Artificial intelligence (AI) is fast becoming synonymous with the future of legal service operation and delivery. As the American Bar Association notes, we are “in an age when it’s easy to harness computer power to engage in learning; it’s cheap, and there are massive amounts of data from which to learn.”
According to a 2025 survey of legal professionals from top law firms:
- More than 95% of firms have an AI use policy
- 87% of respondents have created an AI task force
- 73% of respondents indicated that their firms have already deployed an internal GenAI solution
This article describes six ways lawyers and law firms can leverage AI not only to create efficiencies, but also to help develop and refine strategy, respond to clients faster, and deliver better results.
Artificial intelligence (AI) defined
AI is a broad term, but for our purposes, it simply means technology that can amplify human activities and intelligence. It really can do that, and in the practice of law, it can make you more efficient, more creative, and enable more leverage.
Will lawyers be replaced by AI?
No. Rather than replacing lawyers, AI will enable lawyers (even young lawyers) to be more creative, efficient, and strategic. It can do the heavy lifting in the background, such as reviewing documents, synthesizing evidence, identifying areas of knowledge for witnesses and deponents, and ultimately helping deliver a more compelling story at trial.
AI’s role in law firms
As public awareness of AI’s new capabilities has surged, so too has lawyers’ curiosity and openness around the potential for AI to improve their firms’ efficiency and effectiveness.
Given the forces currently at play within both the legal sector and the broader economy — climbing expenses, competition for talent and clients, and heightened attention to cost containment and efficiency, particularly among clients — this openness could not come at a better time.
Across the legal industry, from the Am Law 10s through the 200s, AI deployment is expanding, with 92% of firms surveyed reporting already having an AI strategy. Plaintiffs and litigation boutiques are also notably leveraging AI to gain a competitive edge against larger firms, recognizing its potential to streamline daily legal tasks. These cutting-edge law practices are beginning to realize the potential of artificial intelligence to propel everyday functions for lawyers.
6 ways lawyers can benefit from AI
Here are some of the ways lawyers are benefiting from using AI to supercharge their work:
1. Ediscovery
No longer a siloed task confined to a single phase of litigation or team within your firm, ediscovery has evolved to become a central hub of case strategy. With the rise of full-litigation-lifecycle platforms, ediscovery now plays a foundational role in shaping legal strategy from the outset.
Traditionally, ediscovery focused on complying with your requirements by collecting and producing relevant documents. Today, that’s just the starting point. Thanks to advances in AI, ediscovery is now a dynamic process that helps you interact with your facts faster so that you can develop and hone your strategy.
Notably, modern ediscovery technology isn’t just about isolated features; it’s about integrating solutions to serve you at every stage of litigation. From Cecilia Q&A, which lets users interrogate their evidence in natural language, to DISCO Auto Review, which automates first-pass review, each component solution streamlines the process of ediscovery to enable you to get a quicker, clearer understanding of your evidence.
2. Document review and fact investigation
Advanced AI can analyze what is relevant to a review by examining your documents and taking into account the order and meaning of words to arrive at intelligent insight as to whether the document is of substance to your review. In practical terms, that means that the technology can tell you the likelihood, from -100 (highly unlikely) to 100 (highly likely), that any given document will be relevant to your claims and defenses.
AI-assisted review can improve speed-to-evidence and achieve significant reductions in the documents requiring review. AI’s assistance in the review process not only results in meaningful time savings in document review, but also enables lawyers to uncover the story behind the evidence faster.
In this section, I’ll explore how AI can help achieve three critical outcomes of effective document review:
- Improving risk assessment
- Enhancing witness preparation
- Accelerating the identification of key facts
Risk assessment
Effective risk assessment during document review hinges on the ability to identify and understand potentially damaging information early in the process. AI-powered review tools excel at this by analyzing large volumes of documents and highlighting those that are most likely to pose legal, regulatory, or reputational risks.
By using natural language processing and machine learning, AI can detect sensitive topics, privilege concerns, compliance issues, and patterns of behavior that might otherwise go unnoticed in a manual review – and it can move much, much more quickly. For instance, DISCO’s Auto Review can review documents at speeds of 32,000 documents per hour — the equivalent of a 1,920-person review team working an eight-hour day. This scale of analysis enables legal teams to rapidly uncover hidden risks and prioritize critical documents for closer inspection.
With AI, potential red flags can be surfaced within hours rather than weeks, not only accelerating early risk assessment but also empowering legal teams to make faster, more strategic decisions about case posture.
Witness preparation
By quickly surfacing the most relevant documents tied to a particular individual, event, or issue, AI allows legal teams to build a comprehensive and accurate narrative that aligns with the subjects on which a witness is likely to be questioned or expected to testify.
AI can automatically cluster and prioritize documents that reference specific witnesses, helping lawyers zero in on communications, documents they authored or received, and materials that contain potential inconsistencies or corroboration.
For example, DISCO’s Cecilia Q&A allows you to ask questions such as “Who was involved in Raptor at Enron?” and get answers with citations to supporting documents in your database, so you can literally interrogate your evidence in real time. This helps lawyers prepare witnesses with a clear understanding of what the documentary evidence shows — and what it doesn’t show — reducing the risk of surprises during deposition or trial.
Fast identification of facts
Traditional linear review methods can bury critical information under thousands or even millions of irrelevant documents. AI changes that by enabling legal teams to cut through the noise and zero in on documents that really matter.
Using advanced pattern recognition, AI can identify people, places, dates, and key events across a dataset. It can link related documents and surface relevant communications, such as clustering emails and attachments related to a particular project, isolating a conversation thread across multiple custodians, or spotlighting a sudden increase in sensitive terms during a specific time period. This allows lawyers to piece together the facts more efficiently and develop a case theory faster than with manual review alone.
3. Quality control
The ultimate goal of quality control in document review is to ensure your team complies with ediscovery protocols. This means making sure you’ve reviewed the documents that matter to your case, haven’t missed key evidence, and haven’t accidentally produced privileged or confidential information. AI plays a critical role in helping legal teams meet these obligations with precision and speed.
AI-powered QC tools can catch inconsistencies in tagging, flag potential privilege issues, and identify documents that may have been overlooked due to human error. By continuously monitoring the review in real time, AI ensures that issues are identified and corrected early, before they escalate into costly mistakes or procedural missteps. This not only protects the integrity of the review, but also helps legal teams demonstrate defensible processes and maintain credibility with the court and opposing counsel.
AI also enables more consistent application of review protocols by learning from reviewer behavior and applying those insights across the database. In one recent case for an Am Law 50 client, DISCO’s GenAI document review tool, Auto Review, achieved 96.9% recall and 70.1% precision on a review set of 200,000 documents — metrics far surpassing typical human reviewer rates.
With smarter, faster quality control baked into the workflow, legal teams can move with greater confidence, knowing the documents produced are accurate, complete, and compliant.
4. Legal research
AI-powered legal research tools have revolutionized how lawyers access, analyze, and interpret legal information.
Traditionally, legal research required attorneys to sift through extensive databases, manually reviewing case law, statutes, and legal precedents.
AI streamlines this process by utilizing natural language processing and machine learning to quickly retrieve relevant legal materials based on contextual understanding rather than simple keyword matching. These advanced capabilities allow attorneys to input queries in plain language and receive highly relevant case law, statutes, and secondary sources in a matter of seconds, significantly reducing research time.
💡Dig into the differences between machine learning, natural language processing, and more: AI vs. Generative AI: What's the Difference?
5. Legal compliance
Law firms are beholden to a host of regulatory obligations. Adhering to these responsibilities (not to mention, keeping up with the latest regulations) can be complex and time-consuming work, with actual and reputational costs should efforts fall short.
With the ability to automatically log and classify files and actions taken by certain custodians, AI is helping innovative firms to reduce the manual work of compliance, as well as the risks.
6. Due diligence
Traditionally, due diligence required lawyers to manually comb through extensive contracts, corporate filings, and transactional records, which is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process.
AI-powered tools streamline this work by rapidly analyzing vast datasets, identifying key clauses, flagging inconsistencies, and highlighting potential risks. With natural
language-processing capabilities, AI can extract relevant information, compare contract terms against industry standards, and detect anomalies that might otherwise be overlooked.
Benefits of AI for law firms
AI promises numerous business benefits for law firms: from enabling better case strategy to building and sustaining longer-term relationships with clients. The opportunity cost of cleaving to the status quo is that your firm will get left behind in the competitive race to attract talent, and win business.
Keep reading to learn how cutting-edge law practices are already using AI to improve everyday processes and how AI will transform the industry as it continues to advance.
Increased efficiency & improved pricing
By automating time-consuming tasks such as legal research, document review, and contract analysis, AI enhances law firm productivity and efficiency. Instead of manually sifting through thousands of pages, lawyers can leverage AI-powered tools to quickly extract relevant information, identify key legal precedents, and assess case strengths. This not only speeds up legal processes but also ensures greater accuracy and consistency in legal work.
AI also enables more predictive and creative pricing models by driving efficiencies that support flat fees and alternative fee arrangements. This allows firms to stay on budget more reliably, offer clients greater pricing transparency, and ultimately foster a more proficient economic relationship that aligns incentives and builds trust.
Competitively priced portfolio litigation
Imagine you are representing a client in multiple matters related to similar issues. Traditionally, you would have to start your document review on each matter from scratch, making thousands of judgment calls relating to the respective relevancy of the documentation, performing new searches to identify the likely relevant documents, and using tags before you could begin to receive tag predictions. Those tag predictions would then take days or weeks to reach the highest level of accuracy.
Now imagine that you loaded your documents into a new database and your documents were automatically categorized and tagged before you had reviewed a single one. This is your new reality with cross-matter AI.
With AI, you can build consistent processes that scale across matters, creating a smarter, more efficient foundation for future reviews. Instead of reinventing the wheel with each new case, you can leverage past learnings, decision patterns, and tagging models to accelerate your review and enhance accuracy from day one. This not only improves performance on individual matters but also helps you refine and optimize your approach to portfolio litigation, delivering better outcomes for clients with less time and effort.
Imagine your Foreign Corruption Practices Act (FCPA) practice has worked on dozens of investigations. Use your work product from those past investigations to create a model that identifies documents that likely indicate bribery to surface potentially relevant documents earlier in your review, giving clients another reason to choose your team.
Rather than throwing away your judgment calls at the end of each case, create custom models and market your expertise to your clients. Your biggest clients will know that coming back to your firm ensures the greatest efficiency.
Reduced operational costs
AI helps law firms reduce operational costs by automating labor-intensive processes such as document review, contract analysis, and legal research. AI also reduces the need for outsourcing specialized legal tasks, such as compliance checks and due diligence, by enabling firms to handle these functions in-house with advanced automation. This not only lowers external vendor expenses but also enhances control over legal processes, improving both cost-effectiveness and operational agility.
AI also alleviates the overhead associated with non-billable assets by taking on routine, repetitive tasks that typically consume valuable internal resources. As a result, law firms can reallocate those resources more strategically and operate leaner without sacrificing service quality. By streamlining processes and minimizing redundancies, AI allows law firms to focus their budgets on growth, innovation, and client service.
Reduced costs and improved odds of favorable outcomes for clients
For decades, managed review teams have been using modified versions of processes designed for paper documents or review software that wasn’t built to cope with the challenges of modern data. As a result, firms and clients regularly pay exorbitant sums for work product that is no better than what was available a decade ago.
As the range of reviewable digital data explodes, review teams unassisted by AI tools can quickly become cost- and resource-intensive. AI-assisted legal tech, however, carves a trail through that forest.
Easier to attract and retain top talent
Lateral partner candidates increasingly prioritize whether a firm has modernized its technology, and so do the next generations of lawyers you’re recruiting from top law schools. AI can help law firms attract and retain legal talent by creating a more efficient and rewarding work environment. By automating repetitive tasks, AI frees up attorneys to focus on more intellectually stimulating and high-value work, like case strategy, client relationships, and complex legal analysis. This shift not only boosts job satisfaction but also enhances career growth opportunities, making firms more attractive to top-tier talent seeking dynamic, technology-forward workplaces.
Moreover, AI-driven tools help reduce burnout. Lawyers can now achieve a better work-life balance and manage their workload more effectively. Firms that integrate AI technology into their practices create a more supportive and forward-thinking environment, which is essential for attracting younger generations of lawyers who expect technological integration in their careers. This fosters a more engaged, efficient, and satisfied workforce, ultimately improving retention and reducing turnover.
Important AI considerations for lawyers and law firms
According to a 2023 analysis by Goldman Sachs, some 44% of current work tasks in the legal sector could be automated using AI, meaning opportunities abound to expand upon these benefits.
The expansion of AI presents exciting opportunities for law firms to stand out in this respect in part because the reduction or removal of manual legal work frees up lawyers to dedicate more time to creative thinking and strategizing.
As technology advances, AI has the potential to become a partner in generating firms’ best work. The opportunities are vast, encompassing everything from tailored, interactive training for students and associates to smarter client intake. With the ability to analyze hundreds of hours of court transcripts and recordings, AI could even help to identify judges’ preferences and proclivities, helping lawyers structure arguments and avoid potential pitfalls for maximum resonance.
As law firms continue to adopt AI technologies to enhance their practices, it's important to consider several key factors to ensure responsible and effective implementation. While AI presents numerous benefits, its integration into legal practice requires careful attention to ethical, security, accuracy, and compliance issues.
Below, I’ll explore some of the critical AI considerations for law firms to address as they begin to embrace AI in their practice.
Developing an AI policy
When building an AI policy, law firms should take a proactive and comprehensive approach to ensure that AI tools are deployed responsibly, ethically, and effectively. A well-constructed policy should address the architecture and training of the large language model you’re using, the reliability and verifiability of the output, enterprise hosting and data security concerns, ethical issues, and the role of AI in your legal services delivery.
The policy should establish guidelines for human oversight and define how attorneys must validate or supplement AI-generated outputs. Additionally, firms should consider transparency and explainability, ensuring that lawyers understand how the tools work and can explain their use to clients or courts if necessary.
As you’re fleshing out your policy, consider what pieces of the framework would entail lawyer responsibilities and which would entail operational implementation. While the lawyer-facing policy should provide practical guidance on the acceptable uses of AI in legal work and risks to watch for, a more detailed operational policy should guide the technical administration of AI systems — outlining verification protocols, accuracy benchmarks, and vendor accountability. This dual-policy approach helps ensure not only that lawyers use AI appropriately but also that the technology itself functions reliably, securely, and as intended across the firm’s infrastructure.
Ethical concerns
AI algorithms are trained on historical data, which may contain biases inherent in past legal decisions, case law, or social factors. If not properly addressed, these biases could lead to AI tools making biased recommendations or predictions, potentially impacting client outcomes unfairly.
Firms must ensure that the AI tools they use are regularly monitored and audited to detect and correct any bias, thus maintaining fairness and impartiality in legal processes. Developing a clear and cogent AI policy is a critical factor here. When evaluating potential vendors or tools, consider whether the large language models are being used in a way that runs the risk of copyright infringement, or if the system is appropriate for the subject matter of the case on which it will be used.
To learn more about building an AI policy that addresses ethical concerns and regulations, watch our latest webinar here.
Security & data privacy
The use of AI in law firms raises security and data privacy concerns, as AI systems handle vast amounts of sensitive and confidential client data. Ensuring the integrity of this data is paramount, and law firms must ensure that the AI tools they use comply with stringent security protocols to prevent data breaches, unauthorized access, and other cyber threats.
AI platforms should be equipped with features like encryption and secure cloud storage to protect sensitive information from being compromised.
Additionally, privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) require that firms take extra precautions in how they store, use, and share client data. Lawyers must ensure that any AI tools they implement align with these privacy laws to avoid costly penalties and reputational damage. Implementing strict access controls and audit trails is crucial to safeguarding client confidentiality and maintaining trust.
Learn more about privacy concerns and GDPR or CCPA compliance.
Information accuracy
One of the key concerns when using AI in legal practice is the accuracy of the information it generates. AI systems rely on data sets and algorithms to provide insights and recommendations, but if these systems are trained on incomplete, outdated, or incorrect data, the results can be unreliable – known as AI “hallucinations.” Law firms must regularly verify AI-generated outputs to ensure their accuracy, especially in areas such as legal research, contract analysis, and litigation predictions. Mistakes or inaccuracies in these processes can have serious legal consequences, so human oversight remains critical.
Pro tip: When using AI tools that generate new content, ensure that those tools provide citations and sources, like DISCO’s Cecilia Q&A, so you can verify the accuracy of the answers they provide.
AI training and education for lawyers
As AI tools become more integrated into legal practices, there is a growing need for training and education to ensure that lawyers are equipped to use these tools effectively and responsibly. Law firms must invest in educating their attorneys on how AI works, the ethical implications of its use, and how to interpret AI-generated results. Training programs should focus on building a deep understanding of AI’s capabilities, limitations, and appropriate applications within legal practice.
Moreover, ongoing education is essential as AI technology evolves. Lawyers should be kept up to date with new AI tools and innovations that could improve their practice. This could involve attending workshops, webinars, or collaborating with AI providers to better understand the latest developments. Firms should also encourage a culture of continuous learning to ensure that their legal teams are always at the forefront of legal technology, enhancing their practice and staying competitive in a rapidly changing legal landscape.
ABA model rules
As law firms integrate AI into their practices, it’s essential to consider their obligations under the ABA Model Rules, particularly the duty of competence (Rule 1.1) and the duty to supervise (Rules 5.1 and 5.3).
The duty of competence states that “a lawyer should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.” This language makes it clear that attorneys must understand and evaluate emerging technologies before incorporating them into legal work.
Additionally, under the duty to supervise, attorneys are responsible for the conduct of subordinate lawyers and nonlawyer assistants — including AI systems — used to support legal work. Just as lawyers must supervise human staff, they are expected to ensure that AI tools are properly vetted, monitored, and used in a manner consistent with ethical obligations.
The good news? You’ve already been doing this. Whether you’re working with human assistance or AI assistants, the underlying responsibility is the same: Make sure the work produced meets professional standards. AI doesn’t change your ethical duties. It just adds a new kind of support to the team.
In line with these evolving responsibilities, the ABA issued its first formal opinion on the use of AI in legal practice in July 2024, acknowledging the increased presence of AI in the legal sector. The ABA’s guidance emphasizes that AI is not a threat to legal practice but a powerful tool, that when used correctly, can help lawyers serve their clients more effectively. By staying informed, exercising judgment, and upholding core ethical standards, attorneys can confidently navigate this next chapter in the evolution of the legal profession.
Find out how DISCO AI can transform your practice
It is indeed an exciting time for AI with tremendous potential to accelerate the work of legal firms. It’s never been easier to leverage the benefits of AI-powered legal tech and market your firm’s credibility and knowledge capital more effectively. There’s no better time than now to get started.
See how DISCO AI operates and discover what it can do for your firm today.
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