AI for legal professionals: Its growing potential and top use cases

Many of these lawyers are eager to move beyond basic GenAI use, such as making queries to consumer-grade products like ChatGPT. AI-powered legal assistants are designed to support, not replace, the expertise of legal professionals. Proper tools have the potential to radically transform law firms’ operations by liberating them from their most time-consuming and mundane tasks. Lawyers are free to focus on higher-value strategy and analysis, all while heightening productivity and efficiency.

Where are legal professionals applying AI?

While AI tools can assist in various areas of legal work, there are six general areas where they can automate many repetitive tasks.

Document review

The most popular use case listed in the GenAI report is document review, cited by nearly three-fourths (74%) of legal professionals surveyed. This use is quintessential of AI technology, which can scan thousands of documents within minutes while logging and retrieving any particular clauses or data points.

However, a trusted AI assistant needs to generate accurate, consistent results. If a junior lawyer needs to routinely conduct follow-up reviews because the AI missed something pertinent to a case or included irrelevant information, the technology becomes an obstacle rather than an aid.

Document summary

Lawyers and legal staff pore through hundreds of documents over the course of a typical case. They must provide concise, error-free summaries of the information they process. AI-powered tools provide a revolutionary upgrade to this task. The tools scan relevant documents, automatically classify them by category, and summarize their contents in readable reports. A job that could have taken a junior lawyer over a week to do, they can now complete in one morning.

Legal research

What was once a lengthy trawl through file cases and databases can be vastly streamlined. AI-assisted tools conduct legal research at impressive scopes and speed, empowering lawyers to provide more informed, strategic advice.

For example, Deep Research in CoCounsel Legal applies its AI power to the precise language of cases, statutes, and regulations. Before generating any text based on a lawyer’s query, the large-language model (LLM) assesses the content to find the most relevant cases, statutes, and regulations. This capability ensures that its responses are derived from the most pertinent sections of these sources, delivering more accurate answers.

Brief or memo drafting

As with research, drafting consumes a great deal of lawyers’ time. Thomson Reuters legal customers have said that, on average, they need to spend as much as 40% to 60% of their time drafting documents; 96% of those surveyed also believe their drafting tools aren’t efficient enough.

An AI-powered legal drafting tool enables lawyers to jumpstart their work, generating quality initial drafts far more quickly than doing a first draft by hand. According to Thomson Reuters research, lawyers typically spend over 15 minutes on average finding a good starting point for their draft. An AI tool removes this barrier. It can produce an initial draft based on the user’s parameters and draw from a deep reservoir of information, from legal terms and precedents to case-appropriate language. With the time savings, lawyers can devote far more of their workday to more productive tasks.

Further, AI-powered tools employ a wide array of editing resources, which makes the first generated draft grammatically sound and compliant with the firm’s stylistic or regulatory guidelines.

Contract drafting

AI-powered drafting tools simplify the process of creating a standard contract, drawing upon a large virtual portfolio of contract templates. All that a lawyer needs to do is select the type of contract, add inputs such as date and length, and other details pertaining to contractual language. Within seconds, they get a workable contract draft.

The tool can then help the lawyer quickly make corrections and additions, incorporating new information in real time and looking for errors.

Correspondence drafting

No matter how well they manage their time, lawyers spend a good deal of the workday reading and replying to emails or writing to current and prospective clients. Here’s where an AI-powered tool can step in, letting lawyers automatically adjust communications to suit a particular client, considering the client’s history with the law firm and the type of queries the client typically has.

An AI tool will access all relevant precedents and current case law, ensuring that a lawyer uses judicially tested, precise language, thereby reducing potential misunderstandings with the client. A lack of clarity could require subsequent correspondence to clarify, and, if unaddressed, could even threaten the stability of the client-lawyer relationship.

How CoCounsel Legal can help

CoCounsel Legal is a comprehensive AI legal solution — the newest evolution of the first and leading professional-grade AI legal assistant — built on the authoritative content and expertise of Westlaw and Practical Law content. When a lawyer needs case precedents or up-to-date securities regulations, a solution that can thoroughly and quickly access a trusted database makes a big difference.

Uniting its patented AI technology with verified Westlaw and Practical Law content, CoCounsel Legal is supported and continually improved by machine learning, data science, and legal domain experts. Further, it fully integrates with platforms like Microsoft 365 and customers’ document management platforms for ease of use. It will continue to be enhanced; we plan to invest more than $200 million in AI within the next year, with a continued focus on investment in CoCounsel Legal.

A new day in research

A boutique trial firm specializing in civil and white-collar criminal litigation, Bochetto & Lentz, P.C. offers expert legal services. Partner David Heim was working on a nuisance case and had to analyze a dense 50-page scientific white paper. He needed to fully digest the paper before he created key documents, such as a cease-and-desist letter and a statement of facts. The task likely would have taken him half a day, he says.

But using CoCounsel’s summarization feature, Heim first generated a two-page summary of the report, complete with footnotes linking back to the original text, which helped him to verify the content’s accuracy. From there, he used CoCounsel to draft a letter based on this summary. The result? He completed the job in under an hour.

 “The ability to move between tools in the same ecosystem and trust the workflow made the entire process seamless and efficient,” Heim says.

A revolution in drafting

CoCounsel’s integrated drafting capability transforms legal workflows by providing fast, structured starting points. Heim, for one, uses the assistant for drafting discovery for agreements like non-disclosure or protective orders. The tool delivers solid first drafts quickly — “90% where you need to be,” he adds — which enables him to focus on refining documents rather than starting from scratch.

J.J. Ball, Legal Counsel at Systemiq, is another regular user of CoCounsel for drafting. “There are substantial time savings when drafting with CoCounsel,” he says. “When we are operating on an average turnaround time of three to four business days for a response, we can cut that down to one to two business days by utilizing the tool to get drafting work done.”

Boosting competitiveness

It’s a challenge to keep your competitive edge in an industry transformed by next-generation technologies. But having a professional-grade legal AI solution will help a law firm stay sharp, regardless of its size.

Small and medium businesses turn to startup OMNIUX for identifying gaps in their growth strategies and scaling up fast. But because the firm lacked an in-house legal team, Chief Financial Officer Gregory Kantor had to handle contract reviews, draft agreements, and ensure compliance. As the business grew, such tasks were eating up more of his workday; he could spend two and a half hours reviewing or drafting a single contract. “That time added up — and so did the cost if we sent it out to a law firm,” he says.

That changed when OMNIUX began using CoCounsel. Now, when Kantor needs to review a client contract, he starts with CoCounsel, which flags risks, suggests stronger clauses, and ensures that nothing gets overlooked — all done in minutes, not hours.

In one example, Kantor had to review a 14-page venue contract for a corporate event. If he outsourced the task, it would normally have cost $700 to $800 in outside counsel fees. “I gave CoCounsel the document and a clear prompt, and within 10 minutes I had a reliable analysis,” he says. “It’s like having a legal analyst on-call, but without the billable hours.” Kantor estimates that CoCounsel has saved OMNIUX between $15,000 and $20,000 in legal fees each month since adoption.

For a startup, this bounty of savings is a big competitive advantage. A firm can hire more legal professionals — who can then move beyond performing clerical work and devote more time to their business, offering substantial value to clients.

Serving clients better

At the law firm of Laffey Bucci D’Andrea Reich & Ryan, partner Guy D’Andrea says the combination of CoCounsel’s GenAI capabilities and Westlaw Precision enables his team to work more efficiently without impacting quality. The result? “This has allowed us to take on even more cases without increasing our overhead,” he stated.

D’Andrea often sorts through thousands of pages and documents for a given case. With CoCounsel, that’s no longer an issue. “I'll have a summary that's near perfect and a timeline that outlines every significant event contextually in less than seven minutes,” he says.

Using an AI solution also strengthens client-lawyer relationships. It is difficult for a lawyer with a docket of more than 100 cases to know each case intimately. But with CoCounsel, D’Andrea quickly gets up to speed on a case and gives answers to clients promptly and thoroughly.

D’Andrea adds that certain features of CoCounsel, such as the near-instant creation of timelines and summaries, put his clients at ease. “One of the really impactful things that helps with clients is there’s always that dread when you are in deposition prep. The client is inevitably going to say something to the effect of ‘what are they going to ask me?’” The timeline feature provides a clear and organized account of events, minimizing the anxiety about being questioned or getting dates mixed up. 

“It helps tremendously, and it goes a long way with client relations and making them really feel in control and part of that case, which is hyper-important for survivors,” D’Andrea says.

Prepare for the future of legal work

Law firms that delay AI adoption risk falling behind in an increasingly competitive market. The legal solutions of the near future will incorporate multiple kinds of AI, from generative to agentic, each designed with specific tasks and orchestrated by human experts.

Consumer-grade AI tools simply cannot meet the rigorous demands of professional legal practice. When evaluating AI solutions, lawyers need technology that delivers reliable results quickly while maintaining the highest security standards. A professional-grade legal AI solution like CoCounsel Legal can enhance your operations across multiple levels, working alongside you in a single, seamless workstream.

More than 20,000 law firms and legal departments already use CoCounsel Legal, including 80% of the Am Law 100. Transform the way you get work done and request a demo today.