How AI Enhances Legal Service Delivery

In recent years, the legal tech industry has witnessed remarkable advancements in the way legal services are delivered and managed. With new and innovative technologies emerging in the market, now more than ever, legal professionals have a wide range of tools to select from. Among these cutting-edge solutions, AI stands out above the rest as a transformative force, especially in workflow automation and request management.  

AI will change the way in-house legal professionals handle their legal service delivery by efficiently processing and categorizing incoming requests, and making sure they are triaged to the right resource, person or team. It also can help reduce manual and administrative tasks and minimize the risk of human error in handling legal matters.  

AI can also enhance the service and experience of the business by allowing a conversational experience for users to submit their requests whilst providing immediate and intelligent assistance. While AI will change the way lawyers work, it cannot replace the value that lawyers bring to an organization. The main goal of AI is to enhance lawyers’ roles within their organization, not make them obsolete as they cannot replicate the human aspect of lawyers in creating strategy, leveraging expertise and experience, or providing empathy.

How AI Can Be Used in Legal Service Delivery

AI-powered legal service management tools can automatically intake and interpret requests and provide a solution to the user, saving lawyers time in handling unstructured, indeterministic requests and manual triage and assignment. Here are some use cases for how AI-powered legal service request management can be implemented across an organization:  

1) AI Legal Front Door

Through an AI Legal Front Door, legal teams can meet business users where they are and intake requests from Slack, Teams, Salesforce, email, company portal and more. Through a legal front door, this enables a single point to capture, interpret and triage requests from the business. Business users are then guided from request to resolution for self-serve contracts, policies, approvals or routed directly to a lawyer for specialized advice.

2) AI Legal Chatbot

Legal teams can employ an AI legal chatbot to serve as the assistant through the legal front door to not only help triage requests, but address queries related to policies, FAQ and knowledge. This provides an immediate, personalized and conversational experience for the business to navigate their requests.

3) Contract Automation

With contract automation the legal team can streamline & accelerate contract lifecycle workflows through automated intake, document generation, review and signing. With AI, the contract lifecycle can be further enhanced by reviewing and calculating risk involved with external third-party contracts. Additionally, AI can also help extract key contract terms to understand obligations and risk areas and summarize contract changes.

4) AI Matter Management

AI-powered intake and matter management platforms are transforming legal service delivery by streamlining how General Counsels (GCs) manage and track legal work. With artificial intelligence automating processes from intake to resolution, these platforms centralize all legal matters, offering GCs real-time visibility into workloads, deadlines and task ownership. This eliminates the inefficiencies of dispersed tools like spreadsheets or Jira, empowering legal teams to manage every matter seamlessly.

The real-time tracking capabilities of AI are critical for legal service delivery, giving GCs automatic updates on matter status, progress and key performance indicators. This proactive oversight helps legal teams quickly identify bottlenecks or risks, allowing them to resolve issues before they escalate. AI also provides GCs with data-driven insights, enabling them to demonstrate the legal department’s value to the broader business. By automating trend analysis and reporting, AI reduces the administrative burden, while enhancing operational efficiency and oversight.

A standout feature of these platforms for enhancing service delivery is the AI chatbot, which acts as a smart “legal front door” for intake. This chatbot automates the intake process, guiding users through workflows in a conversational manner. Unlike traditional intake systems, AI chatbots integrate with tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, allowing employees to easily submit requests, track matters and receive real-time answers. The chatbot routes legal requests to the right professionals or automated workflows, ensuring fast and accurate responses.

This AI-driven approach to matter management dramatically reduces response times, resolving legal requests within minutes. By combining predictive insights, automated routing and integrated tracking, these platforms create a comprehensive, low-friction solution that enables legal teams to focus on high-value work without extensive change management.

Building the Legal Team of the Future with AI

AI is enhancing the roles and responsibilities of the legal team. While there may be concerns that AI is replacing the role of the traditional lawyer, that is not the case. AI will not render legal professionals as being obsolete but will instead serve as a valuable assistant.  

One of the main ways that AI will redefine the role of the in-house lawyers is that they can help reduce the burden of administrative work. AI-powered systems will free up time substantially, so legal teams can manage strategy and engagement across an organization, making them more proactive to provide better legal counsel.  

AI also allows lawyers to upskill themselves to fully leverage AI's potential, legal teams must develop an understanding of AI technologies and their applications in the legal domain. They can do this by keeping up to date with the latest technologies and their peers in other departments such as HR, marketing and IT, who are all at the forefront of employing new technologies.  

Collaboration between AI and human lawyers is crucial for successful AI adoption in legal service request management. AI excels in data processing, analysis, and pattern recognition, while human lawyers bring expertise in critical thinking, creativity, empathy and nuanced legal interpretation. By combining their strengths, AI and human lawyers form a powerful synergy. AI can sift through vast volumes of legal data and identify relevant precedents quickly, while human lawyers can apply their expertise to understand the intricacies of individual cases and offer personalized legal advice.

Safety and Privacy with AI-Powered Legal Service Delivery

AI-powered legal service request management addresses ethical considerations in data privacy. These AI systems can be designed to follow strict privacy and security protocols, ensuring that sensitive client information is handled with the utmost care.

For example, information involved with Checkbox AI products will be stored and accessed only by Checkbox and OpenAI. However, data sent to OpenAI is only stored for 30 days to prevent abuse and misuse, and is not retained, nor used for training to improve their models. This means data sent over to OpenAI is not accessible to any other parties, including publicly accessible models like ChatGPT. Further, both OpenAI and Checkbox have been awarded SOC 2 Type 2 complaint, as evaluated by a third-party security auditor.

A new era of legal service request management has been rapidly ushered in through the introduction of AI in the legal tech space. AI-powered legal service request management can be a powerful tool for legal teams that want to transform their legal service request management. By acquiring the tools and working with vendors that can provide that AI component, legal teams can implement efficient and effective request resolving solutions that will surely benefit the overall organization.

Checkbox Latest AI Capabilities

Checkbox's latest AI capabilities are part of the expanding functionality in our workflow automation and request management ecosystem. With the introduction of AI, Checkbox continues to push boundaries, enabling users to unlock endless possibilities in workflow automation.  

1. AI Assistant: This product is an AI-powered chatbot that provides answers to natural language questions based on a set of documents and workflows containing the body of knowledge on which the chatbot is trained.  

2. AI Triage Block: The triage block from AI works as a workflow mechanism that matches a user’s natural language query against a set of customizable categories with predefined descriptions to direct users to the appropriate determined workflow path.

If you are interested in learning more about what an AI-powered legal service request management platform like Checkbox can accomplish for your organization, book a call with one of our technology consultants who can provide you with next steps.