We are in a technology landscape where hundreds of AI tools are marketed to lawyers. Many of these AI tools for lawyers make big promises, including that they will help you save time, improve the accuracy or quality of your work, or help you get ahead of your competition. But choosing the wrong AI tool for your law practice can have unfortunate consequences, including wasted time, unimpressive results, and introducing new risks for your clients or your firm.

Independent evaluations of AI tools for lawyers are beginning to reveal ways that AI can make a real impact on a law practice. The real challenge isn’t finding AI tools to choose from. It’s choosing the right AI tools that align the best with your unique law practice.

You need an AI Tool Evaluation Process, Not a Recommendation

Lawyers often ask me which AI tool is best for lawyers. This common question reveals an understandable desire for a magic bullet solution to the question of which AI tool will perform the best in legal practice.

The truth is that there is no single best AI tool for all lawyers. The best AI tool for your unique law practice will depend on several factors, including the areas of law in which you practice, the size of your firm, your workflows, your existing technology resources, and your firm’s culture surrounding technology. The AI tool that works best for your law firm may be quite different than the tool that works best for your biggest competitor.

Many lawyers make mistakes in AI tool selection by jumping straight to experimenting with various AI tools without considering their actual needs. Some lawyers assume that using AI means they need to become prompt engineering experts. Other lawyers find themselves unhappy with their AI tools after relying solely on marketing promises and AI tool demos.

Rather than experimentation, investing significant time in prompt engineering, or overreliance on marketing claims, your time would be better spent by following a structured evaluation process to select AI tools for your law firm.

Why Choosing AI Tools Feels So Difficult

There are several factors adding complexity to the AI tool selection process for lawyers. Currently, the legal market for AI tools is the wild west, and because the AI tool market is still in its early days, this landscape is changing rapidly. There are an overwhelming number of AI tool options for lawyers that offer a wide variety of uses and features. Some AI tools offer a solution to one specific problem experienced by lawyers, while other tools are meant for many possible uses. Some AI tools target improving efficiency, while others are intended to improve the quality of a lawyer’s work, and some try to do both. Some AI tools attempt to provide security and confidentiality standards that align with lawyers’ professional responsibilities, while others don’t. Given the sheer number of options available, it’s not surprising that many lawyers have defaulted to choosing the AI tool they’ve heard the most hype about in the news, or gone with the AI tool that they know another law firm is using, before ever conducting an internal assessment of the tool.   

However, even choosing between the AI tools you know about can feel fraught for many lawyers. There is conflicting advice about which AI tool is the “game changer” that your firm needs in order to thrive. And meanwhile, there are countless stories in the news about lawyers getting in trouble for misusing AI. It’s easy for lawyers to feel caught in the crosshairs between the pressure to not be left behind, and the fears of choosing the wrong tool, or the risk of accidental misuse of AI.  

It’s hardly surprising that busy lawyers feel overwhelmed by AI tool selection. The most effective way to cut through this overwhelm is to change the way you search for AI solutions.

Start With Your Practice, Not the AI Tools

If you want to make confident and well-informed AI tool selection decisions, don’t start with the AI tools. How you spend your time on AI will make a big impact on your ultimate satisfaction with your AI tool selection. Focusing your attention on the newest and hottest AI tools on the market does little to inform which AI solutions will actually benefit your practice.

Instead of starting with the AI tools, start by examining the technology problems your law firm is experiencing. When you spend your time on AI focused on problem-solving rather than chasing the shiniest tools, you are more likely to identify solutions that will make a measurable impact on your practice. 

Identifying technology problems in your firm can look like:

• Determining which tasks currently require lots of manual steps;
• Identifying work that is overly complicated or time-consuming;
• Looking for existing bottlenecks and predictable delays;
• Considering if certain tasks could be automated to increase accuracy and consistency; and
• Evaluating whether your client’s experience in interacting with your firm could be improved with technology.

Whenever possible, your existing assumptions about the best opportunities for technology improvements should be verified with concrete data from your firm’s existing operations. Once your firm’s best opportunities for technology improvement have been identified, each opportunity should be quantified to the greatest extent possible, and then prioritized, so that you know which problems to focus on first in your AI tool selection process.

Understand AI’s Capabilities, Strengths, and Limitations

There are numerous ways lawyers can integrate AI tools into their practices beyond legal research and contract drafting. Rather than relying on marketing messages from AI tool companies, lawyers should consider what independent benchmarking efforts have revealed about the current best uses for AI in legal practice. Currently recognized strengths of AI tools used in legal practice include:

• Brainstorming tasks, such as anticipating arguments from opposing counsel, brainstorming potential responses, or drafting deposition questions;
• First drafts of documents when the author’s unique voice is not important;
• Editing assistance;
• Assisting in getting up to speed more quickly on a new area of law;
• Quickly analyzing large amounts of data;
• Workflow support;
• Summarizing information; and
• Extracting information.

While AI’s current strengths in support of legal practices merit attention, understanding the current weaknesses and limitations of AI tools is also critical to responsible AI use. AI risks like hallucinations make weekly news headlines for good reason, yet too many lawyers still fail to appreciate that they are at risk of becoming implicated in the real-world consequences of AI misuse if their colleagues or other collaborators use AI improperly.

Beyond hallucinations, lawyers who are considering AI tools for practice should also be aware that they bear the burden of ensuring that an AI tools’ confidentiality and security standards align with their professional responsibilities. Further, lawyers should be aware of the potential for bias in AI tools.

Evaluate AI Tools Using Clear Criteria

Once you have identified and prioritized your firm’s technology problems, and taken time to understand AI’s current capabilities, strengths, and limitations, it’s finally time to turn to considering specific AI tool options. At this point, it makes sense to take a step back to confirm that AI is the best type of technology to solve your most pressing problem. If pursuing an AI tool solution makes the most sense, then another threshold question to consider in your search for solutions is whether to consider general-purpose AI tools alongside legal industry AI tools.  From there, you can research and identify the universe of potential solutions that align with your top priority problem.

Once the possible AI tool solutions to your technology problem have been identified, the top contenders should each be vetted for appropriateness with a uniform risk assessment. Your law firm may already have a risk assessment process, or you may need to develop one in conjunction with your professional responsibilities.  

Once risk assessments have been completed and any AI tools that do not pass the risk assessment have been eliminated, then other compatibility factors can be uniformly considered, including items such as:

• Overall alignment of features offered with needs of the firm;
• Price;
• Integration opportunities with the firm’s existing technology resources;
• Difficulty in getting up to speed in implementing and using the AI tool; and
• Likelihood of adoption of the tool across the firm

Test AI Tools Before You Commit

The AI tools that remain on your list after assessing for risks and overall compatibility should be tested before a final selection is made. A uniform testing protocol should be conducted for each AI tool using scenarios that do not include confidential client information, but that approximate the real-world scenarios for which the AI tools would be used by your firm. The AI tools should be scored and the performances of the AI tools should be compared and evaluated for a final decision.  

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing AI Tools

As you consider which AI tools will serve your law practice best, here are some common pitfalls to avoid:

• Skipping the risk assessment process;
• Choosing and frequently switching AI tools based on hype;
• Assuming more affordable general-purpose AI tools will always provide better value than more expensive legal industry AI tools;
• Putting too much stock into AI tool demos without fully considering your real-world use of the tool;
• Focusing too early on prompt engineering; and 
• Attempting to adopt too many new AI tools at once.

Choosing AI Tools Is Part of Your Larger AI Strategy

Choosing the right AI tools for your practice is important, but it’s just one part of a larger process. AI tool selection should not be the first step in developing an AI strategy for your law firm. Before AI tool selection or AI use in legal practice, a lawyer’s first step should always be developing AI competency so that you can comply with your professional responsibilities and reduce AI risks.

Once you have developed AI competency, you can work towards developing your greater AI strategy, selecting and implementing AI tools, and building an AI governance plan, all of which can be refined over time as the technology landscape continues to change.

What You Should Do Next

If you’re considering AI tools for your law practice, the big picture steps you’ll want to take next are:

• Develop your AI competency;
• Understand AI’s capabilities, strengths, and limitations;
• Prioritize your firm’s technology problems;
• Identify possible solutions;
• Perform risk assessments and evaluate other compatibility factors; and
• Test your top choices before you commit.

If you want a step-by-step framework for evaluating AI tools, including how to assess risk, compare options, and implement tools responsibly, you can learn more in my 2-hour CLE: How to Pick the Best AI Tools for Your Law Practice. 

Or if you’d prefer a more comprehensive resource that also includes a curated directory of over 200 AI tools for lawyers, check out A Lawyer’s Practical Guide to AI. 

Thanks for being here.

Jennifer Ballard
Good Journey Consulting