What the legal team needs to know

Legal work is evolving as the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in legal professionals' work increases. Generation AI for the Thomson Reuters Institute 2025 Professional Services Report found that 26% of experts use Generation AI (Genai) in their workplaces almost twice as much as 14% they used in 2024.

Given this, legal experts expect that increasing use of this AI will significantly change the role of legal experts. A 2025 Thomson Reuters report on Future Experts found that 80% of experts believe AI will have a high or transformative impact on jobs over the next five years. These experts are most excited by the ability of AI to free up more time and assist in working more efficiently and productively, creating high-quality work.

To remain competitive and take advantage of opportunities to grow, legal teams must adapt to these changes while maintaining their ethical obligations. This guide is a one-stop resource for law firms and in-house lawyers navigating this deep AI shift. It covers what AI is, how legal experts use it, and what the legal team should do next to benefit from it as soon as possible.

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What is AI in a legal context?

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AI timeline in law

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Core Use Cases for AI in Legal Practices

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Court's ai

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Legal Ethics and Regulatory Considerations

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Data Privacy and Security

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A perspective from a legal instructor

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How can your legal team prepare?

What is AI in a legal context?

Let's start by defining the terms commonly used when discussing AI and law.

• ai It is a technology umbrella term that can simulate human abilities such as learning, reasoning, problem solving, decision making, and language understanding.
• Machine Learning (ML) It is a type of AI that learns from data patterns and creates decisions and recommendations.
• Generating AI (genai) It is a type of AI that creates new text, images, audio and video content depending on the user's prompt. Common genai-based solutions include ChatGpt, Copilot, and Gemini.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) Use ML to understand and generate human language. This is key to genai, translation tools, and speech recognition.
• Agent AI In many cases, other forms of AI can be used to use reasons to plan and execute multi-step processes according to predefined goals under human monitoring and control.
• Consumer grade, public toolsTrain a huge amount of information that covers almost every subject found online, such as chatgpt. Therefore, some of the data they rely on is unverified or incorrect. This means that those errors are included in the results.
• Professional grade AIIt is built on curated, verified legal content, including the Coconocel Legal, with the latest and reliable information. These solutions are designed to handle tasks specific to legal practices, such as legal investigations, document reviews, and contract analysis.

It is important to remember that in all cases, AI supports legal reasoning, but does not replace it. It automates specific routine tasks and acts as a jump start for more complex tasks. Attorneys should always use professional skills and judgment to determine how to use the information and insights provided by AI.

AI timeline in law

Although AI in legal work has increased dramatically in recent years, the history of artificial intelligence and law goes back more than a decade. Since the early 2000s, e-Discovery tools began using AI to search for documents. We improved results using AI features such as finding concepts as well as keywords. This is when companies like Clio have gotten off to the start. From 2010 to 2018, AI began to be used in legal analysis. In 2010, Thomson Reuters Westlaw, like LexisNexis seven years later, used AI and ML in legal investigations.

The next milestone was to use genai and increase efficiency by 10 times. With new companies in the AI ​​and legal fields such as Harvey AI, existing legal AI vendors have created increasingly powerful tools.

Core Use Cases for AI in Legal Practices

Attorneys use AI in multiple ways, and these are one of the most common use cases cited in the 2025 Generated AI Report.

Document review and analysis

Document review and analysis are the most commonly used features, and AI usually completes in seconds tasks that take several hours. AI can find needles in haystacks across millions of pages, allowing you to view a wide range of documents, from case files to contracts.

Legal investigation

Research using professional grade AI can be done in-depth research using unique, trusted content.

Document Summary

A summary of the document saves a considerable amount of time for lawyers and staff. genai can find the information most relevant to a particular case or project.

Writing a brief or memo

Writing an overview or note is fast and thorough using legal AI tools. These help lawyers begin the process, find quotations and references, make the document consistent and answer questions.

Draft of the contract

The contract drafting AI tool finds relevant documents to use as a starting point, finds clauses from trustworthy sources, and incorporates a preferred language.

Supported draft

Drafting a correspondence is the time-consuming part of the lawyer's day. AI suggests phrasing options and speeds up email and letter writing by summarizing documents, checking grammar, and automating the process.

Court's ai

In June 2023, the lawyer submitted a simple case written with the help of ChatGpt, citing legal cases that support the client's position. However, as the judge found, six of these cases were absent. ChatGpt made them.

In 2024, the Professional Services Report, Thomson Reuters Generated AI, found that 31% of people working in courts expressed concern about the use of AI, making it the most common response among them. Additionally, only 15% of court respondents who are excited about these technologies are the lowest percentage reported in any employment segment in the survey.

The sentiment about the future of genai

Hesitant	35%
Full of hope	twenty three%
I'm excited	twenty one%
I'm worried	16%
terrible	2%%
Any of these	2%%

Source: Thomson Reuters 2024 Professional Services Generation AI

Despite the “ChatGpt lawyers headline,” the court's hesitation simply allowed us to inform us that we were taking the time to understand where and how technology fits into the modern court system.

“I used ChatGpt and other AI programs, but I saved the playing field for certain tasks and occupations, [it’s] And it's a bit dangerous in the sense that if you're censored, it's inevitably biased,” said one US judge.

Legal Ethics and Regulatory Considerations

AI offers many benefits to legal professionals, but can also pose ethical challenges.

The data used to train AI is biased due to unfairness, limited geographical scope, or historical attitudes currently perceived as impaired algorithms. Human supervision is important for managing risk, especially when manipulating general-purpose AIs such as ChatGpt. As mentioned above, AI can effectively return false information and even make up for things.

In response to the rapid emergence of genai that began in late 2022, with the launch of ChatGpt in 2024, the American Bar Association (ABA) has released a formal opinion on the ethical obligations involved in the use of lawyers' use of Genai. Many state and local bar associations have since planned to publish their recommendations or do so soon.

AI regulations are still evolving. The European Union adopted the world's first comprehensive set of rules on AI in June 2024. While there is no match for the federal level in the United States, there are laws that affect certain aspects of AI use, such as the California Privacy Rights Act and the Federal Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Data Privacy and Security

Legal experts need to prioritize data privacy and security to protect sensitive client information from the rise in cyber threats. Professional AI solutions require strong security rules and strict security standards to maintain client trust and protect sensitive data.

Thomson Reuters prioritizes data security, privacy and compliance and maintains a comprehensive information security management framework. For more information about security commitments and compliance practices, please visit the Thomson Reuter Trust Center.

What do legal tutors say about AI?

Legal leaders experience both challenges and success by incorporating AI into their practice. Many are particularly enthusiastic about the time that AI saves them.

“A task that previously took an hour was completed in under five minutes. What would have taken a few weeks now has come back to the business side in a day or two. That's huge,” said Jarrett Coleman, a community of century.

“Coconsel is a truly innovative legal technology. The power of lawyers to increase efficiency is already benefiting our clients,” said John Polson, chairman and managing partner of Fisher-Philips LLP.

Increased productivity improves work-life balance, but security and reliability are one of the biggest concerns.

Scott Bailey, director of research and knowledge services at Eversheds Sutherland, reflects their enthusiasm. “The AI ​​landscape changes with Cocounsel. The power of this technology is deployed in safe and reliable products, making it a huge leap.”

How can your legal team prepare?

Legal teams approaching adoption of AI tools may systematically do it more successfully.

AI Readiness Checklist

A thoughtful checklist can help you:

• Identify your use case
• Understand Responsible AI Use
• Take leadership with your friends
• Select the Survey and Selection Tool

AI Education and Training Resources

These include:

Thomson Reuters publishes academic articles on topics such as:

• Segment handwritten and printed text in marked-up legal documents
• Best Techniques from Promoting Genai
• The effectiveness of quantifying uncertainty in text classification, and
• Create a calculation lawyer

AI evaluation criteria

When looking for a legal AI tool or vendor, consider the following:

• Was the tool trained on a reliable legal database rather than an open web?
  • If so, what is the legal source?
• Does it help with the specific legal tasks you need to complete?
• Would you like to connect to a platform you already use?
• How much business does the vendor do and does it work with AI?
• Most importantly, does the solution always keep your data private and always safe?

Sensual plan

Make sure all the teams involved are involved.

A new era for legal thinking

It's time to start using AI Legal Solutions. Advance lawyers and organizations embrace the ability of AI to amplify expertise, knowing that it is not a substitute for human professional abilities.

A team that invests in education and considerately adopts these new tools will help advance the profession and fully apply the potential of AI. Thomson Reuters is committed to partnering with legal experts who want to be leaders in this new era.