Law Firm Attorneys Ignore AI Tools Purchased by Their Firms
Legal professionals, from patent attorneys to solo practitioners and law firm partners, are experiencing frustration and difficulty integrating AI tools into their workflows. The core pain lies in a disconnect between AI promises and practical application, coupled with a lack of understanding and willingness to adapt within the legal industry. This results in wasted investment, inefficient processes, and a sense of disillusionment.
SOURCES (60)
“I think extrapartytime means the people from MBA schools w/connections will be building AI. I don't agree with the negative outlook presented though, as there's always room for the best. I think solo-small firms are a good target, especially if you could offer everything to…”
“I second the first premise here -- a lot of this already exists. I agree with intake concerns in part, but I think it largely depends on the nature of the case.”
“Lawyers might come from MBA schools but what does it mean for AI automation agency? I didnt get it sorry”
“I think you might have success with very small firms, but if they’re big enough to have an IT department, most of that will already be handled internally.”
“LoL. No. I'm a brazilian lawyer. I have been using reddit for a couple years now but never had a topic I really needed help like this. As I said, this is a project I'm working for my firm and ran out of ideas while developing it. Now I will restart it soon with new ideas!”
“All of this is pretty comprehensively done by existing legal AI products (or even just free frontier models) except for the the client intake but I don’t see much value in automating that. No client wants to talk to an AI with an inbound inquiry, conflict checks are possibly automatable but due to the sensitivity it will require heaps of human oversight, not sure what the attorney ready summary would be but no major law firm is going to let an AI do a client interview so a person is running this”
“i use a tool that's a hybrid between ai and contract template library. it's 20$ a month and it keeps vendor costs low for my solo practice”
“I am currently at an am law 100 firm and are looking for thoughts on DeepJudge. It seems to be a good tool that would fit our needs but does anyone have any insight on what implementation actually looks like? How does it work with your DMS etc? How’s the relevancy search? Of course when you see the demos everything sounds so easy. So I just want to hear from folks who actually have gone through it. submitted by /u/Character_Girl [link] [comments]”
“If you live in Microsoft Word for contract work, Spellbook is good. It sits right inside Word as an add-in and suggests clauses, points out missing terms, and helps you redline based on the context of the deal. For research across different jurisdictions or digging into specific privacy regulations, dedicated legal research platforms like CoCounsel or Lexis+ AI are the safest bet because they ground their answers in actual primary sources and provide real citations. If you do not have an enterpr”
“I would separate the use cases before picking tools. Clause drafting, country law research, and policy drafting are three different risk profiles. For clause drafting, a general model can be useful if you give it your preferred clause bank and ask it to produce options with assumptions. For legal research, I would be much stricter: make it give you sources, then read the sources yourself, because the answer is worthless if the citations are weak or out of date. For privacy policy work, the harde”
“Set up in Claude to spin up two agents - one for each side then make arguments to a third judge agent who makes a ruling between the two. That ruling is then sent to CoCounsel or perhaps Midpage for deep research analysis to confirm, get a strength rating or find blind spots etc. Can assign the agents to be Opus and Judge Fable, just as an example. Require all arguments between the three to be written to an audit trail. All output that cites a case must come out clean with a 2-3 service waterfal”
“Those working in Big Law.. Has AI helped you with research, drafting, due diligence, document review, or understanding dense agreements and complex terms in simple language? Or has it created more problems? I’d like to hear your experience please. I want to work in big law and I heard it's technically very difficult there. submitted by /u/Every-Argument-7037 [link] [comments]”
“My understanding is that they use all the major LLMs. They said on an early call that they test to see which models best perform a specific task, and then use whichever is best. I liked that, because I figure that I get access to all the LLMs with one tool.”
“Honestly, just use whatever LLM you have a pro/enterprise agreement with. I think Harvey is the only legal tech vendor with their own LLM model (which they just launched), every other legal AI tool is just sitting on top of Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini models. You're paying for the pre-configured instructions that run in the background. If you are good at prompt engineering, try using whatever tool you have first.”
i champion this approach but it does have it's limitations. no matter what you put in the md files, every now and then your chosen ai just won't read the md files.…
“Gotcha - sorry, didn’t understand the constraint. Perhaps asking them for financial consideration in exchange for feedback on use of the tool in a non-typical setting may be a workable solution? Doesn’t hurt to ask. Since they are in Toronto, they may be more kindly disposed to helping our colleagues around the world unlike us money grubbing yanks! :-) Good luck - lots of advice in the threads about using premiere models for contract work. It try them all out and pick a workflow that works for y”
“Yes, that makes sense — a local AI could review DPAs against EU/UAE rules to flag risks and compliance gaps. I’d need to add the relevant jurisdiction-specific rules to the local knowledge base/playbook first.”
“Thank you for the recommendation. It appears to be aimed at UK and EU practice. Do you know if it can be adopted to Australia? Our eqivilent of BAILII might be Austlii.”
“Definitely a genuine ask for help and not a marketing ploy. I'm not sure what would satisfy you on my bona fides. I totally understand the NDA bit, and would be happy to sign yours. It seems Eudia is spot-on with what I need. Contract drafting, review, and research across multiple jurisdictions. Does it only use Gpt, or other LLMs to mark it's "homework"”
You should look at CoCounsel and use the Practical Law playbooks
“Do you want Anxious-employee to verify or myself (OP) ? Silly question ? But how would you do such a verification?”
“Solid advice, thank you, Squire. A bit above my pay grade, but I see where you're aiming at.”
“I hear you. I was looking at Chat Code & Claude Work together with a 3rd, like Qwen or DeepSeek, as optimal. But these are theoretical at this point since the only code I'm good at is Morse. As another Redditor said, once I've got the confidence up (I'm an old codger) I can look at API integration and writing a line of Python or something. Thanks for taking the time.”
“Something along the lines of Data Protection Agreements across multiple jurisdictions ?”
“We have a Claude teams account with five seats. We opt out of training data. We first setup a project with the client's information--email conversations, scope of services, engagement letter, notes--and build a project summary and timeline. Claude Sonnet 5 is good for this. Then I have it setup an Asana project to track tasks. After that, we have Claude build custom instructions for the project. For document generation, use Opus 5 and give it a docx template. Your prompt should instruct it t”
“Please verify as a practitioner, so the community can better trust your response. Is that price per seat?”
“Please verify as a practitioner, so we can add flair. You can retain your anonymity to the community through this process, but it would add credibility to this comment.”
“Spellbook is all you need for contract everything. $350/mo or so. Has expanded my and my colleagues productivity 10x at least and made turn around of drafts so much easier. Plugs into Word and also a stand alone web app. Has “what’s market” type functionality as well as access to non-US law. No connection with them - just been along as a paying customer since early beta times.”
“Totally agree on the privacy and playbook points. I’m actually building a local-first contract review tool around this idea, where sensitive documents can stay in the user’s own environment. If you’d be open to sharing real-world use cases or feedback, I’d be happy to provide long-term free access for testing.”
“This makes good sense. I'd need one that can cover EU, GDPR & UAE jurisdictions. These sorts are eye-wateringly expensive for a 1 man band. Have you found an Ai legal assistant that fits the Bill ?”
“Excellent reasoning, thanks ! Two things, if I may: are you using the Claude Pro subscription and Co-work + Sonnet as a frontline ? and, how do you get them to output their product in a Word .docx executable file ? (Instead of spending hours formatting).”
“Thank you for this🙏🏾. Is there a way to automate this without the copy/pasta back and forth so as to get the 2 Ais to sort out their scepticism and produce the best result which I then review and tweak ?”
“I’d look for a legal AI assistant rather than a general-purpose chatbot. The useful ones are built around actual legal work: reviewing contracts, suggesting or drafting clauses, flagging risks, summarizing legal documents, researching regulations, and helping with repetitive workflows. For something like privacy law in a specific country, the real value is when the tool can help you find the relevant legal sources and structure the research, rather than just generate a generic answer. That’s whe”
“Just curious. This isn't market research or anything. I used to work in family law and criminal defense. I later got picked up onto the legal tech side of things by big companies and now work in-house in a private equity company making document automation software for their legal team. Since I got out of direct law firm life just before AI really took off, I'm curious if firms are largely the same in terms of document automation (which was fairly simple and felt like it was in its infanc”
“1L at a T14 trying to get a sense of practice areas I might be interested—particularly corporate but not totally closed off to lit—and looking for perspectives on how AI could change the realities of working in certain practice areas. I’m fairly bullish on what it will be able to do in 3-5 years, so for those who feel similarly, how do you think this will impact practices you’re familiar with in terms of: Day-to-day work? Hiring, stability, promotion? Skills that make successful BL associates? I”
“Apart from the model quality, the right data is crucial. For contract work indeed go for skills /playbook. That way you are basically building your own legal tech tool. For research look into a rag solution that indexes your internal know how. Or use the cheap option: subscribe to perplexity and connect it to a Google drive in which you put your know how. Use perplexity to do the research and limit it to your dataset. Perplexity is quite good in sticking to sources, which makes it less prone to”
“I'd like to believe this post is genuine — Please be helpful, and not self-promotional.”
“Happy for you to reach out, conveyancing really requires a lot of manual updates and automation. A case system that could just soak up the information from clients or contracts could create massive time savings and automate so much communication.”
“You don't need a tool; you need to redesign your workflows. Pick your favorite frontier model provider (ChatGPT, CLaude, Grok, Gemini, etc.) and describe in the prompt your current workflow and your wants. Be very detailed and take it through every step. Then ask it to create a playbook for you to save as a project .md file and as a skill. Upload the .md file into a project for that workflow and add the skill to the application. Then everytime you trigger that workflow, start in the project.”
“I work with small firms on this front. I’d recommend Claude Cowork or ChatGPT Work as a good starting place. Using skills, connectors, and scheduled tasks can get you a long way. After that, you can build out custom automations or potentially custom software to fit your needs. All this is much cheaper than off the shelf, legal specific tools.”
“If only for legal research: 1. Ask Claude Opus/fable 2. Ask chat gtp sol 3. Feed Claudes answer to chat gtp sol telling it to review it with scepticism and make an independent assessment (important!) 4. Feed chat gtps answer from 3 to Claude opus/fable, telling it to review it with scepticism, make an independent assessment and combine the most accurate insights to a final answer. Or just do 1, 2 and start exploring the legal sources like a lawyer”
“Claude Fable is the current champion. Using the open source models may be cheaper but will require more technical ability.”
“Help or Advice please 🙏🏾🙏🏾 I'm after some tools that can help lighten the load. Things like contract clause drafting, legal research on an aspect of a particular country's laws on a subject (eg privacy policies), or just anything similar you find interesting. submitted by /u/RonanH69 [link] [comments]”
“I agree that most legaltech is just a wrapper trying to make things easier for lawyers who dont want to learn how to leverage tools like Calude and ChatGPT. The reality is these tools are fantastic, amd with the right context and prompt engineering, skill bulding, and workflows are nearly all you need. Where ive seen legaltech add value is in deploying agents to help drive repeatable tasks at scale. Vlaude is great and we started redesigning our workflows around it a year ago, but there are stil”
“Most people run general Claude for everything and never touch these. They're free, official, and each one loads Claude with the workflows an actual specialist in that field uses. The legal one is the standout. Install it, then: Review the attached contract. Flag every clause that deviates from standard terms, classify each risk as low, medium, high or critical, and generate redlined suggestions I can send back. Summarise the three things I should push back on hardest before signing. The risk”
“I'm appearing for a legal drafting competition. In this, we must act as a regulator and draft a set of executive guidelines addressing the AI regulation on using agentic ai for contracting. Do y'all have any tips? I'm a first year student with zero legal knowledge. submitted by /u/Own_Yogurt7556 [link] [comments]”
“What financial system is your firm using? I know many fin system have some AFA functionality. As AI continues to reshape legal work, I imagine the billable hour as we use it, will look very different. I believe flat fee and AFA billing will become the new norm. I was also at ILTA and almost every vendor had some AI tool they are touting but I didn’t see anything about gaining efficiency handling AFAs.”
“I’d take the perspective that you are selling trust to your law firm clients and are taking on real responsibility. I’m doing the same building internally, but at an operating company where I have it easier because there is only one client. Have you thought about releasing your tool as OSS? It’s a lot more work, but there are a lot of legal tech minds out there who could contribute to making the tool even better. I would take a look for sure.”