Gen AI Reduces Grunt Work for Some In-House Legal Teams

Generative AI use is increasing the quantity of work done by some in-house legal professionals but also freeing up their time to work on higher-level tasks, according to a new Bloomberg Law survey.

About 41% of respondents to Bloomberg Law’s State of Practice survey said use of gen AI has increased the amount of time they spend on higher-level tasks. Nearly four in 10 said artificial intelligence has increased the quantity of work done in-house.

The responses indicate that gen AI is making an impact on corporate legal departments, especially with lower-level tasks that some AI-watchers have long believed would be the first to be automated.

At the same time, the survey suggests AI adoption is still in its early days. Most in-house legal professionals said gen AI hadn’t yet led to changes in how much money they spend as a legal department or the amount of work outsourced to a vendor. For some law department leaders, it’s still too early to fully embrace a technology that is expensive and far from perfect.

Evan Slavitt, executive vice president and general counsel at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, uses Google‘s AI assistant Gemini to summarize documents. But he’s not ready to broadly integrate gen AI in his department because he’s experienced its imperfection and doesn’t have time to deeply vet gen AI tools.

“I will probably use it more, but I don’t feel comfortable being an early adopter, partly because I don’t have time to think about it enough,” said Slavitt, who was among the roughly 150 in-house legal professionals who responded to the survey.

Big Impact on Smaller Teams

Because AI has been gobbling up lower-level tasks, its benefits are sometimes more pronounced in small legal offices that don’t have as many staff.

Benjamin de Seingalt runs a one-person legal department at MarketVision Research, an Ohio-based firm.

De Seingalt said he uses gen AI assistants Gemini and Notebook LM, and the legal-specific tool GC AI, to supplement his work at the company’s legal and compliance department.

“I’m it for legal, so anything that can force multiply my time, that’s the be-all and end-all of ROI,” de Seingalt said.

He runs contracts through GC AI and asks it to flag concerns. The tool can identify flaws, like if a contract is making bad assumptions about the amount of industry-specific knowledge the other party has, he said.

He can also ask it to analyze how certain policies comply with particular laws and train it to follow specific guidance, like preferred privacy principles from a specific law firm.

“It’s a gut check,” said de Seingalt, adding he uses the tool to do tasks that he would ask an intern do if one was available to him.

Keeping Control

Many in-house legal professionals indicated gen AI had no impact on their workflow. For example, nearly three-fourths of respondents said gen AI had not changed the amount of work they send to or spend on outside counsel. About 70% said gen AI had led to no change in overall legal department spend.

Amy Feldman, chief legal officer at the consulting and staffing agency The Judge Group, said the lawyers in her department still read every contract and do the redlining themselves.

“I still think I can do it better than a computer can,” Feldman said, jokingly referring to herself as a Luddite. “I am not ready to give up that kind of control,” she added.

But AI adoption isn’t just about trust in a tool or belief that it can perform. For Feldman, it’s also about cost—and that’s a big hurdle.

She said contract management software, which is an increasingly popular AI-powered legal tool, was too expensive. Depending on the software’s features and other factors, it could cost thousands of dollars per year. That doesn’t include the tab in time and money for Feldman’s company to revamp its contract data so it can pull customized contract preferences out of the CLM software.

Workflow automation is a key selling point of CLM software. But less than 40% of respondents to the Bloomberg Law survey said gen AI had increased the number of automated processes or workflows they have, while 60% said there was no change.

Even though she’s been slow to adopt, Feldman said she understands why everyone is talking about AI in the legal world.

“A lot of what we do involves some significant grunt work; let’s face it,” she said.

The survey was conducted throughout April. In-house respondents included more than 150 attorneys and other legal professionals at US-based corporations and organizations.