Law Firm Attorneys Ignore AI Tools Purchased by Their Firms

“seriously man. [re: Most Law Firms Should Use a Frontier LLM (e.g., Claude) through AWS Bedrock]”

Learn to be a good lawyer yourself instead of offloading it to a product. Pathetic. [re: 40 year old law school grad looking to go back to school to get a handle…

“Former BigLaw M&A associate here. I’m building something in this space and curious what people are actually using. Do you have a tool you can hand a full set of diligence documents to and get back a contract tracker covering the provisions you care about, supplemental requests, a summary across corporate and commercial documents, and a report in your firm’s format? How much of that can it handle without you having to babysit each step? Obviously you’re still reviewing the work, but are you m”

“Start with secure case management and deadline tracking then add AI for call summaries and task lists. Protecting confidential client data should come first. [re: Solo prison law attorney seeking AI systems, tools, and plugins to stay organized and catch up (ADHD, no staff)]”

“I help manage and support legal tech for my day job and I build legal tech for niche attorneys on the side. Just you having that experience of being an attorney is huge! This is the biggest issue I face. I can build an entire app full of useless features that I think would be cool to have until I show the attorney and they will be like ya I don't need any of that shit. So just by you knowing the work flow how they do things and what would actually help is a huge benefit. [re: Anyone else who”

“That’s interesting, never thought about lawyers setting traps for AI. How do you run a scan for this? [re: My checklist before I trust an AI summary of a contract. What's yours?]”

“From the builder side, I wouldn’t start by trying to “learn AI” as a broad subject. I’d pick one real legal workflow and try to improve it from beginning to end. I’m currently building a case-law research product for Spain, and the difficult part isn’t getting an AI to produce an answer. It’s working out where the information came from, whether the cited decision actually supports the answer, and how a user can verify it quickly. So the skills I’d focus on are workflow mapping, working with stru”

“The real bottleneck sounds like the time attorney spend comparing vendor language against the playbook, rather than finding the documents. ai assisted review and clause deviation detection are the area. Should be looked at first especially if the system can flag exceptions and route only the risky clauses to counsel. ironclad could also be worth considering for its ai contract review workflows but I'd want to see it tested against your actual vendor paper before assuming it'll cut review”

“This could be genuinely useful. Making legal information accessible to people who can't afford a lawyer is a great idea [re: Feedback Friday: Rate My Ideas | October 16, 2026]”

“45 year old lawyer here using AI all day long. No schools or CLE. By the time it’s taught it’s too late and mostly clueless anyway. We’re at the Homebrew stage of this thing. Just sign up for the max Claude plan at ~$200/month. Run every idea you’ve ever had for optimizing legal workflow, research, marketing, whatever through Fable or Opus. See what it suggests. Do that again and again. Build some skills to replicate actions. Here’s a start. Get Claude. Tell it to clean up your Downloads folder.”

“Focus on prompt design workflow automation and AI tools for legal research and document review. [re: 40 year old law school grad looking to go back to school to get a handle on this AI thing. What specific AI skills/classes would help me?]”

“Ya did? Show me. [re: I have $15000 worth of OpenAI credits expiring in 14 days. What does the legal tech need that I can build?]”

“your legal background is actually an advantage here. i would focus on practical ai workflow, document automation and evaluating ai generated legal research rather than jumping straight into coding. [re: 40 year old law school grad looking to go back to school to get a handle on this AI thing. What specific AI skills/classes would help me?]”

“I don’t think school would be worth the tuition. AI is moving so fast. I’d try to teach myself the skills. But if you really want to, Google has some free AI classes online [re: 40 year old law school grad looking to go back to school to get a handle on this AI thing. What specific AI skills/classes would help me?]”

“Just get the Openai pro and setup your dot to be your assistant. You are gonna get the most ROI on that. [re: Solo prison law attorney seeking AI systems, tools, and plugins to stay organized and catch up (ADHD, no staff)]”

“This week, bring us a finding we can actually discuss. Reports, surveys, benchmarks, whitepapers and useful datasets are welcome. Tell us: The finding How you got it: sample, market and dates, where relevant Who funded the work One link to the full report or data Your relationship to it Please put the finding in your comment. A PDF link on its own doesn't give people much to respond to. Paid research recruitment needs its own mod-approved post. Vendor comments need Vendor: Company or verifie”

“The real moat is workflow integration, governance and adoption. AI features can be copied but fitting into how legal teams actually work is harder. [re: No moats left in legaltech]”

“I’m an attorney with Morgan & Morgan, and I find the firm’s MX2 AI platform to be astoundingly good. [re: Morgan & Morgan is spending $1 billion on AI. What happens to the firms that can’t?]”

“I'm a lawyer and librarian, was thinking along the same path, only with a law niche. [re: You have to start a remote business with nothing but a pc and an internet connection . What do you do?]”

“Depends where you work. At a firm or in-house team, you take a legal process like NDA review or client intake and build it into a tool. That means mapping the decision logic, setting up templates and workflows in document automation software, and testing them with the lawyers. Some roles use Python, but a lot of it is no-code. At a vendor, it’s closer to presales and implementation, like Mps-1 said. Better than biglaw or bigtech? Usually lower pay than the top of either, but better hours and mor”

“Yep. More and more are turning to AI and online document creation services to save money. It is scary, but it’s a sign of both the economy, and public perception of what it is lawyers do and how easily they believe they can replace us without risking serious financial loss. To compete we have to get cheaper and better at marketing our profession so that the risks of not using a lawyer are in the minds of more clients. AI can certainly help with cost. Most of us have extensive precedent libraries”

“lmaoo [re: Law Firm launches it's AI native office. How does that make sense?]”

“Are small businesses doing their own legal work? sounds scary [re: Law Firm launches it's AI native office. How does that make sense?]”

Law is not a castle pal [re: No moats left in legaltech]

“I am a solo practitioner with small staff focusing primarily on upper middle class estate planning. Clients’ use of AI is getting completely unmanageable. From the initial contact, bringing in AI prepared strategy for their documents, running every single of your recommendations through AI to see what can be done better, lists of “follow up questions”, running the document drafts through AI. You name it. It’s becoming unmanageable. I do have provisions in the retainer agreement that any reviews,”

“Are you asking from the perspective of a legal practitioner? If so, why does the moat matter to you? Just buy a product you like using. [re: No moats left in legaltech]”

“Teach me your ways, wise one. [re: Has AI actually saved you time in your legal work?]”

“Realistically the most expensive thing is processing text. As in research and summarization. I'd have workers reading as many opinions and pdf-only court texts as possible, summarizing, extracting text, vectorizing, whatever. [re: I have $15000 worth of OpenAI credits expiring in 14 days. What does the legal tech need that I can build?]”

“id pitch a pilot on one contract type, not enterprise software. pick the most common one, time how long intake and review takes now, run it through an extraction tool for a month, and show the partners hours saved per contract. one measured workflow is way easier to approve than a platform [re: We are drowning in manual contract processing]”

“A client (trust) account management/ compliance monitoring tool [re: I have $15000 worth of OpenAI credits expiring in 14 days. What does the legal tech need that I can build?]”

“the thing that finally got our partners to move was showing them the math on attorney hours burned on intake alone. we pulled a random sample of 50 contracts and tracked every touchpoint from receipt to first review. came out to something like 3.2 hours per contract just on admin tasks before any actual legal analysis happened. when you multiply that by our annual volume the number was kind of embarrassing to present. pilot was the way in for us, not a full cost comparison upfront. we picked one”

“You still haven't read the cases, or if you have, you have reading comprehension issues. The fact the plaintiff was self-repped was ONE factor of many the court looked at in concluding that the AI content was not producible. The key finding, especially given the content and fear mongering of this thread, was that disclosing attorney-client privileged material to AI is NOT the same as disclosing it to a third-party, which would waive attorney-client privilege (though not work product privileg”

“Excellent read - thanks for writing it. Had a few questions, but obvious one from a personal perspective: Your agent approach (" Nothing exotic. A simple folder structure, an LLM wiki, instructions about how I work, access to the systems it needs, and a learning loop so it gets better with every pass .") is what I want to achieve. At my previous biglaw firm - amidst the mess of Harvey / Copilot / iManage / other tools (none of which talked to each other), I couldn't get it done. I&”

“I’m a 2L and law clerk. Trust me, I use AI when I need. But every other day some legal assistant is tasked with compiling our AI usage rates and then reporting to our COO and then the firm releases another reminder about X or Y AI use we aren’t taking advantage of. I just don’t get it… Doesn’t the firm want us to be billing more hours? So why would they keep asking us to use AI within net docs, Lexis, Westlaw, etc.? The CEO told me that she couldn’t give less of a sh*t if people use AI when I as”

“That’s a side of AI I rarely see talked about. Is the exhaustion more from the sheer volume, or from switching between so many matters in a day? [re: Has AI actually saved you time in your legal work?]”

“Exactly this. The pro per got the benefit of the doubt because he was acting as his own lawyer. Not so when a client already has a lawyer. [re: When a client runs your firm's work through an AI and sends back a pile of questions, who should pay for that time?]”

“This is exactly why I think legal AI needs authorization and auditability at the matter level, not just generic observability. Referent is interesting to me for that reason the AI works inside a controlled matter workflow, with permissions, an audit trail, and lawyer review/approval for important actions. [re: AI agents in legal ops: how do you document that the agent only acted within its authorized scope?]”

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“You need an in house person or people who understand the tech and the legal workflows. And a partner who champions it. [re: What makes a legal tech implementation actually stick?]”

Supio [re: recommendations for best litigation doc org AI?]

“I don’t make the rules, friend. Read the case law. [re: When a client runs your firm's work through an AI and sends back a pile of questions, who should pay for that time?]”

“As the title says What are you using most? What do you find most useful? Are you running subs to OpenAI or Claude? Do you use Skills (Claude)? Do you write your own skills? Do you use Local LLMs for privacy, if so, what do you find is best? Do you use "internal" ones like Xero's JAX, or internally (self-trained) LLms inside your large(ish?) firm? Looking to promote beneficial discussion, not AI-hate. AI is getting into every area of life: Art, Law, writing, Real Estate, and yes Acc”

“I'm a solo plaintiff's attorney handling prison law and civil rights cases. I currently have 30 cases (about 10 of them active lawsuits) and no staff. I’m significantly behind, and I have ADHD, so organization and prioritization are a constant struggle. Current setup: I’m on an Apple iMac and using Apple Notes, Dropbox, and Drive. I’m using Apple Notes for case notes, call notes, etc. Notes are not separated by case, security and reliable backups are weak, and I’m drowning in the volume”

“I'm a solo plaintiff's attorney handling prison law and civil rights cases. I currently have 30 cases (about 10 of them active lawsuits) and no staff. I’m significantly behind, and I have ADHD, so organization and prioritization are a constant struggle. Current setup: I’m on an Apple iMac and using Apple Notes, Dropbox, and Drive. I’m using Apple Notes for case notes, call notes, etc. Notes are not separated by case, security and reliable backups are weak, and I’m drowning in the volume”

“This sounds like an extremely niche situation. You’re basically saying that before AI, this attorney would not have been able to make the right legal arguments. Because there were facts that you somehow didn’t know to share, and they didn’t know to ask for, and the need for the facts was only revealed by the AI? Generally, a competent attorney will know what questions to ask to elicit the relevant facts from the client. While preparing that document and doing relevant research, they should have”

“I dont understand how you guys get results that bad. What fo yiu use the AI for? as far as it goes for drafting contracts, or going through case files and making defences, finding arguments, GPT 5.6 SOL upwards works great. I could easily replace a junior lawyer. I dont understant the fuss with retainer language preventing AI. The clients use Ai so i just put their comments back to the AI and make it respond in such a way that an AI would be satisfied. Its a waste of time, but not that time cons”

“We're seeing exactly that. Courts are getting mass AI pro-se documents dumped on them, will be interesting to watch. [re: AT&T is using AI to cut its reliance on law firms.]”

“If that’s the case in the US, I don’t think it will change. People will use AI to help file their claim and have their day in court. Cost savings in the age of AI won’t be a compelling enough reason to choose mediation. A desire for privacy is compelling, or it be required before filing is another reason. [re: AT&T is using AI to cut its reliance on law firms.]”

“Was your engagement hourly or flat fee? [re: When a client runs your firm's work through an AI and sends back a pile of questions, who should pay for that time?]”

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“What matters is which client workflows become faster without weakening judgment, privilege, or accountability. [re: Law Firm launches it's AI native office. How does that make sense?]”

“I think “AI-native” makes more sense as an operating model than as a separate kind of legal service. The point is that AI is embedded into how matters, inbox, follow-ups, drafting prep and admin get handled, while lawyers still make the actual decisions. That’s basically the direction Referent is taking. [re: Law Firm launches it's AI native office. How does that make sense?]”

“It’s the budget arm of a budget law firm [re: Law Firm launches it's AI native office. How does that make sense?]”

“Second this. Even if the skills are all good, some may be a better fit for one’s specific practice. Reviews/ratings would be great. [re: 260+ open-source legal skills]”

“Curious on why you think mediation is emergent now? [re: AT&T is using AI to cut its reliance on law firms.]”

“AI can do tasks- it will make certain tasks faster which leaves the lawyer time to do other higher value tasks for the client. Programmers at walmart are more efficient because of AI- do you see cheaper prices at the grocery store? All biglaw firms are pushing AI integration hard but most lawyers are idiots tbh. Everyone just uses Harvey (or some flavor of this Legora etc.) and so everyone will be bottlenecked by that platforms limitations. I suspect most aren’t even creating their own skills no”

“That's interesting. So ideally you don't see other big firms ever venturing here? I was wondering with time whether all law firms would have to lower their cost as AI keeps up. [re: Law Firm launches it's AI native office. How does that make sense?]”

“https://giphy.com/gifs/QZ38uNOgx1usPFZO9z [re: Law Firm launches it's AI native office. How does that make sense?]”

“I have seen partners exiting firms to launch their own AI native practices, but why would a law firm want to launch its AI-native office? Isn't it cannabalizing their existing billing hour model to standard price hour? Why would a client prefer their traditional service over AI -native? submitted by /u/Top-Nefariousness-28 [link] [comments]”