By Saakar S Yadav
With this year coming to a close, it’s time to take stock of how far we have come in our efforts to build and integrate Legal AI and what’s in store for 2025.
Despite being a slow adopter of technology, the legal world was compelled to take notice of the potential benefits of Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLM), especially due to the mounting pressure of pending cases. The staggering delays in our judicial process caused by lack of human resources and unstructured legal data, needed us to reimagine our approach and transform the legal arena with AI.
Although these solutions present several complexities and risks, legal firms and professionals should start exploring AI integration into their daily work and not wait for the technology to mature.
GenAI and LLMs have come a long way in the past year in proving their capabilities to support legal teams in executing critical workflows. Several Legal AI products have solved known challenges like hallucination, privacy, confidentiality, source/citations, and copyright and built the case for using this technology to boost legal productivity.
Even though it is early days, the current use cases cover a wide range of tasks that need speed and accuracy.
Law Practice: Legal research • Draft documents
Non-Practice: Legal research, drafting documents, drafting legal updates, emails, speeches, and slide decks • Summarize video meetings and action items
Litigation: Deposition summaries and question generation • Draft interrogatory responses • Timelines
Transactions + Contracts: Due Diligence • Contract review (e.g., extract clauses, redline, compare to standard) • Contract summarisation
Compliance: Answer questions about policies
Source: Gartner Research
Also read: How Explainable AI can speed up court cases, and cut out legal jargon
Recently when Google revealed Willow, its state-of-the art quantum chip, questions around Quantum Computing and its potential use in the legal field rose again.
Quantum Computing could help the legal profession tackle several challenges in legal research, data security, e-discovery, and contract analysis with its superior processing power and computational capacity. It is also capable of simulating legal scenarios – predicting outcomes of legal disputes or even determining the impact of policy changes. With AI-driven insights lawyers, counsels and judges could make informed decisions for fairer legal outcomes.
As we look to 2025, our industry is poised for significant shifts with increasing technological advancements, evolving client expectations, and changing workplace dynamics.
Self-Service Legal Tools
In the coming years, the percentage of legal requests answered by self-service tools designed for business will increase from low single digits to at least 20%.
AI Models with Advanced Reasoning
Advanced reasoning capabilities in AI models are likely to transform tasks such as comparing contracts and handling multistep workflows with even greater innovation.
Small Language Models (SLMs)
SLMs are a good fit for legal tech because they offer better privacy, faster responses, and more affordable customisation. They’re particularly useful for focused tasks like contract analysis and document drafting. They won’t replace Large Language Models (LLMs) entirely, but are useful in niche areas, giving law firms the flexibility to train them for industry-specific needs.
Rise in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
RAG combining LLMs, SLMs, and external knowledge bases is expected to rise significantly. This will ensure enhanced functionality with generative AI tools producing precise and relevant information. This trend will revolutionize document management and streamline legal research.
Building GenAI Skills for Adoption
To keep up with document generation and contract review tools, legal professionals will need to sharpen their prompt engineering and data management skills. Bridging the gap between new tech investments and actual user adoption will be a big focus in 2025.
AI-Driven Legal Assistants
2025 has been declared the year of Agentic AI and the legal space will also see an influx of AI agents and AI-driven workflows. These Legal AI assistants will find their way into everyday operational tasks, enabling firms to optimize their workflows and enhance client service.
We are on the cusp of revolutionising Legal with AI, and our industry needs to trust and invest in these technologies moving forward.
(The author is the founder of Lexlegis.ai. Views expressed are the author’s own and not necessarily those of financialexpress.com.)
