AI Revolution: transforming legal tech in 2025

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been on the horizon for a long time, with AI already adopted in numerous business functions, from marketing IT, and HR to corporate strategy, finance, and software engineering in some shape or form. We haven’t even scratched the surface, though. In 2025, AI in all its guises will practically eclipse every other technology and methodology there is – big data, blockchain, process automation, supply chain management, you name it.

AI to deliver standardisation and transparency 

So far in legal tech, we have seen the most prevalent use of generative AI for summarisation – report summaries, meeting summaries, and so forth. 2025 will see AI being embedded into legal tech to a whole other level. AI, including generative AI, will be rooted in software making it invisible to the user as a technology/tool, but noticeable in the substantial value it delivers. 

Take, for instance, the mundane yet crucial task of time recording. In a typical scenario, multiple participants in a meeting might describe the same event in wildly different ways. One lawyer might note ‘meeting with Z and T,’ while another logs ‘meeting to discuss project B.’ This disparity can lead to confusion for clients reviewing invoices and timesheets. With generative AI, the potential to develop capability exists to harmonise these divergent narratives, creating a standardised description that clearly identifies the specific meeting and its purpose. This will not only help to streamline the billing process but also enhance transparency, fostering trust between law firms and their clients.

Similar approaches will be leveraged in other business functions too, such as HR, compliance, finance, and so forth. Utilising generative AI to assimilate information for clarity on activities in the respective business departments is a logical use of this technology in 2025. The legal tech landscape will be defined by AI-driven standardisation, offering transparency and efficiency in every aspect of legal operations.

AI to deliver concrete productivity gains in knowledge management 

More specifically in the legal tech knowledge management (KM) space, 2025 will see a transformative shift as AI becomes deeply integrated into systems as productivity features. Moving away from isolated, independent, or standalone AI tools, law firms will expect their KM vendors to re-engineer and revitalise KM workflows and processes to better reflect how lawyers interact with information and complete tasks. 

Imagine a KM system that applies an intelligent ‘KM template’ to legal tasks, automatically guiding lawyers through the process, and providing important and contextual information at every step. This KM template or set of building blocks, powered by AI, complex conditional logic, and analytics, would be a series of actions that would automatically trigger and surface relevant outputs within the lawyer's workflow. To illustrate, a lawyer logs into the KM system and the solution immediately recognises the individual as operating under Californian jurisdiction. The AI in the system automatically analyses the document the lawyer is working on to determine it is an ‘employment contract’ and searches for specific employment law-related values in the contract, say ‘reimbursement’, among others. On confirmation that ‘reimbursement’ is indeed mentioned in the contract, the KM system habitually queries external legal platforms such as LexisNexis or vLex to assimilate and make visible all the pertinent information that a Californian labour lawyer needs to be aware of regarding the issue of reimbursement.  

This KM template would serve as an in-built, automatically-triggered solution within the KM system for practically any knowledge activity lawyers perform as part of their day-to-day work. Rather than lawyers manually querying the generative AI engine within the KM system to shape the document or activity they are performing, the system itself would anticipate requirements and seamlessly integrate pertinent outputs at their point of need.   

Law firms will come to expect this level of AI-driven efficiency as the norm, not the exception, as they raise the bar for their return on investment in technology. 2025 is poised for a new era of intelligent, responsive, and truly productivity-enhancing KM, making material progress in liberating lawyers from the drudgery of time-consuming routine tasks, so that they can free themselves to focus on innovative, strategic thinking for clients.