How legal teams can make AI work

Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant prospect for corporate legal teams, it is already reshaping how departments work and deliver value to our internal and external clients. Yet the path to adoption is rarely smooth. Common pitfalls, ranging from poor technology choices to insufficient change management and lack of clear use cases, can stall progress and undermine confidence in AI’s ability to deliver real value.

With so many challenges to sidestep, how can corporate legal teams drive AI adoption within their department while safely clearing the hurdles that might trip them up?

Avoid shadow AI

Practically speaking, there are several tactical and strategic steps that corporate legal departments can take to increase their odds of success with AI. A necessary starting point is recognising that people are already using AI in their personal lives, in some capacity, every day. The toothpaste is out of the tube when it comes to AI.

Given this reality, corporate legal teams must ensure their organisations have enterprise AI accounts in place, and that licenses are distributed to the right employees. If your team doesn’t have a sanctioned platform to work with, they’ll inevitably turn to their own tools. They have AI on their phones and on their personal devices at home. Would they use those devices to ask some quick work-related questions, if they’re away from the office and inspiration strikes, potentially inputting sensitive or confidential information? The most realistic answer is: maybe.

The choice is simple: either provide your teams with secure, approved AI solutions, or risk them turning to unsanctioned “shadow AI” alternatives.

Go with the (work)flow

To further smooth the path towards successful AI adoption, don’t underestimate the importance of having tools that “live” where your people work.

Most people, legal professionals included, are averse to change. A vendor might create the world’s best AI-powered contracting platform; however, if your team is used to doing contracts in Microsoft Word and they have to step into a separate platform to get that work done, they likely won’t take advantage of it.

So: make it easy on them. Choose tools that fit right into everyday workflows. If AI tools don’t meet people where they work, they will gather dust. The best AI tools feel like an extension of existing habits, not a disruption to them.

Don’t shortchange change management

One of the biggest mistakes a corporate legal team can make is rolling out AI with little instruction beyond a vague encouragement to “try it out,” “explore what it can do,” and “see if it can make your life easier.”

This nebulous approach isn’t effective. People need clear guidance, supported by training and change management, to adopt new ways of working. If you have a LegalOps person within the corporate legal department, they can be instrumental in selecting and introducing AI into the team.

But even if you don’t have a LegalOps person, someone has to take the lead and guide the team through the transition. Frankly, AI has reached a point where people are getting overwhelmed – if not outright annoyed – by the sheer number of AI options that are flooding the marketplace. You can practically hear the choruses of “Great! A new AI tool! What’s this supposed to do for me besides just taking up more of my time?” ringing in the hallways.

This is where having specific use cases in mind for the AI comes in – and it can start with “the small things.”

Get the ball rolling

AI can deliver value in a variety of scenarios that seem “small” but are actually “huge,” simply because they occur nearly every single day.

For example, how many times does someone need a quick primer on a new regulation or the specifics of a law in a foreign jurisdiction? AI can be a great tutor to quickly get up to speed on these items – and since it provides references and citations, people can dig deeper into the actual law as needed. Legal professionals have been doing this sort of “quick fact check” for ages with Google; now they can do it even more effectively with AI.

Another fantastic application of AI within the corporate legal department is crafting customer email responses. Busy legal teams can lean on AI to make sure that replies are suitably empathetic while still firmly holding the line on a position. They can even input their position and ask AI, “What will the customer be bothered by in this?” so that they can start thinking ahead of how the customer is going to respond.

Summarisation is another no-brainer, especially for taking a dense legal document and translating it into something that business users can make sense of and act upon. All these applications of AI are huge time-savers and something that every legal department should be doing.

Don’t dismiss data once you get more advanced

From here, it’s easy to move into more sophisticated use cases like playbooks: running any new agreement against a “playbook” which represents the ideal form of that agreement. The AI highlights areas of concern in the agreement, flagging missing provisions or unusual added language.

This use case brings up the critical importance of data. 

The fact is, corporate legal departments need accurate, relevant data for their AI-powered playbooks to be effective. If the data repository that serves as the foundation for the AI is filled with rejected drafts or provisions that have been struck dozens of times in the past, the AI may assume that they’re fair game simply because they appear so frequently. It can’t tell what’s “good” and what’s “bad.”

In other words, “garbage in, garbage out” is alive and well in the AI era. By making sure they have clean, quality data sources to point their AI towards, corporate legal teams can avoid one of the biggest pitfalls around getting value out of their AI investments.

Build in guardrails

As corporate legal teams are deploying AI tools for their own use, they’re also advising other parts of the business on how they can use AI. This makes it imperative to have some set of AI usage guidelines in place that spell out the requirements for the internal use of AI (or the development of AI if it’s a product company).

Human oversight is one of the key principles these guidelines should embrace. There needs to be mechanisms for human review of AI decisions, particularly for high-impact outcomes or critical operations. Put another way, always keep a human in the loop.

Additionally, organisations should ensure respect for privacy, quality, and integrity of data, and access to data in line with relevant data protection and privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and other emerging regulations.

Meanwhile, governance and accountability are non-negotiable – and organisations must ensure that relevant assessments have been carried out to establish, mitigate, and monitor risk around AI usage.

These are the things that organisations need to think about because these are the things that their customers are going to ask about. These are the things auditors are going to ask about. These are things the market's going to ask about. 

Carefully thinking through and defining a clear set of AI usage guidelines and principles well ahead of time will save corporate legal departments a lot of potentially costly problems further down the road.

Avoid the pitfalls to unlock the promise

Questions around AI in corporate legal don’t center on if it will happen, but how to make it happen. The departments that succeed will be the ones that ground adoption in everyday workflows, train their people, clean their data, and set clear guardrails. Done right, AI becomes a trusted partner, helping legal teams deliver sharper insights, faster decisions, and greater value to the business. If they can successfully navigate the pitfalls that can derail progress, corporate legal departments will be well-positioned to fully realise the promise of AI and the better business outcomes it can deliver.