Practical Applications of A.I. Within the Legal Department

Over the last two years, virtually every app and website has deployed some form of AI. And the number of generative AI (GenAI) solutions available to businesses is also expanding, with new solutions hitting the market even as you read this.

Naturally, this proliferation of new AI options has led many leaders in the legal industry to wonder how to most effectively utilize this technology to optimize their in-house departments and help their company stay ahead of the AI curve.

How do you make the best deployment decisions? Focus on practical legal AI applications rather than AI hype. The real impact of AI on law firms and in-house legal departments lies in its ability to streamline and improve existing processes. In this blog, we explore practical AI applications for legal departments, and what kind of benefits your team can expect from this transformative technology.

What Are the Best, Practical Legal AI Use Cases Today?

With so many new AI tools hitting the market, it can be challenging to determine which use cases truly add value for your department.

Our advice? Lean into the core capabilities of the tech and utilize artificial intelligence for data-intensive tasks, such as reviewing and organizing legal information or extracting rapid-fire insights from legal data. Here are the top applications:

Legal Invoice Review

Invoice review is one of the more time-intensive tasks that corporate legal teams face, especially when multiple rounds of approval are involved. Fortunately, newer AI tools, such as Brightflag’s Invoice Summaries feature, can significantly speed up this process — extracting relevant data to summarize key information, including the total cost of an invoice and any red flags that require attention. The best tools are also designed to slot review directly into day-to-day workflows, for example, by sending summaries straight to the recipient’s inbox.

Outside Counsel Billing Guideline Application

Legal AI tools like Brightflag can also help teams ensure stricter oversight and enforcement of outside billing guidelines by automatically flagging violations for review by the legal team. This ensures outside counsel stays compliant and helps to set clear expectations that strengthen relationships. It can also make it much easier to identify the best outside counsel teams to work with and pave the way for conversations around bulk work and discounts.

Strategic Data Insights

One of the most significant advantages GenAI brings to the table is the ability to instantaneously access clear-cut insights into legal work and spend using natural language. Legal tech with GenAI tools—like Ask Brightflag, for example—allow anyone on your team to find the data they’re looking for instantly and without sifting through spreadsheets.

Legal Contract Drafting, Review, and Lifecycle Management

GenAI has also opened the door to automating time-consuming tasks, such as contract drafting, review, and lifecycle management. Some of the more advanced tools can even assist with risk identification and assessment through contract analysis, speeding up turnarounds on contract drafts and making it easier for legal reviewers to quickly pinpoint what’s preventing a deal or matter from moving forward. All of which translates into greater efficiency and better service delivery outcomes from the legal team.

e-Discovery

Teams are increasingly turning to AI to help with e-Discovery as well. Instead of spending days sifting through endless legal documents and conducting document analysis, AI can be used to sort, categorize, and cross-index information, making it far easier to quickly find relevant information on a matter. This makes a significant difference in a modern legal environment, where teams are often faced with “information overload” due to the sheer volume of material they must typically collect and analyze. It also ensures that matters get resolved faster, thereby increasing the value that legal brings to the broader organization.

For legal teams looking to implement AI in their legal tech stack, there are already several AI-powered discovery and research tools available worth having on your radar. As with everything else legal, however, it’s advisable to pay careful attention to whether your chosen solution is specifically designed with legal needs — and compliance — in mind.

Measurable Impacts of Legal AI Deployments

Now that you have a better idea of what legal AI tools can do, it’s time to get to the real question: What measurable impacts can they have on your legal department?

While we can’t speak for every legal AI provider, here at Brightflag we’ve seen the effects that our AI has had on our customers’ ability to manage legal work and spend. Software solutions specialists Rimini Street, for example, found that applying AI for legal spend management allowed them reduce their annual spend by over 5% in one year—a number that’s undoubtedly grown in subsequent years.

The company also notes that AI-driven spend analytics enabled them to streamline lengthy invoice review processes and quickly identify redundancies and major billing issues, such as block billing, thereby realizing significant savings.

Lufthansa saw similar results, using AI to increase outside counsel guideline compliance by 5% in a single quarter. Combined with other savings realized with the help of Brightflag’s AI-powered analytics capabilities, they effectively recouped their annual investment in the platform within just three months.

Another example is the online grocery platform Ocado, which stated that Brightflag’s AI functionality saved them 1,470 hours on manual administrative tasks in a single year, translating to around £ 68.6k in savings.

Interestingly, the kinds of results we are seeing now are just the starting point. In the coming years, AI will become an increasingly integral part of the legal landscape, and the value it delivers can be expected to increase substantially.

The Future Legal AI Applications and Use Cases

A recent conversation with Mathew Steer, Associate Director of Legal Management Consulting at Deloitte Legal, revealed some interesting insights into the future direction of AI technology. Mathew noted that companies are actually starting to really move into the ROI phase of AI deployments, after spending the past few years running their initial trials with the technology.

As Brightflag’s own Kevin Cohn noted during the conversation, the significant potential of AI lies in quietly handling repetitive tasks, while legal professionals are freed up to tackle higher-value work. For example, imagine the difference it would make to business KPIs if someone like a commercial contracts attorney could spend 80% of their time with the sales and partnerships team, instead of just 20% because they’re wading through administrative work. GenAI is unlocking that capacity.

It’s also set to unlock greater value from data analysis, legal research, legal document management, and other traditionally painstaking administrative tasks — especially as AI agents come onto the stage, acting as reasoning and natural language go-betweens for legal teams and their data.

The natural language aspect is crucial because it enables legal teams to communicate with AI software in a way that was previously impossible. For example, comparing spend between two similar matters on a granular level simply by simply asking a legal generative AI tool the question: “How do these matters compare in terms of cost and the business value delivered?”

Now extrapolate that to every legal task currently on your plate, and you start to see where this tech is headed.

From Legal AI Hype to Legal AI Impact: Taking the Next Step

To circle back to the start, the real issue now facing many legal leaders isn’t whether they should be using AI. There are numerous AI tools available for lawyers and in-house legal teams to choose from, and it can be challenging to determine when a tool is impactful enough to be worth adopting.

To answer that, legal teams must focus on AI tools that can deliver measurable results. Repetitive, time-consuming tasks that lend themselves to automation, such as the contract review, are a great starting point. Other high-impact uses include using AI solutions to surface real-time data insights — like how your department’s legal spend aligns with the budget and broader business priorities. Or whether outside counsel is working within your billing guidelines.

The bottom line? This tech is already making a massive difference to how in-house legal teams operate. In the coming years, those impacts are only set to grow. For forward-thinking legal teams, that means there’s really only one choice — learn how best to integrate legal A.I. into your workflows and processes to reap the long-term benefits.

Interested in learning more about legal AI applications that can enhance legal service delivery? Keep an eye on the Brightflag blog for the latest insights and legal content about how this tech is shaping up. Or book a demo to see how our AI-driven platform can transform your legal ops today.