What Technology Tools Should Corporate Lawyers Use?
As in-house legal departments grapple with increasing workloads and the constraints of declining resources, legal technology has become a vital tool to help legal teams work smarter to provide efficient and effective representation.
Learn about the different types of legal technology that can boost productivity for in-house attorneys by streamlining daily legal tasks and workflows, all while meeting the ethical obligations required for the practice of law.
What is legal technology?
Legal technology encompasses tools and software that enhance legal services and processes. Some types of legal technology are designed specifically for legal professionals, while others are more general technologies that are used both inside and outside the legal industry.
Why is legal technology essential for corporate lawyers?
As workloads grow at a rapid rate and risk management increases in complexity, businesses are asking more from their legal departments. Today’s in-house counsel must be effective generalists for a wide variety of legal topics that arise in day-to-day corporate practice. However, as corporate legal departments trend toward insourcing more work and headcount remains relatively flat, CEOs are looking to GCs to transform their department into strategic business partners and valued members of the leadership team.
Tech competence is vital for in-house legal professionals to effectively offer sound counsel to their organization and comply with legal ethics rules. In-house lawyers have a responsibility to keep up with existing and emerging relevant technologies, understand the associated benefits and risks of a technology, and take reasonable measures to protect client confidentiality.
Do corporate lawyers use AI?
Yes. AI technologies are rapidly changing industries around the world, including the legal industry. In advanced economies, about 60% of the workforce is already exposed to AI.
While some lawyers may be skeptical of the application of AI to legal practice, it’s clear that AI is already impacting how modern legal teams operate. Soon, the failure to understand and use AI could be considered a deficiency in legal representation.
Both law firms and in-house counsel can leverage AI-enabled automation tools to save time and money, but the technology isn’t perfect and can lead to serious risks including fraud and inaccuracies. AI alone can’t be used to take the place of human legal expertise and experience. Therefore, lawyers who use AI software must understand its limitations and review the outputs, just as they would supervise the work of junior staff.
The best way for corporate lawyers to reduce risk when using AI technology is to use tools that were specifically designed and tested for use in the legal profession.
[Download our report, The Truth About AI and the Legal Profession, to explore five common myths about AI’s potential for legal use, the latest AI developments, and how to evaluate AI tools for lawyers.]
What types of technology do corporate lawyers use?
Legal professionals rely on a diverse range of technologies tailored to their unique needs. These tools help improve efficiency and productivity, ensure compliance, and enable strategic decision-making.
Some of the most popular types of legal technology for corporate attorneys include:
- Project management platforms: Manage workflows and deadlines efficiently with integrated task management and collaboration tools such as Dashboard Legal.
- Document management systems: Centralize and organize contracts, agreements, and other legal documents for easy exporting and seamless sharing.
- Legal research platforms: Save time and increase accuracy with unmetered access to primary and secondary sources, including court dockets, statutes, regulations, and expert analysis from Bloomberg Law.
- Contract automation software: Streamline your contract workflow with Contract Solutions, built specifically to help in-house attorneys more efficiently store, manage, draft, negotiate, and analyze contracts.
- AI-powered workflow tools: Reduce repetitive, time-consuming tasks such as legal research, due diligence, and document review, freeing up time for more strategic initiatives.
- Generative AI writing assistants: Draft briefs, contracts, and motions using AI-powered legal drafting tools specifically designed for the legal industry.
What are the benefits of legal technology for corporate lawyers?
Technological advances in the legal field – including a wider adoption of generative AI tools – are changing the practice of law. Corporate lawyers are adopting these technologies to not only improve efficiency but to also stay competitive in an increasingly complex legal landscape. By leveraging legal software, legal teams can seamlessly integrate advanced technology into their workflows while minimizing risk.
General Counsel
Waste Management Company
More time for strategic work
When AI-powered tools are used ethically with appropriate human oversight, they can expedite tasks that have traditionally been assigned to entry-level associates, freeing up staff time to focus on more strategic work.
By integrating Bloomberg Law’s comprehensive platform into their daily workflow, customers simplified and streamlined common, time-consuming legal tasks, saving an average of four hours per week. This gave their department back approximately 200 hours per year (which is equivalent to 25 business days) to spend on higher-value work.
Draft legal documents in minutes, not hours
Advancements in legal tech software have the potential to transform the way attorneys approach the legal writing process. AI-powered tools built specifically for legal teams can produce a first draft of legal documents such as motions, briefs, contracts and settlement agreements based on a short prompt, and can also offer instant analysis of an opposing counsel’s brief or contracts.
For example, Bloomberg Law’s Draft Analyzer uses a proprietary algorithm to quickly benchmark and redline draft agreements against market-standard language filed in EDGAR documents. Additionally, Clause Adviser – a feature of Draft Analyzer – uses AI technology to evaluate clause favorability to a particular party and offers a plain-language rationale for each rating. A user-friendly slider tool then helps legal professionals rewrite or modify contract language as desired.
Faster, more comprehensive research
Legal research tools powered by machine learning can sift through massive volumes of legal documents in a fraction of the time involved in traditional research and make instantaneous associations between related case law to help aggregate or summarize data in more useful ways.
For example, Bloomberg Law’s research platform gives users access to more than two million transactional documents filed in the EDGAR database, with the ability to filter across 600 document types to find the exact forms they need.
Our innovative Smart Code feature uses machine learning to identify and extract sections of a court opinion that reference or interpret a particular code, rule, or regulation. The Smart Code tool then ranks those extracts on a sliding scale, from weak to strong, to help in-house counsel focus on only the results that are most relevant to their case.
Reduce spending on outside counsel
Bloomberg Law’s tools and intelligence allows in-house attorneys to respond to legal issues quickly and confidently – instead of calling outside counsel for advice. By bringing more work in-house, customers reduced outsourcing costs by 11%, which on average saved their organizations $221,760.
Although there is a range of features that help reduce spending on outside counsel, participants consistently highlighted these three as the most impactful in achieving cost efficiency:
- Practical Guidance
- State and federal legal and regulatory primary source search tools
- Case law research tools
Deputy General Counsel
Woodside Group, LLC
Transform your workday with Bloomberg Law
Corporate lawyers face ever-evolving demands as they navigate complex legal challenges, balance resource constraints, and support the strategic objectives of their clients or organization. Legal technology has emerged as an essential tool, enabling attorneys to streamline workflows, boost efficiency, and comply with ethical and professional obligations. By adopting the right tools, legal teams can focus on delivering more value while minimizing risks.
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 report that they have reduced their need for outside counsel by 11%, saving their organizations $221,760 on average each year.
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 corporate 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.
Download our In-House Counsel Customer ROI Survey to learn more about how Bloomberg Law’s comprehensive platform helps in-house teams reduce outsourcing costs and gain time back in their days.
Request a demo to discover how Bloomberg Law’s legal tech tools save time, reduce costs, and streamline your workflow.