If your team is not ‘ready’ for legal tech, AI is not going to fix that for you. Gartner research shows that this is unfortunately the case with 77.4% of legal departments (worldwide). Indeed, the discouraging prospect of a poor 22.6% positive has to do with the readiness of the legal team, not with the tech.
It gets worse (down to 8%)
Worse, if the Legal Ops team or GC does not take the right measures as part of their digital enablement journey, even for the ‘ready ones’ (the 22.6%) their potential legal-tech adoption rate appears to further diminish to a mere 8%. Successful digital legal service delivery is then far away, because 8% is not just a small minority: the ‘remaining’ 92% will be tempted to raise excuses for not using your promising legal tech.
If you do not know what every excuse means (i.e., the underlying issue) and not how to respond to it (i.e., both solving the underlying issues and maturing your Legal Ops effectively), well… then it requires exceptionally great leadership and team spirit to transform the team’s legal services delivery.
At the end of this newsletter, I will tell you what you need to mature, where to find the right adoption measures and a complete catalogue of excuses (and related responses).
But let’s first dig into the ‘magic’ of AI – watch this video (between 0:30-0:55): But let’s first dig into the ‘magic’ of AI – watch this video (between 0:30-0:55):
How AI is (not) fixing this
You may think: “that is for old legal tech – AI is going to change everything”. And indeed, in part, this may be true:
- Agentic AI may fix some bottlenecks in your processes. After all, every automation comes with some benefits. Typically, it means that you expand the group of users with access to the AI-driven process and that a greater level of AI tailoring is needed. So, extra cost and a wide array of copilots and AI agents.
- It may incentivise your team members (or internal stakeholders who deploy AI for their purposes) to insist on mature data management. But having an incentive is not the same as being ‘ready’ for data.
- Gen AI may even support the people in your team for the time that AI is a nice distraction from the ordinary way of doing things. It may even bring the lazy ones in motion. For some time.
If you are not ready for legal tech, the above may justify initial AI attempts. But when it comes to people, process and data, it really takes more than the above.
Data validation tooling
One issue with AI are the hallucinations. Hallucinating is inherent to AI, and it is expected that it will never really disappear. What you need, and that is an accelerator for AI, is powerful data validation tooling. For example an ‘under-water-screen’ where your CLM are highlighted in the contract text.
Something like this (watch from 0:30-0:55):
How to fix your readiness gaps?
Weagree’s Legal Ops readiness assessment is a super helpful way to:
- Identify your maturity gaps (and prioritise fixing your gaps), the resulting readiness report gives you
- Lists of the right measures that drive adoption of legal tech, and it gives
- An extensive catalogue of excuses for avoiding legal tech, what they mean (underlying issue) and how to respond effectively to each such excuse.
You will find all this on our website: https://clm.weagree.com/clm-readiness
And then Weagree AI will relieve your legal service delivery because it offers such great accelerations! Tell us which AI accelerators would help you:
