Productivity Tools for Lawyers
Essential productivity tools for the modern legal practice
Investing in legal tech tools isn’t just about saving time – it’s about staying ahead in a competitive legal landscape. Bloomberg Law offers tailored solutions to help legal teams be more productive, accurate, and efficient so they can offer more value to their clients.
Productivity tools that work for you
Transform your day-to-day with AI-powered legal technology designed to make you more productive and deliver powerful insights.
A new wave of productivity tools for lawyers is transforming legal workflows – just as legal teams face growing pressure to control costs and demonstrate greater value.
Legal departments have long been seen as cost centers, incurring expenses without directly generating revenue. While legal teams have traditionally focused on litigation and compliance – acting more as risk managers than business enablers – this model is increasingly unsustainable amid rising competition from other firms and alternative legal service providers.
Even within billable-hour structures, law firms aren’t benefiting from the status quo. Inefficiencies drive burnout, as actual work hours often exceed what can be billed. Speaking to this reality, while many firms set a 2,000-hour annual billing target, attorneys routinely spend over half their workday on nonbillable tasks – often resulting in weekend work to keep up.
To stay competitive and meet client demands, legal professionals must streamline workflows. The right legal technology can drive this transformation – but only if implemented strategically, without adding unnecessary complexity.
Here’s how legal software can help legal teams shed the cost-center label and deliver more immediate value to their firms and clients.
Identifying the right legal technology
As legal teams embrace innovation, the right productivity tools can transform legal operations – enhancing transparency, automating routine tasks, and freeing up time for higher-value work.
In fact, a Bloomberg Law survey of 150 in-house attorneys and legal operations professionals found that 70% of respondents reduced annual outside counsel spending by 11%, while 83% lowered total annual legal spend by 8%. Additionally, legal teams saved an average of four hours per week on legal tasks, reclaiming nearly 200 hours per year for more strategic work – all because of the right productivity tools for lawyers that streamline workflows and increase efficiency in law firms.
But improving law firm efficiency with technology requires more than just purchasing software. Selecting the right law firm workflow tool demands due diligence, with a clear understanding of risks and rewards. The ABA’s professional conduct rules emphasize this responsibility, stating that lawyers must stay current – not just on legal developments, but also on technology. To truly increase productivity in a law firm, legal tech solutions must be carefully evaluated, especially when they involve AI-generated content or the handling of sensitive client data.
The first step is identifying the need – whether it’s saving time, surfacing data faster, or strengthening security – while minimizing workflow disruptions. In effect, rather than reinventing the wheel, legal teams should optimize processes through complementary tools.
Task-specific legal tools
Embracing productivity tools isn’t about starting from scratch – it’s about selecting the right tools based on a clear need. Once that need is identified, navigating legal technology becomes easier, and sorting tools by function ensures adoption is effective rather than overwhelming.
Likewise, legal technology isn’t a radical departure but an evolution. While AI dominates the conversation, today’s legal tech ecosystem builds on decades of advancements in machine learning, automation, and data analytics. These innovations have led to solutions that go beyond content generation – they extract insights, streamline processes, and drive greater productivity.
Within this evolving landscape, Bloomberg Law provides an all-inclusive solution, delivering seamless single sign-on access – without out-of-plan charges. Under this unified platform, a suite of productivity tools addresses myriad legal needs, enabling legal teams to reduce reliance on outside counsel and accomplish more in-house. Here’s a closer look at the key tool categories.
Legal writing and drafting tools
Fact-gathering is the linchpin of legal writing and drafting, yet manual research can be arduous, requiring attorneys to sift through millions of court opinions. Bloomberg Law eliminates these inefficiencies through a single, AI-powered legal research platform with unmetered access to primary and secondary sources, as well as AI tools for legal writing and research.
Within this ecosystem, there are multiple tools to help improve attorney efficiency:
- Docket Key locates exemplar briefs
- Points of Law and Smart Code identify precedents
- Brief Analyzer flags citation errors and provides AI-driven case recommendations
- BCite ensures accurate citation validation
- Litigation Analytics, an advanced legal analytics tool, delivers insights on courts
- Clause Advisor and Draft Analyzer analyze contracts and provide AI-generated language to strengthen your position
- Practical Guidance provides samples, templates, and checklists to get you started
By integrating these AI-powered legal research tools, legal writing and drafting becomes more efficient, with insights surfaced more quickly. Freed from the minutiae of manual research, legal teams can then focus on higher-value work – maximizing productivity in legal practice.
Legal project management software
Legal project management remains a persistent challenge, with more than 90% of legal professionals in some cases still relying on email to manage projects. This fragmented approach makes it harder to track moving pieces. Email-driven project management also introduces security risks, from “reply-all” mishaps to cyber breaches, all while cutting into billable hours.
Without a centralized dashboard, legal teams often find themselves managing projects across scattered email threads, shared folders, and disjointed document management systems. Best practices for legal project management emphasize the need for centralized visibility and structured workflows – key elements often missing in email-based project tracking.
Dashboard Legal offers a centralized platform that moves legal project management beyond the inbox. Instead of juggling scattered communications, legal teams gain access to a real-time dashboard where they can track progress and collaborate seamlessly. The platform also integrates with iManage and NetDocuments, enabling direct document exports.
Configurable within days and deployable in a private or managed public cloud, Dashboard Legal provides a single hub where legal teams can collaborate in real time and monitor project rollups with clear visuals eliminating the inefficiencies of inbox-driven project management.
Contract management software
Managing contract workflows presents challenges, particularly for in-house counsel, who must juggle multiple acquisitions and contract reviews. The complexity of handling contracts across different departments – each with its own naming conventions and storage systems – deepens fragmentation, increasing the risk of drafting errors and inconsistencies in contract language. Searching EDGAR filings for relevant clauses can add even more complications.
Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions helps legal teams work smarter within the tools they already use. As one user put it, “No one wants to reinvent the wheel when they don’t have to.”
Seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Word as an add-in, Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions provides instant access to a clause library: Here, attorneys can quickly find and compare clauses without leaving their Word document. Powered by AI-driven clause analysis, the tool also shows how similar clauses have been handled in previous agreements, and it identifies relevant precedents, helping legal teams align contract language with industry standards.
By streamlining contract workflows, Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions saves time and minimizes inconsistencies in contract drafting – all without having to leave Microsoft Word.
AI-powered legal technology
As laws rapidly evolve, keeping pace with legal developments gets harder each year. AI-powered legal technology can quickly surface the most relevant case law, eliminating hours previously spent combing through PACER or conducting time-consuming Boolean searches.
By supporting natural language queries, Bloomberg Law’s AI-powered legal platforms deliver intuitive, targeted results in seconds, compared to the days or weeks of traditional methods.
However, amid potential risks including hallucinations and biased outputs, it’s essential to use AI tools developed specifically for the legal profession, with models trained on vetted legal data. With this foundation, AI acts as an augmenter – not a replacement – to expedite core tasks such as legal research and writing. At the same time, attorneys must continue to exercise due diligence and validate outputs.
Through this balanced approach, AI can help attorneys overcome the blank page by generating first-draft language and templates. AI can further enhance drafting efficiency through smart automation, such as suggesting clause language, summarizing case law, and flagging language that deviates from market standards.
For legal research, Bloomberg Law’s AI tools can surface legal data to help attorneys make meaningful associations and uncover insights they might otherwise miss. By accelerating these common tasks, AI-powered tools also enable legal teams to reduce reliance on outside counsel and focus more time on strategic planning.
Tailored tools for corporate legal teams
Corporate legal work doesn’t end at contracts. Even as workloads grow and head count remains flat, legal teams face mounting pressure to deliver not only legal guidance but also meaningful business insights. To free up time for this higher-impact work, today’s corporate legal departments require streamlined technology that drives greater efficiency across the enterprise.
Corporate legal teams should consider investing in technology solutions that address:
- project management
- document sharing
- legal research
- contract review and drafting
- workflow automation
At the enterprise level, AI features – such as a generative AI writing “assistant” built for legal content – can reduce time spent drafting and reviewing contracts.
Legal-specific automation tools strengthen compliance by tracking legal and regulatory changes across jurisdictions, flagging contract language deviations from company standards or legal norms, and consolidating internal policies into a centralized system for consistency across teams.
To help cut costs and increase efficiency, many in-house departments have turned to legal software such as Bloomberg Law. After implementing Bloomberg Law’s software into their daily workflow, over 70% of customers reported that they reduced their need for outside counsel by 11%, saving their organizations $221,760 on average each year.
Performance tracking with legal tech
Legal technology offers more than task automation; it also helps legal professionals measure performance. Beyond benchmarks including billable hours, case resolution times, and revenue per case, forward-looking teams are also using AI legal tools to track and improve productivity.
For example, matter management tools, which can organize and monitor legal work by client or case, can track how long legal professionals spend on specific tasks and pinpoint which stages are most time-consuming. These insights can improve resource allocation and budget decisions.
In effect, it’s about seeing legal tech as more than a task-specific solution. Tying legal tech adoption to performance metrics – such as hours spent on case law research and the percentage of work subsequently brought in-house – helps teams quantify ROI and make any data-driven tweaks.
Equally important is gathering feedback from stakeholders who use these tools. Written input, user interviews, and satisfaction surveys can add valuable context to the numbers.
Building on this foundation, the next step is defining what productivity looks like for your legal team and how to measure it.
Measuring productivity in your practice
Because technology can be a hefty investment, tracking data is essential to justify costs. Yet a Bloomberg Law study found that 70% of respondents either lack a process for evaluating legal tools or are unsure if one exists, increasing the risk of technology adoption without a strategy.
Before implementing technology, gathering workload metrics is essential to identify which tasks demand the most resources, such as document drafting, contract review, and client correspondence. Once technology is then adopted, measuring its effectiveness is equally important.
Key considerations include return on investment, adoption rate, utilization rate, and stakeholder feedback – all critical for determining if a tool delivers on its promise as a productivity enhancer.
For firms with a structured framework for evaluating tool effectiveness against an identified need, many are already seeing gains: For example, in a recent customer survey, 94% of general counsel agreed that Bloomberg Law provides all the legal research tools, resources, and content their legal departments need – on a single integrated platform.
One user noted, “Using Bloomberg Law’s transactional precedent search, I was able to negotiate a high-value credit agreement instead of using outside counsel – this likely saved my firm $250,000.”
Similarly, on the time savings front, Bloomberg Law Contract Solutions has made a measurable impact. One user, who previously reviewed eight to 10 due diligence worksheets a month, saw a significant reduction in workload, saving at least three hours per month.
Kick-start your legal department’s productivity with purpose-built tools
Legal departments have long been viewed as cost centers rather than drivers of innovation and value. Yet today’s lawyers must be versatile generalists, navigating the trio of operational needs: legal writing and drafting, legal project management, and contract management.
Amid these obligations, leveraging legal technology is critical – not to replace existing infrastructure, but to elevate it. With the right tools, aligned with a clearly identified need, legal teams can shift from opaque, reactive operations to transparent, data-driven practices, where productivity isn’t just a buzzword – it’s a way of operating.
Bloomberg Law’s all-in-one legal research and workflow software offers a comprehensive suite of advanced technology solutions specifically designed to address the unique needs of legal teams. From our AI-powered legal research platform to our document drafting and analysis tools, Bloomberg Law integrates cutting-edge technology with trusted legal content, ensuring legal professionals can be better prepared and develop an informed strategy.
Bloomberg Law’s Dashboard Legal is a top solution for legal teams looking to modernize their workflows. This legal project management platform helps you stay organized, collaborate seamlessly with your team, and communicate effectively with clients. No complicated setup is required – Dashboard Legal integrates easily into your existing workflow.
Now is the time to invest in legal tech and transform efficiency into measurable productivity gains. Request a demo of Bloomberg Law to get started.