Dive Brief:

• Debate about whether to use artificial intelligence in legal practice has ended. Discussions today are focused on costs, returns and how to best incorporate the technology into departments and outside law firms, according to an expert panel of legal tech specialists.
• Buyers of generative AI solutions will encounter “a lot of confusion and a lot of opacity” on pricing, with multiple commercial models, George Socha, senior vice president of brand awareness at legal tech firm Reveal, said on a recent webinar. Long-term or firm contracts are best avoided for most legal tech customers, said Lee Wielenga, chief information officer at U.S. Legal Support.
• Legal executives should consider small-group pilot projects for AI tools, focused on areas where routine, mundane tasks would benefit from automation, according to the panel. Software used in a business setting typically comes with permissioning access for employees, and generative AI adoption is likely to follow similar models.

Dive Insight:

The potential improvements of incorporating AI into legal work is such that “clients are expecting their outside law firms to use this technology,” Gina Passarella, senior vice president of content at ALM Media, said on the Dec. 4 webinar, sponsored by legal tech firms CARET Legal, Reveal and U.S. Legal Support.

“This isn’t [about] how to do this or maybe – this is happening,” said Passarella. 

The return on an AI investment can be thorny for managers to assess, often because there’s no adjacent “true control group” to operate on an identical use case, Socha said. “It’s so often difficult to say how much return did you really get?” he noted. “Did it speed things up? How much?”

That reality for gauging returns also makes it critical to focus on the true cost of any AI investment, even though the industry often makes pricing for AI products and services tricky to ascertain, Socha said.

Any product offered for free “means your data is undoubtedly being used for training and other kinds of research on the platform,” Wielenga said. “You’re going to want to seek subscription-based or license-based services,” he said, as those likely let customers opt out of platform training or data-sharing.

Additionally, “pay-as-you-go” models for generative AI products will work better for general counsel and law firms, helping to avoid long-term or inflexible pricing commitments, Wielenga said.

Most in-house legal departments and firms are seeking to automate parts of their operations, where possible. Some of this can be in mundane areas such as non-disclosure agreements, or “some areas of the business where there is no human interaction,” said Raphael Lopez, vice president of product at CARET Legal.

Start by examining the team’s daily functions and work activities as a guide for where automation may be most useful, he said. Operations managers will want to keep lawyers focused on the department or firm’s “high-value work” and in providing higher levels of service to clients.

Lawyers have adopted generative AI tools much more quickly than technology products in the past, Socha said, much of that driven by the expected efficiency gains.

The software can organize data and produce insights much faster than humans, helping to deliver higher-quality work product to clients, Wielenga said.

“The perception, of course, is not monolithic but what I’m seeing is that law firm leaders, some enthusiastically and some begrudgingly, are coming to recognize that they will have to adopt GenAI,” Socha said. “There’s really no way not to go down that path.”