In-house Legal Teams: The Frontier of Legal AI Innovation

Note: This article is just one of 60+ sections from our full report titled: The 2024 Legal AI Retrospective - Key Lessons from the Past Year. Please download the full report to check any citations.

In-house Legal Teams: The Frontier of Legal AI Innovation

In-house legal teams are uniquely positioned to benefit from legal AI, as there's no threat to their hourly wage and everything to gain.

According to the Thomson Reuters' Legal Department Operations (LDO) Index 2023, 76% of surveyed legal departments are already using contract management software solutions.[87] AI-powered contract management systems can accelerate contract review cycles by as much as 40% by optimizing terms and conditions, standardizing clauses, and flagging non-compliant clauses intelligently.[88]

AI-based contract management solutions can improve contract compliance and quality by minimizing errors and risks and ensuring alignment with the parties' goals and expectations.[89] Generative AI in contract management can enable companies to innovate and adapt to changing markets by surfacing new insights from their contract data.[90]

AI-powered contract review and analysis solutions allow legal teams to go beyond the typical extraction of facts and clauses from legal documents. A recent report indicated that 36% of law departments predicted an increase in regulatory spend, indicating a growing focus on compliance and risk management in legal departments.[91]