Light Legal is aggressively leaning into the use of AI legal tools to deliver maximum value to its business clients, particularly in the form of increased speed, cost efficiency, and quality of legal services. My basic theory and equation is this: human lawyer x AI tools = maximum value-add for clients. Human lawyer alone or AI tools alone are not going to cut it today and into the future, but the combo can multiply the value-add that clients receive from legal services well beyond anything that has come before. This is great news for clients and lawyers alike! This blog post intends to share my perspective on this both for the benefit of clients hoping to understand how AI can boost value from their lawyers’ services and for lawyer’s looking to figure out how they should use these tools to boost value for their clients.
1. Start with the Goal in Legal Services and How AI Helps Achieve It: A lawyer's goal should always be to deliver maximum value to clients on the measures of quality, cost efficiency, and speed. Any lawyer that is not trying to maximize value-add for clients on these three measures (which are sometimes in natural tension with each other) is not thinking from the client’s perspective. Lawyers should adopt any tool that can help increase the delivery of value on these measures and AI provides such a tool (phenomenally so). Therefore, it falls into the category of auto-decision, must-have! If this means that a lawyer bills less hours for certain projects, well that’s great news for the client! It’s the lawyer’s job to then find additional clients and/or find ways to move up the value chain by delivering higher-value services to existing clients (don’t worry lawyers, there is good news here discussed below). Lawyers that consider AI a threat aren’t thinking about AI correctly in my view – it’s a tool and opportunity to wow our clients with bigger value-add.
2. Delivering Legal Services at Light Speed. For Light Legal, a large part of taking a founder’s mindset in delivering legal services is trying to get on the founder’s wave-length and particularly their cadence – this means putting urgency and velocity on a pedestal. A great work product delivered day-of or within 24 hours creates more value for most founders than a perfect work product delivered a week later. AI tools help increase the speed in the delivery of work products and in this way align with the founder’s mindset. I use ChatGPT 4o and other AI tools like Spellbook in contract reviews to shave valuable minutes and sometimes hours off of work products. This often comes in the form of asking ChatGPT 4o a practical question, like “Can you show me a customary mutual limitation of liability section that excludes indemnification and includes a liability cap of 12-months fees”. I know what this clause should look like and I do have plenty of good examples to draw from in folders on my computer, but ChatGPT 4o can help me more quickly identify good example language for me to customize and integrate properly into the agreement. AI will often suggest some good and bad ideas, but I know what I'm looking for and can quickly filter through the responses from AI in a few seconds, make some quick modifications in a few more seconds, and off I go from there with my document drafting or review without having to pause and dig for example clauses elsewhere. This allows for light-speed turnaround times on document drafting and reviews.
3. Increase in Quality. I like using certain review tools built into Spellbook, for example, to see what redlines Spellbook would suggest in a document. So, for example, I can highlight text in an agreement and ask the question “please suggest redlines here so that the customer has exclusive rights to use the Sofware in the aerospace field of use”. I don’t use the majority of the redlines suggested (some are indeed not great) and I throw away the comments that are produced by Spellbook because they are often too generic and not tailored to a normal/human contract negotiation process with opposing counsel. But, filtering through these suggested redlines is quick and it does result in good inclusions and some occasional catches I hadn't thought about. This combination of AI review with human expertise and contextual understanding can indeed increase the quality of work products.
4. Cost Efficiency and Bang for Buck. Cost efficiency isn’t about keeping the client’s expenditure near zero, it’s about delivering maximum bang for buck / value. This means there are natural trade-offs between speed and quality. AI helps alleviate this tradeoff a bit, enabling higher quality work products in less time. It does not eliminate this tradeoff, but moves the ratio of quality over speed in a favorable direction for the client. This is unequivocally good news!
5. The Best Question Asker Wins in the World of AI (The Lawyer’s Role).
AI is only as helpful as the quality of the questions / prompts that you ask it. This means that the people who can ask the best and clearest questions and follow-up questions are going to get the most out of AI. This is where a lawyer’s skillset can really shine! A great lawyer is, in my view, not someone that has all the answers all the time, but someone who is excellent at asking the right questions and follow-up questions to surface the right answers and path forward for a client (that is “thinking like a lawyer”). This is how my relationship with AI is emerging as I interface with it on behalf of clients on a daily basis. I am asking it often 5, 10, 15, 20 questions and follow-up questions in a row on more complex matters to sequentially hone in to the right answer and the correct path forward. My observation is that clients often struggle with asking AI the right questions or providing it with the right level of detail in prompts in order to obtain from it the correct answer, draft clauses, draft agreements, etc. I've seen clients hand me AI-generated drafts that are in terrible shape because the prompt was simply not on the right track. And it should also be noted that AI-produced drafts of agreements are often extremely short and skimpy on important and customary details even when the prompt is good (I've had to clean up a lot of messes created by AI-drafted agreements recently). I often ask my clients a dozen questions and follow-up questions to get the big picture of what they need and then ask AI a dozen questions and follow-up questions based on that big picture on the path toward executing the client’s needs. This is where human lawyer x AI is a true multiplier of value. This is particularly true, for example, when human interfacing is required with a client and opposing counsel as part of a complex contract negotiation, financing, or M&A deal and when there is substantial background context and information in emails, documents, phone calls, and group Zoom conversations that simply can’t all be dumped on AI within the limitations of its prompt window. Human legal judgment is required to filter through this background context/docs/material and ask AI the right questions at the right moments to deliver maximum, customized value to clients.
6. Why I Am a Lawyer x AI Optimist.
Because I think the ability to ask the right sequence of questions toward finding the right answer or path forward is the core function of a great lawyer, it is an incredibly fun and rewarding time to be a lawyer with AI tools at our disposal.
I had mentioned that, in the world of AI, lawyers can and should get more work done for each client more efficiently (i.e., bill less time for any given work product). Some lawyers might fear that this is a race to the bottom with lawyers fighting over a finite or shrinking pie of work. Fear not! As all prior technology advances have shown, productivity-improving tools mean more value is created across the board in the ecosystem, meaning more work gets done with less so that more and better products and services are offered at lower cost and higher profits and that deliver more value in the marketplace (in essence more revenue and GDP across the economy). It is no coincidence that the AI boom has coincided with a stock market bull run recently. This means more ideas, products, and businesses... and more work for lawyers, not less.
Just as lawyer x computer and lawyer x smart phone and lawyer x [virtually any other tech advance] has meant higher delivery of value to clients with still plenty of work to go around for lawyers, lawyer x AI will also help lawyers deliver more value to clients and, as a result, grow the legal-work pie. So call me a lawyer x AI optimist!
