How Can AI Help Lawyers Move Up the Value Chain?

By Julie Chapman | LexisNexis Head of Legal, North America 

The acceleration in the adoption of new artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the legal industry has many lawyers anxious about how this technology will change their profession. This is perfectly understandable — as with any new tech innovation that impacts the way that law is practiced, there are uncertainties around what it is, whether it’s worth the hype and even how it may impact the value of lawyers in the future. 

For those lawyers who are struggling with these fundamental questions, perhaps a wise course of action is to take a step back before diving in. This pause for perspective just might be the key to taking control over how AI-powered legal tools can be used to enhance legal practice and actually make lawyers even more valuable to their clients. 

Low Value vs. High Value Work 

Any legal professional has an instinctive understanding of the difference between “low value” and “high value” work. Low value work is that behind-the-scenes administrative work that clients rarely see, or even care to see, but must get done accurately. High value legal work is the legal advice that only a highly trained, experienced lawyer can provide — and that clients actually want to pay for. 

For example, lawyers often end up being “note takers” in meetings and are asked to specify agreed-upon action items for the record. We are frequently expected to review lengthy emails or legal memoranda and provide succinct summaries for colleagues that identify next steps.  And let’s be honest, most of us were not trained to build those impressive PowerPoint presentations that visually communicate important findings or legal recommendations. 

The problem with low value work is that it tends to force lawyers to be reactive most of the time as we get stuck in our daily routines of dealing with emails, calls and meetings as they are assigned to us on a first-in, first-out basis. This is inefficient and prevents us from focusing our valuable time and effort on tasks that are viewed as true value-adds by our clients. 

Low value work is disadvantageous to lawyers because it: 

• Limits ability to seek out and prioritize strategic projects; 
• Leads to patterns of doing work that may have little utility for the client and does little to reduce risk; 
• Reduces business development opportunities; and 
• Jeopardizes work-life balance. 

Of course, the problem of low value work is hardly new, this has been a recurring theme in legal circles for years. For example, a 2020 survey reported by Artificial Lawyer found that two-thirds (67%) of in-house lawyers feel buried in low-value work. But we may be closer to a solution than we have ever been. 

How AI Can Help with Low Value Work 

The emergence of new legal AI tools creates an incredible opportunity for lawyers to demonstrate higher value as strategic advisors to their clients. The best way to illustrate this point is to provide a couple of real-life use cases. 

Administrative Tasks 

New legal AI tools can automate a number of administrative tasks, such as summarizing emails from the past week to get you caught up on what transpired while you were on vacation. They can help prepare you for a 1:1 meeting with your manager by immediately surfacing all interactions with that individual — e.g., emails, calendar invites, etc. — since your last meeting. And they can assist with project management by breaking any project idea into specific, actionable phases with key milestones for you to use in tracking progress. 

Legal Advice and Drafting 

Legal AI tools can also help lawyers achieve new efficiencies with time-intensive legal research, analysis and drafting tasks. For example, they can seek out relevant authoritative legal content based on just a simple prompt, then can serve as your sparring partner in the review of that research by helping you make sure that you have covered all of your bases. They can quickly summarize case law and various legal documents to provide you with salient conclusions that would otherwise take hours to surface. And they are extraordinary legal assistants when it comes to generating first drafts of agreements, claims and other template-based legal documents. These are ways for lawyers to have helpful starting points, freeing up your time for the nuanced legal counseling work that is valuable to your clients — and more fulfilling to you as a trained lawyer. 

The key result of these breakthrough AI-powered legal tools is that using them wisely allows attorneys to free up their capacity to focus on what they were trained to do. Demonstrating high value work for clients is the pathway to success for everyone concerned, from in-house counsel to senior partners at law firms to junior attorneys just starting out in their careers. 

Move Up the Value Chain 

For lawyers wrestling with the uncertainties of AI technology, it is useful to take a step back and think holistically about your current workload, workflows and available resources. This allows you to see where your time is being spent and assess whether that time is being spent on tasks that your clients view as high value work. The best way to move up the value chain is to prioritize high value work and delegate low value work. The good news is that there are specific tasks and workflows that are well-suited for delegation to legal AI tools. 

LexisNexis Protégé is a personalized legal AI assistant that leverages AI technology to help legal professionals feel like they are working with a trusted colleague. For example, Protégé can generate full, custom transactional and litigation documents — such as operating agreements, copyright assignments, complaints and motions. 

LexisNexis Protégé is available now in Lexis+ AI and Microsoft Word workflows and will soon be ubiquitous across LexisNexis and Microsoft products.