How Is GenAI Impacting the Future of Legal Ops?

Generative AI (GenAI) may become a catalyst for change in corporate legal departments. Richard Tromans contemplates the role Legal Ops will have and the impact GenAI will have on law firms and alternative legal services providers (ALSPs) in an article in Artificial Lawyer.

GenAI addresses use cases that are already supported by existing legal tech tools. However, it achieves results in different and perhaps better ways. Here are some of the key issues Legal Ops needs to address:

• The Legal Ops team must decide the benefits a new approach will provide compared to what they currently have. They need to know what advantages or improvements they hope to gain before considering whether to build their own LLM-linked system or work with a legal tech vendor.
• Legal Ops teams will need to experiment and do a full analysis of what needs to change, what the effect of an LLM will be, and whether there will be a notable improvement in reaching their desired goals.
• As well, Legal Ops has to consider how any LLM tools they buy or build fit with the GenAI tools the company already has.
• Legal Ops needs to determine the impact on the law firms and ALSPs the department works with. They also need to determine what areas of work that are sent out might be impacted and whether the ALSPs they work with use LLM technology to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
• Additionally, Legal Ops should reconsider whether fixed fees will be the norm rather than hourly billing. Fixed fees and technology will optimize efficiency, while hourly billing undermines the use of technology for core billable tasks.