Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that AI has, and will continue to revolutionise the world as we know it. The legal industry is no exception.
We’ve all read the posts on Linkedin about how AI is transforming legal teams. AI-powered legal tools are everywhere. But on the ground, integrating AI into legal teams isn’t entirely seamless.
Many teams I speak to love the idea of AI but are lagging behind, struggling to understand how AI directly translates and can tangibly benefit their day-to-day work. Worse, some teams treat AI like spaghetti and throw it at the wall to see what sticks.
I’m not an expert. But I have implemented AI in a legal team with success.
So, in an effort to bring some clarity amidst all the noise, we’re going to break down AI use cases for you and your legal team.
Today, we’re diving into one of my favourite topics,
Legal Bots.
What is a Legal Bot?
(A very basic summary)
A legal bot (or assistant) is an AI-powered tool designed to help legal teams automate repetitive tasks and streamline workflows.
Without getting technical, at its core, a legal bot typically combines a large language model (LLM) (yes, like ChatGPT) with your team’s existing documents and knowledge base to provide quick, relevant responses.
No matter how advanced or customized your bot is, the basic process remains the same:
Ingest Information – The bot is trained on legal documents, policies, contracts, and FAQs relevant to your business.
Understand Queries – Using natural language processing (NLP), it interprets user requests, whether it’s a simple contract request or a compliance-related question.
Generate Responses – It retrieves the most relevant information or automates a task (e.g., providing a contract template, flagging key clauses, or directing a user to the right policy).1
The best part? Unlike most of us, it doesn’t get annoyed by having to answer the same questions over and over… 😵💫
Use Cases in Legal
Okay great, but I still don’t get how this applies to my day-to-day work.
Let’s set out some common scenarios and where a bot could likely step in to do some of the heavy lifting:
The Knowledge Management Bot
How many times per week do you send the same links, outline the same process, or get asked the same questions that are already available in your company’s policies?
“I need an NDA.”
“ How do I get a vendor contract reviewed?”
*internal scream*
Allowing the business to self-serve knowledge is a great way to combat this.
Ok but how would this work in practice?
Step 1 : Build or buy an AI bot (more on this later).
Step 2: Fill its brain by uploading your chosen documentation (make this as broad or narrow as you like!).
Step 3: With a click of a button, hook it up to a test comms channel (Slack or MS Teams) and give it some training by asking it questions and correcting them if needed.
Step 4: Launch time 🚀 Set up a public channel on your comms platform (e.g #legal-queries) - this will act as your legal “source of truth” for the business.
Step 5: Let the bot answer, monitor the channel, give the bots answer a ✅ reaction to let the business know you approve or edit the answer for accuracy.
Step 6 : Sit back and….well, not just yet but we’re getting there.
The overarching idea here, is that we have streamlined legal queries.
The entire business knows there is one way to contact legal for questions, through our #legal-queries channel. Users get quicker answers, the business moves faster and the pressure is taken off legal to answer general queries2. We achieve all of this while still maintaining human oversight and confidence that legal is still there to step in when the business needs them.
2. The Vendor Management Bot
Yes, we’ve all seen AI redline contracts and that’s great.
But have you ever wondered how many active vendor contracts you have? Do you have to message 10 people to find out if the business already has a project management tool? Or spent hours searching for when your renewal date is?
Create a bot to manage this! Sync it up to your contract storage (Google Drive / Notion etc.), create a channel for your legal team and let it work its magic 🪄
*Tip: Now that you know ABC Ltd is due for renewal in August, why don’t you set a reminder in Slack/MS Teams to give you a heads up?
3. The Librarian Bot
We’ve all been there, staring at "Final_Final_v3_ACTUALLY_FINAL.docx" wondering where everything went wrong… too deep?
What if you could get AI to tell you what to name it? Lets go even further, what if it could give you guidance on where to store it?
This is super simple to achieve:
Feed the AI a naming convention (e.g [Vendor/Company][Document Type][Version][YYYYMMDD] [Initials].docx).
Give it an overview of how you store your docs ( Legal Team Drive > Vendor Agreements > [Name of Company] )
Building or Buying a GPT
I love it…But where can I actually get a bot?
Two options: Build or Buy.
We could go back and forth on the pro’s and con’s of both. But to keep it simple, unless you have a team internally that can dedicate the time and attention to your needs, I suggest buying.
Here’s a list of legal tech companies I’ve tried that offer AI bots (all plug-n-play and no need for an internal tech team). Have your own suggestions? Leave them in the comments!
Usually, bots are just one feature of a Legal AI company, so be sure to evaluate whether the other tools included would be useful for you when making your decision.
Conclusion
The aim of this piece was to demonstrate how the scary discussion of AI can be broken down into practical tools that can transform how legal teams operate. Here we discussed 3 simple use cases, but there is so much more you can do.3
Start small and build meaningful change. The goal isn’t to replace lawyers but to free them for high-value strategic work.
After all, wouldn’t you rather spend your time advising on strategy than sending someone the link to your contract review form for the 100th time?
Best,
LegalOps 101
I am not a legal expert, please converse with your Privacy & Infosec teams to ensure the tool abides by your company’s privacy & data rules.
Your output is only as good as your input. If you’ve trained your bot well enough, it should answer the user’s general query. If the query is bespoke and the bot cannot answer, legal can then step in and handle the request.
Want similar content? Check out Laura Jeffords Greenberg on Linkedin | The Legal Engineer on Substack.