August 27, 2024

 Pratik Patel

Consulting law department innovation artificial intelligence

If you are a general counsel or head of legal operations, you have likely recently spent time pondering a hot question from the business: How does legal, including outside counsel, plan to use technology – in particular, generative AI – to support and enhance legal work?

The fact that a recent Bain & CO AI study ranked lawyers dead last as far as trust in and expectations for AI may explain why (as Dr. Alexander Rohde noted in a recent and astute LinkedIn post) corporate law organisations lag behind all other corporate functions in GenAI adoption. But with legal ranking second in opportunities for GenAI automation, dodging the question is not an option. Even if you distrust generative AI, executive leadership expects you to define and communicate a strategy for its adoption and use, mainly because they are expected to do the same.

This requires more than lip service. You must offer a methodical and defensible plan for how your law department will approach GenAI to take the company to even greater heights. From my perspective, as Elevate’s VP of Innovation, your plan should incorporate two key aspects: first, a phased approach (which my Elevate colleagues and I call ‘Crawl, Walk, Run’) to generative AI, and, second, hints at specific use cases.

Based on our work with numerous law departments, here is what such a plan might state:

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Hi Business Leaders,

Based on our law department’s ongoing analysis of the impact of AI (particularly generative AI) on the legal function and business as a whole, we believe AI and GenAI are transformative technologies that have an important place within our go-forward strategy. To safely and practically embed AI and GenAI into our day-to-day work for the benefit of you and our customers, we plan to execute a ‘Crawl-Walk-Run’ strategy that balances foundational progress (Crawl) with strategic ability to leverage rapidly evolving technology and emerging use cases (Walk and Run).

Our Crawl-Walk-Run approach includes the following:

• Crawl (next 12 months): The Crawl phase starts with tracking and organising our work and work-related data in ways that will make any AI and generative AI more accurate and productive. To do this, we are using legal intake and workflow tools that allow us to centrally receive and organise our legal work. This will serve as a foundational ‘spine’ for anything we want to do in the future.

  Further, as part of this phase, we’d like to equip and train our legal team on how to access, use, and prompt generative AI chatbots in basic forms. This will help introduce our people to the capability and develop comfort around use cases and the value of generative AI.

  We neither expect nor want our legal teams to use generative AI to perform any material legal tasks at this point. Rather, we aim to get them familiar with the basics and benefits of what this capability requires and offers. Our first use cases will involve tasks that save our lawyers time doing routine, low-complexity work, such as summarising longer documents or law firm invoices against outside counsel guidelines.  Our initial use cases may also include using AI to process and flag deviations or standard missing clauses within contract review requests.

  We believe that addressing these use cases will enable our lawyers to spend more time on activities with greater strategic and business value – providing an immediate and low-risk quick win for us and you, our internal customers.

• Walk (following 24 months): The Walk phase of our approach includes implementing more conventional AI across the department and extending the use of generative AI on more substantive legal tasks.

  On the conventional AI side, we’d like to implement AI tools that find and extract information within documents faster than presently possible and review and flag content that varies from our guidelines or playbooks on more complex legal documents.  For example, we’d like to test generative AI’s ability to support our teams in certain aspects of litigation and contracting.

  In litigation, this could include generating first drafts of discovery responses based on the relevant document set and deposition summaries based on the testimonial record and finding and foldering potential key or hot documents based on prompted case strategy or issue tags.

  In contracting, this could include drafting first drafts of contracts based on the submitted deal terms, finding and reporting summaries and counts of contracts that match certain contractual terms or positions within a large repository, and analysing and recommending contractual positions that better balance company priorities and the likelihood of being accepted by counterparties.

  These use cases will be aimed at delivering more speed to you, the business, to accelerating revenue generation and faster protection against known risks.

• Run (post-24 months): The Run phase of our approach will centre on using AI and, as suitable, generative AI, to move further ‘upstream’ and help analyse risk and root causes to limit the scope and growth of risks. We believe the ‘Run’ phase will be transformative to our legal department and business.

  We anticipate our Run phase to include using AI and generative AI to do things like:
  – Monitor and flag recurring risks in the business that are correlated to downstream disputes or litigation
  – Fly ‘with’ the legal team to continuously analyse matter data and generate ideas and pathways to the most efficient resolutions
  – Look and analyse across data sets to identify and generate themes of risk and/or opportunity that warrant further investigation by our legal and business teams

  Given that generative AI is rapidly evolving, we plan to re-assess our projections and the focus of the Run phase mid-way through our Walk phase.

We believe our Crawl-Walk-Run approach to AI and generative AI will produce significant benefits for our people, the business, and our customers. We are excited by what’s to come and we will keep you, the business, and its leaders, informed of our progress.

Best,

[Your name]

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If you are in the process of defining your legal team’s approach to AI or generative AI and want to speak to or learn best practices from our expert team, please submit a request for one of our law experts to contact you. We’d also love to hear your feedback or experiences with generative AI and where your teams are using or planning to use it!