Blend your AI development with other legal innovation

Are you investing time and resource into AI innovation but need more time to assess and demonstrate tangible efficiency gains or use cases?

It’s completely understandable and something we’re seeing across the market, and so it’s worth trying to articulate some points to consider.

New and emerging products will always need refinement and iterative improvement, often making it hard at first to demonstrate tangible, economic returns to management who, whilst supportive, also have to set budgets and stay laser-focused on profitability - not just for future years but here and now. So how do we find the right balance between higher and lower risk / short and longer term innovation projects?

Certainly AI will undoubtedly transform many elements of legal service delivery and it’s important to keep up with developments, investing and deploying when and where appropriate for your business.

More broadly, AI workstreams may best fit inside a multi-track innovation strategy, continuing to assess emerging AI technologies (investing where appropriate), whilst also developing tools where you can more easily demonstrate efficiency gains from day one – such as document automation (where you can generate fully approved, well-progressed, certain first drafts efficiently and effectively), a knowhow curation initiative, or some best practice toolkits to help lawyers work through matters more efficiently. As part of an overall innovation strategy, these tools can point immediately to real financial benefits, business improvement and renewed momentum across the business – giving you the space you need to build out and validate your AI strategy as needed.

Moreover, AI products often work so much better with curated knowhow and well-established systems, so it’s a win-win.

And as we’re starting to see, AI will often help by blending into (rather than completely replacing) these tools or processes, so it makes sense to fit it inside a broader strategy, giving you innovation wins from day one.