Choosing the Right Legal AI Tool for Your In-House Team

22 November, 2025

Introduction

The pressure on organisations to embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology while delivering greater efficiency seems like it has never been higher than in today’s business environment.

For in-house legal teams, the opportunities presented by AI adoption are particularly compelling. In-house lawyers spend much of their time on repetitive, operational tasks such as answering legal questions, contract reviews and compliance reporting. By automating these high-volume processes, well-chosen Legal AI allows in-house lawyers to focus on higher-value, strategic advisory work, and substantially improve their work-life balance.

However, the unsanctioned use (also known as ‘shadow AI use’) of publicly available AI systems like ChatGPT or other generative AI platforms for work tasks, without formal oversight or governance, introduces significant legal risks for an organisation. Inaccuracy and the potential for unethical or discriminatory AI-derived outcomes, which may breach privacy, copyright and intellectual property laws, may impact a company’s reputation or risk legal exposure. AI tools used without proper vetting can compromise defensibility in legal workflows or may hallucinate or mishandle privileged data.

The following article identifies key factors to consider when making a business case for investing in Legal AI and offers a checklist for evaluating Legal AI solutions.

Free Checklist: Choosing the Right Legal AI Technology for Your In-House Team

How Are Legal AI Tools Driving Efficiency and Innovation for Organisations?

In-house lawyers are highly skilled knowledge workers who spend significant time on work that is often tedious and repetitive, well below their highest potential, but necessary for business risk management. This is precisely why legal technology—and particularly generative AI—is increasingly being recognised as a force multiplier for in-house legal teams, upskilling lawyers so they can independently deliver more service without incurring additional law firm costs.

According to the Association of Corporate Counsel’s (ACC) 2025 latest survey, over 90% of legal professionals cite efficiency as the top benefit of generative AI, but this is not the only driver of AI adoption by the legal industry.

Legal executives are increasingly being asked to do more with AI and less headcount, all while fewer resources, while steering their teams through uncertainty and AI transformation. The thoughtful adoption of legal AI solutions and tools for an in-house legal team has great potential to address the challenge of legal team employee engagement, expanding their ability to deliver more value to their organisation, reducing their reliance on external counsel, accelerating response times and decision-making processes, and providing the satisfaction of having more time to focus on higher value strategic work..

Inside the recent Forrester Consulting’s Total Economic Impact^TM (TEI) study, legal professionals reported finding more satisfaction in their roles when using Lexis+ AI^®.

5 Key Steps to Choosing the Best AI Tool for Your In-House Legal Team

Step 1 — Understand the Different Types of AI Tools on the Market

There are many options to consider when choosing a legal AI solution; however, they generally fall within the following categories.

General AI Tools are generative AI tools that are trained on vast datasets, usually including large portions of publicly available documents that were published on the internet at a specific point in time. This type of AI product is developed for general use rather than for use within a specific domain or field and, depending on the product, can assist in general drafting of emails and other documents, answering general questions and producing images. One of the significant risks of using publicly available AI systems is inaccuracy and the potential for unethical or discriminatory AI-derived outcomes, which may breach privacy, copyright and intellectual property laws, among others.

Legal Specific AI Products — several Legal industry-specific AI tools and solutions (such as Lexis+ AI with Protégé) can streamline document-heavy or legal research tasks such as answering legal questions based on a content set of legal resources, drafting various types of legal documents, summarising cases and documents, or performing contract clause drafting and comparison. Legal AI must enable in-house lawyers to drive more value to the business and maintain the high standards of privacy, security, and accuracy required in legal work while ensuring compliance with legal and regulatory standards.

Build Your Own AI Tool — some organisations have invested in developing their own internal AI tool to address specific use cases. It is worthwhile considering that many Australian in-house legal teams may not have a sufficiently deep content set on which to base an internal AI tool. The accuracy of the legal information on which AI bases its answers can be difficult to verify and this type of AI is generally not appropriate to be relied on for answering legal questions or drafting legal content.

Step 2 — Identify The Best Use Cases for AI in Your Legal Team

Before choosing an AI tool, consider and identify the use cases most relevant to your team. Invest time in identifying your key processes and what your legal team’s daily work looks like.

What type of work are your lawyers spending the most time on? What work type or processes could be assisted by an AI tool, e.g. repetitive low-risk work, collection of team data to drive insights or process inefficiencies? The best (and most common) use cases for legal AI tools to support in-house lawyers should accelerate the execution of critical daily tasks. For example,

Legal research: A Legal AI tool can rapidly analyse thousands of documents to identify those most relevant to your matter.
Case summarisation: Your selected Legal AI solution should have the capability of summarising a case in a way that provides legal professionals with succinct, relevant overviews that enable users to quickly gain an understanding of the pertinent information. This might include key legal holdings, a list of relevant material facts, controlling law, the rationale of the court, and the outcome of the case.
Insightful legal recommendations: A Legal AI Solution can uncover additional persuasive precedent cases and analysis to help strengthen arguments or transactional deal points that lawyers may have overlooked.
Automating tasks: Legal AI can assist lawyers by automating repetitive tasks such as drafting documents and analysing contracts.
Legal chatbots and virtual assistants to answer legal questions from the business, schedule appointments, or provide basic information about legal services or organisation policies.

Legal AI assistants such as Lexis+ AI with Protégé™ offer the opportunity to reimagine legal work. Starting with instant, verifiable answers to help you accelerate decision-making and reduce spend on external legal advice, to automating routine legal tasks such as agreements and contracts. Legal drafting is a particularly valuable use case for generative AI, where lawyers can generate an initial draft of a clause, correspondence, or a memo, by simply prompting an AI assistant with information around the matter at hand, adapting and re-using the trusted language and legal documents within the organisation’s Document Management System.

General legal functions can now be safely supported across a broader range of everyday tasks, with Protégé General AI, powered by the latest General AI models and verified open-web sources.

Protege General AI

Step 3 — Identify the Key Functionalities of the AI tool That Will Best Meet Your Use Case Needs
In addition to being able to carry out the tasks most relevant to assisting your legal team, consider the other key functionalities of the AI tool, such as:

Customisation — Do you need to be able to customise the AI tool for specific language or legal terminology? Using a conversational style AI can allow you to adjust your tool’s output through prompting.
Ease of use — Can you integrate the tool into your existing workflows and tools that you already use?
Do you want to isolate the AI tool from your document management system (DMS) or would you prefer to integrate it?
Training and customer service — What type of training do you and your team need and what are your ongoing support requirements?
Scalability and flexibility to future proof the technology — AI technology moves fast, and the AI tool should have the capability to be future-ready in the event of technological advancements and available integrations.

Step 4 — Gather Legal AI Tool Options and Conduct Due Diligence on the AI Vendor

Once potential AI tool vendors are selected, it’s essential to conduct due diligence on the vendor and its operations. Relevant considerations include,
How accurate and reliable is the tool?
What content set is the tool trained on?
How is the content set maintained and kept current?
How are AI hallucinations limited and managed?
What is the vendor’s experience with AI?
For a complete list of due diligence questions to ask potential solution providers, download the Checklist: Choosing the Right Legal AI Technology for Your In-House Team.

Step 5 — Adhere to AI Governance and Risk Management

This is an important final step when selecting a legal AI tool. Make sure to follow your organisation’s AI governance framework, policies, and procedures.

Keep in mind legal professional duties and have a clear written policy about how the legal team should use the AI tool. AI tools need human oversight and should be considered as the jumping off point for your legal research or first draft, and all AI outputs should be thoroughly reviewed and amended.

For guidance on governance frameworks, read the LexisNexis^® Whitepaper ‘Taking the Lead on AI Governance’ released in August 2025.

Why Is Thoughtful Investing in Legal AI Important?

For legal leaders looking to make the most of legal AI, the value of ensuring innovation is in step with your organisation’s long-term goals can’t be understated. Therefore, assessing the return on investment (ROI) for your future Legal AI solution is essential.

Focus on measurable outcomes and long-term impact to ensure your investment pays off. Look for a Legal AI solution that excels at the specific legal tasks you need — such as legal research or summarising documents — and then conduct due diligence to evaluate its real-world speed in generating outputs.

Not all Legal AI tools are created equally, so it’s important to assess the empirical data surrounding the performance of the tool once it’s placed in the hands of practising lawyers. The key considerations for evaluating the ROI of Legal AI technology include the following.

Measure time savings
Assess productivity gains
Evaluate cost reductions
Quantify improved outcomes
Analyse competitive advantage
Factor in risk mitigation
Calculate long-term value

For detailed guidance on evaluating the ROI of legal AI technologies, read the LexisNexis Whitepaper: Choosing Legal AI: Ultimate Guide for In-House Legal Leaders.

Legal teams who adopt Legal AI can expand their ability to deliver more value to their organisation, reduce their reliance on external counsel, accelerate decision-making processes, and experience the satisfaction of having more time to focus on strategic work.

Investing in Legal AI (such as Lexis+ AI with Protégé) is not simply a matter of acquiring cutting-edge software; aligning your technology investments with well-defined, measurable legal use cases, a clear change management process and long-term business goals is crucial.