This is the tenth and final installment in a series about how to implement legal AI that knows your law firm. In the series, we cover the differences between LLMs and search, the elements that make a good search engine, the building blocks of agentic systems (e.g. RAG), and how to implement a system that is fully scalable, secure, and respects your firm’s unique policies and practices.
In this series we have covered all the interrelated components that comprise a comprehensive AI strategy. The best platform is much more than a single tool; it is an aggregation of tools and techniques that work together.
In this final post, we will now turn it back to you. Why are you implementing an AI strategy in the first place? What does it take to achieve that goal? Some firms are aiming merely for efficiency, and others are motivated by a desire not to fall behind the times. But what we hear from the smartest firms is that they see their AI platform as essential to their strategy to stand out from the competition.
By definition, a firm cannot stand out by simply buying the same AI workflow tool as the competition. What truly sets firms apart is their own expertise, embodied in their institutional knowledge. To survive and thrive in the AI era, law firms need an AI platform that truly knows their firm.
The essential elements of an AI platform that knows your firm
Throughout this series we’ve already covered the necessary elements. We’ll recap them here, and for more detail, we encourage you to read our linked posts on each topic:
First and foremost, your AI platform needs to be able to access your institutional knowledge accurately. Lawyers' knowledge is largely embodied in their prior work product, i.e., in documents. Thus, your AI platform needs robust enterprise search that understands legal-specific needs and provides instant, real-time access to all of a firm’s data, regardless of where it resides across the firm’s systems.
- It’s important to understand that standalone LLMs are not search engines (and never will be). For accurate results, any LLM-based system should rely on techniques such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to ensure the system's generative responses are grounded in your proprietary data and expertise.
- For your AI platform to be continuously informed by your firm’s institutional knowledge, your choice of search engine is of paramount importance. All search engines are not created equal—far from it. Especially for law firms, it’s essential to have a search engine that understands both semantic and keyword techniques, blending them intelligently based on the intent of your query. Moreover, since your data lives in multiple systems, your underlying enterprise search must also layer in the appropriate metadata from other systems (e.g. experience management, time/billing etc) and combine it to enhance the quality and relevance of results.
Second, the architecture of your AI platform really matters. To be “always on” when you need it, your AI platform should have access to all your documents and data, but in order to achieve that it must address important security and compliance concerns.
- Your AI platform must incorporate high security standards including respect for ethical boundaries at the retrieval layer, following permission protocols wherever the underlying data is stored.
- With the security fundamentals in place, the underlying search engine becomes the “always on” foundation for firmwide AI, enabling any workflow, agent, or application to draw on the same holistic and authoritative knowledge without adding additional retrieval and compliance steps that slow down workflows and introduce risk.
- From there, it becomes possible to implement ever-more robust AI workflows and agents that automate not just search, but also extract insights, perform complex decision-making steps, and deliver specific actionable outputs. These AI workflows and agents—because they are informed by all your firms’ institutional knowledge—can enhance and/or partially automate nearly any legal workflow imaginable.
Third and finally, your AI platform needs to be able to scale with your firm. As you imagine an AI platform that can find, understand, and act on everything your firm knows, it becomes clear that ongoing governance will be a key challenge moving forward.
- As firms implement more and more AI workflows, they will need “agent operations” and orchestration tools that empower the firm to effectively and efficiently manage the proliferation of AI workflows. For a firm with multiple practice areas, there may be specialists for whom such management is a full time job—and a very valuable one at that!
- These specialists will need the ability to deeply customize the firms’ AI workflows and agents to reflect not just the firm’s knowledge but also its “know how” including proprietary approaches into their work.
Your firm’s value is in your institutional knowledge and this is what helps you stand apart from competitors. In the AI era it is even more urgent to leverage your institutional knowledge to stand apart, win more business, and demonstrate effective, creative client service. Today, your value may be locked in your people’s heads and in the knowledge and expertise embedded in the data they produce. Successful firms will be the ones that build their tech stack in a way that unlocks this advantage and leverages their institutional knowledge at scale.
We hope you have found these posts a helpful guide. Your firm’s knowledge is your greatest asset—make sure your technology helps you use it.
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Explore the blog series “Legal AI That Knows Your Firm”
Posts in this series:
- The Allure (and Danger) of Using Standalone LLMs for Search
- Why Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Matters
- All Search Engines Are Not Created Equal
- Why Good Legal Search is Informed by the Entire Context of Your Institutional Knowledge—Not Siloed or “Federated”
- How Can Your AI Securely Use All of Your Firm’s Data?
- Why an “Always On” Search Engine is a Prerequisite for Scalable AI Adoption
- Building AI Agents That Are Informed by Your Real-World Legal Processes
- As the Variety of Tasks Automated by AI Agents Proliferate, How Does a Firm Manage It All?
- How Do I Adapt Workflow Agents to the Specific Needs of My Firm?
- Does Your AI Platform Set Your Firm Apart from the Competition? (This one)