You didn’t ask for AI to be tied to your bonus, but here we are.
Here’s how to spot AI opportunities in Legal without rewriting your job description.
You’re the lawyer who protects the company.
You don’t miss details. You can sense risk before it shows up in the deck.
And despite being under-resourced, over-scheduled, and pulled into 47 things a day, your team still delivers.
But now, you’re hearing a different kind of pressure:
“Can Legal start using GenAI to improve efficiency?”
“What’s your AI roadmap?”
“We’re tying legal productivity to bonus this year.”
Let’s be honest: You didn’t go to law school to figure out artificial intelligence.
You went to think, write, negotiate, and move fast. (And without sacrificing precision, may I add).
And yet…
In your quieter moments (between contract reviews and compliance summaries), you’ve probably said:
“There must be a smarter way to get all of this done!”
There is.
And this is it: AI.
Why Legal Teams Must Learn AI (and Not Just for the Bonus)
You’re not resisting AI because you’re afraid. You’re resisting because you’re busy.
And because the tools never feel built for Legal.
But here’s the shift: Legal is no longer just the approver at the end of a process.
Legal is now a strategic function. And the way GenAI is implemented across the enterprise needs your voice at the table.
Legal needs to evaluate risk in GenAI use cases before reputational damage happens
Legal needs to understand where GenAI can ethically and securely speed up contract cycles, due diligence, and compliance
Legal needs to spot when AI is making decisions that require human oversight
This isn’t about becoming an engineer.
It’s about understanding AI just enough to apply your legal, compliance, and risk expertise to it, so you can help shape how it’s used ethically, securely, and strategically across the business.
The Real Problem: Legal is Drowning in Work That AI Could Handle
Let’s walk through how legal teams are working today.
And what changes when you add GenAI, automation, and AI agents to the mix.
Contract Review
The current way:
You manually review MSAs, NDAs, SOWs, often under pressure (and often alone). You compare language, flag deviations, hunt for past versions, and redline in Word. Every contract feels like a fire drill.
The AI way:
Drop the doc into a GenAI assistant (like Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT Enterprise). It scans the contract, highlights non-standard language, suggests redlines based on your clause library, and scores risk.
Now you’re editing a reviewed draft, not starting from scratch.
Result: 10x faster reviews, with time to focus on strategic risk, not typos.
Compliance Research & Regulatory Tracking
The current way:
A new law drops. You open tabs, read PDFs, highlight key points, translate legalese into plain English, and write a summary for the business. It’s hours of unscalable brainpower.
The AI way:
You forward the statute or PDF to your GenAI agent. It generates a side-by-side comparison to current policy, flags what needs to change, and writes an internal summary in plain English.
Result: What used to take 3 hours? Now takes 15 minutes.
Legal Intake & Triage
The current way:
Requests come through email, Slack, drive-by conversations. You sort NDAs from MSAs, chase missing details, and assign tasks manually. Intake is chaos.
The AI way:
You stand up a smart intake form using Microsoft Forms and Power Automate. Contracts are routed based on type, business unit, and priority. AI flags incomplete submissions and adds them to your Legal dashboard.
Result: Consistent routing. No more manual tagging. Intake runs itself.
💬
Internal Legal Q&A
The current way:
Everyone—from sales to marketing—asks the same 12 legal questions all year long. You answer them again. And again. And again.
The AI way:
You train a secure GenAI chatbot on your SOPs, past contracts, and policy docs. Now teams ask the bot questions like, “Do we have a DPA with Vendor X?” or “Can I use this image in a campaign?”
Result: Time back. And fewer emails that start with “Quick question…”
Reporting, SLAs, and Dashboards
The current way:
You manually export data from DocuSign and Salesforce. You build PowerPoint decks for the GC showing contract volumes, time-to-close, and risk flags. It’s tedious, and often late.
The AI way:
Your AI agent pulls live metadata across platforms, generates a real-time dashboard, and sends a slide-ready update every Friday at 4 PM.
Result: Reporting that’s automated, accurate, and actually usable.
Your Legal AI Playbook
Here’s how you start identifying your highest-value AI opportunities:
1. Inventory Your Work
Ask your team:
What tasks do we repeat over and over?
What gets triaged manually?
Where do we spend time gathering instead of analyzing?
What do we always do under pressure?
2. Categorize by Opportunity Type
3. Choose a Pilot Use Case
Pick one task that:
Happens frequently
Is easy to measure (time, volume, turnaround)
Drives value if you make it 50% faster
Then test one tool or platform inside your existing stack.
Start with Conga CLM, or Salesforce’s Einstein features.
Use what your company already pays for.
4. Prove the Win and Scale
Once you save 5 hours a week, reinvest that time into training the next AI process.
This is how your legal team becomes a strategic accelerator…without needing more headcount.
Legal AI Quick Reference Guide
Final Thoughts
You don’t need to become a technologist.
You need to become the legal strategist who knows when to delegate: to your team, to your tools, and now to your AI agents.
This isn’t about replacing your judgment.
It’s about refusing to waste it on things a machine can now do better.
Think horse, then car. The job didn’t change…just the speed and the tools.
#GenAIForLegal #LegalInnovation #SmartLegalOps #AIInTheEnterprise
What’s one thing in your legal workflow GenAI could do right now to make your week easier?
Drop it in the comments ⬇️
Let’s build smarter.
– Angela
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