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As in-house legal teams race to adopt artificial intelligence, experts argue that they are overlooking the foundations needed to unlock its full potential.
In a recent episode of LawTech Talks, Shaun Plant, co-founder and chief legal evangelist at LawVu, argued that fragmented systems, inconsistent processes and disconnected information are restricting the value of artificial intelligence.
Plant highlighted that legal departments must look beyond speed and prioritise connected knowledge, proactive risk management, and better decision making.
Speaking with host Jerome Doraisamy, Plant discussed why getting the fundamentals right could be an integral way of making in-house legal teams more effective, not just efficient.
Fixing fragmented legal flows
Plant argued that many in-house legal teams are embracing AI before addressing the outdated processes that are holding them back.
“I think we’re at this kind of really strange point in in-house legal where teams are looking at some incredibly sophisticated technology, AI, while, at the same time, many of their existing ways of working are still pretty archaic,” Plant said.
“And then when I moved in-house, there was nothing.
“There’s no real process around how the team was working – everybody worked the way that they thought best.”
Without the right foundations implemented, Plant noted that AI risks reinforcing existing inefficiencies rather than helping legal teams work smarter.
“Navigating between all those tools to do your routine work just adds a heap of wasted time and lost focus,” Plant said.
“And so, essentially, we’ve digitised individual legal activities without really improving how the function works as a whole.”
“If you don’t have the foundation, if you don’t have the context, then this is going to be a really hard struggle for the team to do.
“You’re still just going to be adding an incredibly intelligent but dumb tool into your team, and it’s going to be creating additional work while at the same time making you think that you’re actually a little bit faster.”
From AI efficiency to effectiveness
Plant noted that AI’s ultimate potential lies not simply in saving time, but in helping legal teams adopt collective knowledge and make better decisions.
“The value of AI isn’t just helping me to do my work faster. It’s about potentially allowing me to benefit from the rest of the team, what everybody else knows and what we’ve done and the decisions that we’ve made before me,” Plant said.
“I think that’s why we need to move from having a conversation [about] productivity to something which is more interesting at the level of the legal function.
“At that point, you’re no longer just asking AI to tell us what a document says, but you’re then starting to use it to help us to understand something more about the organisation.”
Plant recognised that by connecting information across a business, AI could help legal teams identify issues that continue to recur and merge risks before they escalate to something bigger.
“That’s where AI has real potential, if we can see that particular contractual issue is appearing more frequently, that one part of the business is generating the same type of problem over and over again, or that something we’re seeing across our contracts is beginning to create a wider exposure, AI can potentially do something about that a lot easier,” Plant said.
“And that’s the difference again between efficiency and effectiveness, but also that reactive way of working and proactive way of working.
“Saving 20 minutes on a task is useful, but helping the GC to understand something about the organisation that couldn’t previously be seen, or being able to identify an issue before it became significant is a very different level of value to just saving time.”
