools or tools like optical character recognition to automate parts of the invoice review process. The latest automation software, however, uses AI to tackle a much broader set of challenges, including matter management, legal workflows, spend management, and more.

Are AI tools for in-house legal teams secure and compliant?

It depends. When researching tools, be sure to verify that vendors comply with all compliance regulations and standards required by your business and region, including GDPR, CCPA, CPRA, ISO/IEC 27001:2013, ISO/IEC 42001, and SOC1/SOC2.