Summary In the corporate legal department, is there a difference between matter management and legal case management ? Legal operations professionals are more inclined to manage a matter, while lawyers...
Summary Legal departments face mounting pressure to control costs while maintaining quality service delivery. Artificial intelligence tools are emerging as powerful solutions to help in-house legal teams...
Summary The trend toward more AI-driven legal tools in the law department is here to stay, with daily advancements creating opportunities for workflow automation , improvements in accuracy, reduction...
Summary Contract Lifecycle Management is an enterprise legal management software application delivering a comprehensive approach to managing contracts from initial creation through execution and renewal...
Summary Global economics, regulatory compliance, cybersecurity, and data security and privacy concerns shaping the legal world require continuous attention to the rule of law. Contract lifecycle management...
* The views expressed in externally authored materials linked or published on this site do not necessarily reflect the views of LexisNexis Legal & Professional.
The trend toward more AI-driven legal tools in the law department is here to stay, with daily advancements creating opportunities for workflow automation, improvements in accuracy, reduction in legal spend, and less dependence on outside counsel. In this article, we look at the responsible use of AI-driven legal tools, highlighting specific areas to watch.
While these improvements will create a more productive law department, legal teams and operations professionals must be made aware of the risks and challenges that AI-driven legal research tools deliver.
Improvements in AI tools are occurring at a rapid pace, suggesting that generative AI is emerging with greater accuracy. On its heels is agentic AI with personalized agents that automatically complete tasks and workflows. It’s easy for a lawyer to get caught up in having research or document summarization handed to them on a silver platter; however, a cautionary yellow flag must be the mode of operation when using AI for all things legal.
Being aware of the risks, challenges, responsibilities, and accountability when using AI-driven legal tools is a priority for anyone submitting work products bolstered by AI. Here are some of the areas that may cause issues for legal teams that depend more frequently on the benefits of AI-driven legal tools for efficiencies and to complete work faster:
AI systems can perpetuate or amplify biases present in their training data, leading to unfair or discriminatory outcomes in legal analysis, research or recommendations. This is particularly concerning in areas like criminal justice, employment law and regulatory compliance, where biased outputs can have serious consequences. How is a lawyer to know a response is biased? The common practice of fact checking work with due diligence and not taking work delivered by others on the team for granted.
Many AI models function as “black boxes,” suggesting an opacity to how decisions are processed or interpreted. This outcome makes it challenging and sometimes difficult to understand or explain conclusions. In the legal world where the rule of law is tantamount to success or failure, this lack of transparency can undermine accountability and erode trust in AI-generated legal research. For senior legal leadership in a law department presented with AI-generated work in support of case management, for example, the first mode of operation is to ask for facts, due diligence, accuracy, and supporting citations.
AI tools often require access to sensitive client data, increasing the risk of data breaches or unauthorized disclosures. Legal professionals must ensure that AI vendors have robust security protocols and that confidential information is not inadvertently exposed or used for model training without consent. This area is critical and can create liability issues for a company if the legal team uses AI tools without concern about data privacy, security and protection.
There is a risk that legal professionals may place too much trust in AI-generated outputs, reducing critical oversight and potentially allowing errors or biases to go unchecked. This “automation bias” can be particularly dangerous in high-stakes legal matters. In-house lawyers need to question outside counsel’s use of AI-driven legal tools. The fast pace of legal cannot successfully continue without a yellow flag of caution to question citations, sources, and other presented evidence to confirm the accuracy of sourcing.
Lawyers must communicate the use of AI to clients, ensure the accuracy of AI-generated work, and maintain their duty of candor to courts and third parties. Failure to do so can lead to ethical violations or professional discipline. There's also the challenge of maintaining client confidentiality when using cloud-based AI services that might store or process sensitive information.
For example, the use of Anthropic’s Claude.ai helped create this article; however, when researching examples of AI hallucinations and copyright infringement, Claude was excluded. Could we suggest unethical bias? Various landmark cases against Anthropic’s use of copyrighted materials ended up in court.
At the end of June, 2025, a federal judge ruled in favor of Anthropic, saying the company did not commit copyright infringement. Judges ruled that Anthropic and Meta could train their Large Language Models on copyrighted products; however, the cases are far from over.
Determining who is responsible for errors or harms caused by AI-generated legal research is complex, raising questions about distributed responsibility among software developers, legal professionals, and organizations. Just as with other tips in this article, each lawyer’s discretion is paramount to success. Fact-checking behavior is critical to ethical accountability and responsibility. Without that pattern from the start, it would be easy to take whatever is delivered and ignore alarm bells about verifying information.
Rapid advances in AI may outpace existing regulations, creating uncertainty about compliance obligations and increasing the risk of inadvertent legal or ethical breaches.
Foundational software, like LexisNexis CounselLink+, provides enterprise legal management software with critical features for in-house legal teams. They can improve matter management with AI-driven legal research tools, approve outside counsel invoices using SmartReview®, qualify vendors, create improved workflows with AI tools, and much more.
Contract lifecycle management integrates in a single, unified workspace so lawyers can access contracts at any time. Contract to matter linking provides further efficiencies that eliminate manual searches for respective contracts.
The entire LexisNexis ecosystem is accessible with one click from the CounselLink+ dashboard. Users of LexisNexis Practical Guidance® can find hundreds of contract templates with approved clauses, terms and conditions to make contract drafting more efficient. Lexis+ AI is leading the industry, and AI-driven legal tools are being populated within CounselLink, including LexisNexis Protégé in CounselLink+.
In summary, while AI-driven legal research tools offer significant efficiency gains, they also introduce substantial risks around accuracy, bias, transparency, privacy, and professional responsibility that must be actively managed by legal departments.
The right enterprise legal management software provides a robust foundation for legal departments to shore up matter management, financials and budget planning and management, contract management, workflows and reporting, and vendor qualification and management.