On the surface it makes sense. Legal work is at the core of business operations, so legal AI feels like a natural starting point. But companies are more than just practice groups. Behind every problem are billing teams, operations teams, marketing teams, and the network of business professionals who keep your company running. However, a company with lawyers drafting in AI and billing teams manually matching invoices did not have AI in place and procured a point solution for one department.
Most legal AI tools already produce great findings and solid first drafts. A more difficult question is whether one platform can serve both the partners executing cross-border transactions and the billing teams closing at the end of the month.
The “Lawyer Only” Problem
The first generation of legal AI tools was built for a narrow audience. You can also summarize case law or rewrite contracts. While they may be useful to some people, they are designed for one type of user who does one type of work.
That causes problems. When lawyers use one AI platform and finance teams use another (or none at all), workflows become fragmented, work is duplicated, and context is not shared across the firm. Claims teams don’t have access to the same systems that lawyers work with. The marketing department is unable to quickly create materials for clients based on the firm’s actual business results. Operations are still piecing things together manually.
The average company uses five to 10 different applications to manage their operations, but less than half are satisfied with how those tools work together. That fragmentation will only get worse as AI emerges as yet another disconnected layer.
What does a company-wide approach actually look like?
Hughes Hubbard & Reed, an Am Law 200 law firm with offices on four continents, recently took a different approach. After a four-month evaluation, the company selected August as its enterprise-wide AI platform and implemented it across business areas as well as finance, billing, marketing, operations, and management.
This decision wasn’t dictated by a single flashy feature. At the end of the day, the question was whether the platform could handle the breadth of work that is actually done at global law firms without creating additional overhead for those using the platform.
“We have lawyers all over the world who work on transactional, litigation and regulatory issues. The hurdle for any new technology here is whether it can accommodate that scope without increasing the burden on the people using it,” said Neeraj Rajpal, chief information officer at Hughes Hubbard. “August reflects how our lawyers work while delivering real value to our finance, marketing and operations teams. That’s why this became not just a legal decision, but a company-wide decision.”
The last line is worth listening to carefully. It’s not just a legal decision, it’s a company-wide decision. This is a fundamentally different way to evaluate AI.
Why is this important now?
The legal industry has moved past the “should we use AI?” debate. According to Thomson Reuters, 26% of law organizations are currently actively using Gen AI, up from 14% in 2024, and 78% of law firm respondents believe Gen AI will be central to their workflow within five years. The open question is no longer about adoption but architecture. How can we deploy AI in a way that serves the entire enterprise?
Point solutions have no scale. These create tool sprawl, security issues, and fragmented experiences that cause people to abandon technology rather than adopt it. Companies running separate AI tools for contract reviews, investigations, business operations, and customer communications have a procurement problem, not a strategy problem.
Instead of needing a dozen different tools, companies need one platform that can properly and accurately cover their workflows. The pressure to consolidate is real, and it’s coming from committed leadership, not just IT departments.
practice and business
A phrase that keeps coming up in conversations with forward-thinking companies is “the practice of law and the business.” Capturing what’s important. A law firm’s competitive position depends on both departments working well and cooperating.
When a single AI platform connects the work of lawyers and the work that supports them, the entire firm moves faster. Lawyers can focus on the essence of the problem. Business teams can get the context they need without having to chase it down. And with solid leadership, you’ll have a clearer picture of how your entire business is performing.
Evaluation standards are rising
What stood out about Hughes Hubbard’s process was its rigor. Rather than simply testing whether an AI tool could draft documents and contracts, we tested whether it would work across all departments of the company. This evaluation took more time up front, but it avoids the more expensive problem of implementing something that only serves half of your employees.
If your company is currently evaluating AI, here are some questions worth asking: Is this a tool for lawyers or a platform for our firm?
The answer will determine whether you buy technology or make strategic investments in innovation.
If you want to see how August can work for your entire firm, schedule a meeting with our team at august.law.
