Generative AI for legal professionals

A major reason for the thawing of the legal profession’s estimation of GenAI is that it can vastly improve lawyers’ efficiency, speed, and creativity if used in the right ways. Because GenAI is intended to augment — not replace — the work of legal professionals, the quality of the legal AI tool itself is key. Viewing such tools as assistants whose work is of high quality but nevertheless benefits from a second set of eyes is also important. GenAI’s output meets even some of the highest of bars, but legal professionals should still approach these tools as they would approach the work of a very bright earlier-career associate — review by an experienced lawyer is always needed.

Although AI can streamline the human-centered work of law, lawyers still need to apply their expert knowledge. They can do this by fact-checking AI-produced assertions, building GenAI research suggestions, adapting GenAI output for their specific clients and strategies, and turning the connections it finds into strong legal arguments. Like professionals in other fields who are using these tools, legal professionals should think of GenAI as a research and ideating aide that works at the speed of light but doesn’t possess even a fraction of a lawyer’s knowledge or experience-honed judgment.

Some positive misconceptions about GenAI are also common in the legal profession — and these can impede the effective use of GenAI in legal work. For example, some professionals believe that any GenAI product can deliver helpful results. The truth is that it takes an extensive amount of work to create GenAI solutions reliable enough for legal purposes.

In considering the use of GenAI for legal work, it’s important for law practices to note that there is a vast difference between free, public-access GenAI tools like ChatGPT and industry-specific, professional-grade solutions like Thomson Reuters CoCounsel.

CoCounsel is designed specifically for legal professionals, integrating GenAI with trusted content and expert insights to redefine the future of legal work. As the decades-long standard-bearer for products that help legal professionals do their best work more quickly, we understand the importance of accuracy and reliability in legal work. Our solutions are developed by both domain and technical experts, ensuring that the technology is secure and reliable, while understanding the intricacies of legal work.

Why legal professionals should embrace GenAI

Efficiency and speed

GenAI uses the power of automation to help legal teams perform a range of tasks more efficiently and quickly. Examples of work that GenAI can help with include summarizing legal content, planning depositions, synthesizing and reviewing content, and conducting contract analysis. Such tasks take a large amount of time when done manually, so the extreme speed of GenAI leaves lawyers with more time to thoughtfully assess and build on what the AI product produces. More efficient legal research means minimized nonbillable time and reduced administrative burden.

This may be of special interest to in-house legal departments, as the most recent Legal Department Operations Index found that 75% of respondents reported placing a high priority on using technology to simplify workflow and manual processes. Furthermore, the latest Future of Professionals Report found that the average professional services worker believes AI could save an average of four hours of effort per week. Apply these time savings to the work of busy legal teams, and it’s not difficult to understand why this is a significant motivator.

Legal-specific support

Professional-grade legal GenAI is significantly different than general AI for wider use cases. It is built and optimized for legal use, and is held to higher standards around data, privacy, models, and content. For example, some GenAI-enabled tools not only perform legal research but also integrate with a variety of other applications. Such integration allows teams to complete rote tasks specific to legal work far more swiftly and with a high degree of confidence that the outputs will be valuable.

Satisfied clients

Legal professionals are facing client pressure to adopt new technology and deliver more value to automate rote back-office functions. Clients expect their lawyers to be on top of technology and use the best tools available. GenAI helps legal professionals deliver on those client expectations faster and more efficiently from a better starting point, thereby reducing friction, cost, and other impediments to providing optimal customer service. As a result, legal professionals who use GenAI-enabled tools strategically will pass the benefits of the resulting time and cost savings to clients.

Reduced outsourcing

In-house counsel can use generative AI-enabled tools to perform critical tasks faster, reducing the amount of work outsourced. Doing less outsourcing can bring down costs substantially and remove bottlenecks that slow down progress throughout a firm or law department. Reducing costs helps in-house law departments move toward the goal of working as a revenue-driver instead of a cost center for their organizations. Indeed, with 85% of respondents to the Legal Department Operations Index reporting they place a high priority on controlling outside counsel costs — a six percentage-point increase over the same finding last year — reducing the amount of work to be outsourced is a major source of appeal for GenAI-enabled tools.

Revenue generation

Any law firm that can improve efficiency without compromising quality will be in a good position to boost revenue and enhance its bottom line. GenAI tools make such scenarios more possible than any other developments that have come before. It’s a similar story for in-house counsel, for whom use of this technology can help generate revenue on behalf of the organization, thereby helping their department shift away from being a cost center. One example is speeding up the contract analysis process to help the business close deals faster. Additionally, when highly skilled legal professionals are freed from mindless tasks, they can spend more time on high-value activities that drive the business forward and make the best use of their training and knowledge.

What drives your GenAI tool?

Why the right content matters

At first, many lawyers were cautious about adopting GenAI tools due to a lack of trust and concern over the increased risk these tools might introduce. These sources of hesitation often abate with an increased understanding that consumer-grade GenAI technology is quite different from professional, purpose-built GenAI tools. While public-facing GenAI tools like ChatGPT use open-source, stale data with very few security and privacy controls, legal-specific GenAI tools use high-quality data in a safe and secure environment. Professional-grade GenAI solutions like CoCounsel use closed, secure data sets in an environment that maintains privacy, and leverages trusted content that is not freely available to the public.

The only way for legal professionals to trust the output of the AI tools they use is for those large-language models (LLMs) to be powered with trusted content specific to their professions — with robust security and privacy controls built in. Law firms that want to leverage the massive advantage in efficiency and speed that AI provides need a best-in-class tool built on trusted data — and they need to mandate its exclusive use within their firms. Yet most legal teams today are doing little to counter the risk of employees using whatever GenAI tool they prefer.

How legal-focused GenAI tools help law firms and legal departments

More efficient legal research

GenAI provides a jumpstart on legal research by reducing the time legal professionals must spend shifting through and summarizing content. These tools can produce in moments an informative version of research that would have previously taken hours or days. Lawyers can then refine the results to ensure that the research output is high-quality, thorough, and accurate. This jumpstart is like beginning a journey at its midway point, leaving the legal team and its client far more time and energy to make it to the end successfully.

Faster synthetization and analysis

Legal professionals can use GenAI to produce a range of useful outputs, including content summaries, contract analysis, and document review. The synthesis and analysis required to create these products happens in the blink of an eye, leaving users time to check, enhance, refine, and rewrite where necessary. Legal GenAI improves a legal firm’s or department’s output by streamlining and trimming away lower-value tasks, thus leaving more time and energy for legal professionals to apply themselves to higher-skill work.

Improved knowledge management

GenAI can help legal teams stay organized and share information via cross-functional tools. Better and faster methods of saving, indexing, identifying, and disseminating lawyers’ prior work and collective expertise help legal firms and departments solve legal and business problems more effectively. Legal teams can use these tools to rapidly draw upon the store of knowledge, allowing them to enhance their analysis without extensive or frustrating searching. The work that goes into knowledge management is typically not billable, so making it faster and easier helps the legal firm or department save costs and free up professionals’ time for billable work.

Enhanced onboarding and learning

Legal organizations benefit from efficient onboarding and ongoing skills development, both of which can be enhanced with GenAI. Legal-focused GenAI tools help users get up to speed quickly without extensive training, whether they are new to a firm or gaining knowledge about an unfamiliar area of law. These tools also help users learn new skills in a hands-on way as they work, reducing the need for as many formalized skill-development interventions, saving time and money.

Plain-language prompting to navigate complexity

Legal matters are often complex, which can make research, knowledge management, synthesis, and analysis difficult. Those unfamiliar with a given area of law may struggle to know where to start or what terms are most relevant in searching for resources. GenAI tools that can be prompted using plain-language queries allow users to access faster answers to complicated legal questions and rapidly organize information and precedents that can help them develop successful arguments.

Trustworthy security and privacy

Data privacy and security are paramount concerns in the legal industry. In the Legal Department Operations Index, 65% of responding legal departments said they place a high priority on internal data security. A professional tool licensed to a particular institution or firm provides a far more secure work ecosystem than a public-facing tool with few or no data controls. While legal professionals must always use caution regarding what data they use with AI tools, they can input a range of proprietary data with far less risk in a professional, licensed tool. Additionally, since legal-specific GenAI tools use high-quality legal content for their research capabilities, legal organizations can be confident that their output will be more trustworthy and accurate than that of other GenAI products.

A successful field test leads to trust

A legal customer decided to test the capabilities of a new GenAI-powered research tool from Thomson Reuters with a research question they already knew the answer to. The customer was thrilled when the answer was completely in line with their expectations. This assured the customer not only that the research tool returned trustworthy and verifiable answers, but that they could also take that generated research answer and use it to train associates in a fraction of the time that it would take an individual to train them.

Thomson Reuters has been a trusted resource within the legal industry for 150 years and is now a leader in legal AI.

Over 17,000 legal organizations worldwide have already adopted Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, and our labs have been developing tools driven by LLMs since the early days of their development. Thomson Reuters works together with partners and customers to build solutions iteratively, a method that ensures that those solutions meet their needs. Thomson Reuters AI tools like CoCounsel use best-in-class content created by qualified lawyers, which makes them far more useful and trustworthy to legal professionals than other GenAI tools on the market or those available to the public for free. This high-quality content and additional safeguards built into the product help mitigate problems like hallucinations and missing content in responses and enhances users’ trust in and experience with the tool.

Powerful tools for legal minds

While GenAI is a powerful tool in any form, customizing its functionality to a particular context amplifies its usefulness.

Legal audiences need legal-specific GenAI to get the full benefit of this technology, which can help speed up research and analysis, better satisfy customers, reduce costs, and boost revenue. Professional-grade GenAI tools can add tremendous value to legal work, but they won’t replace legal professionals. Humans’ legal expertise and judgment will remain the core drivers of the profession. GenAI technology can augment the efforts of legal professionals by increasing efficiency, jumpstarting research, facilitating synthesis, and augmenting analysis. GenAI is a powerful tool — but as with any tool, it’s most useful when wielded by a skilled professional. As this technology develops, forward-looking legal teams will benefit from learning about its risks and benefits from an expert with a century and a half of legal industry experience.

If your legal function wants to invest in technology to support their teams and streamline workflow but they aren't sure where to begin, we recommend CoCounsel Core. Request a free trial of our professional-grade AI assistant for legal professionals today.