AI for Legal Teams: What Actually Works in 2025 (And What Doesn’t)

The Rise of AI in Legal: From Support Act to Strategic Partner

AI tools are quickly becoming part of the legal tech stack. But they’re not replacing lawyers. They’re equipping them to work smarter, faster, and more strategically.

Instead of spending time on low-value tasks, legal professionals are using AI to automate intake, accelerate workflows, and extract insights from their data. Done right, AI doesn’t remove people from the picture; it elevates their ability to make better, faster decisions.

This shift is already happening. Legal’s role is evolving from reactive service provider to strategic advisor. But AI adoption has to be intentional. Not everything works the way it promises to.

What AI Can Actually Do for Legal Teams in 2025

Optimize Intake and Triage

AI-powered intake tools can automatically categorize, prioritize, and route incoming legal requests. This reduces the manual triage burden and gives legal teams a head start on urgent matters.  

Streamline Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)

AI can help speed up the process of reviewing and managing contracts by identifying key clauses, checking that language matches approved guidelines, and suggesting edits. Some CLM platforms support these features, especially for simple, high-volume agreements like NDAs, where legal teams often spend more time than they should. With AI handling the routine parts, contracts move faster, and lawyers can focus on more complex work.

Checkbox supports the CLM lifecycle at the intake and workflow level. By automating how requests for contract support are submitted, triaged, and routed (and embedding smart approvals and audit trails throughout the process), Checkbox helps legal teams reduce cycle times and streamline how contracts get into the right hands faster.

Surface Real-Time Data and Centralize Reporting

With centralized intake and automated tracking, AI can turn everyday activity into structured data. That means faster, more accurate reporting on matter volume, cycle times, and outcomes.

Enforce and Facilitate Compliance

AI can help legal teams embed compliance into everyday processes by prompting the right actions, ensuring required steps are followed, and surfacing issues that need closer review. Rather than relying on individuals to remember each policy, AI enables consistent processes that reduce manual oversight.

With Checkbox, compliance can be built directly into intake and workflow logic. For example, a conflict-of-interest workflow can guide employees through a structured disclosure process, requiring specific details and routing the submission to the appropriate reviewers. Similarly, a privacy impact assessment can be automatically triggered when a request involves personal or sensitive data, ensuring the right stakeholders are involved before the work progresses. With these types of capabilities, Checkbox makes it easier for legal and compliance teams to manage risk, maintain auditability, and align with both internal policy and regulatory requirements.

Enable Self-Service Through Agentic AI and FAQ Chatbots

AI-powered chatbots can now handle repeatable, policy-driven questions with ease. By guiding users through structured responses, they reduce the number of one-off requests sent to legal and give business users fast, consistent answers. These bots also capture valuable data on request volume and trends, helping teams refine self-service content and identify opportunities for automation.

Checkbox takes this a step further. Our AI-powered front door doesn’t just respond to FAQs. It acts as a dynamic assistant that uses internally provided information to guide users to the right legal pathways, captures critical intake data, and automates next steps like document generation or routing for review. The result is a smarter, more responsive intake experience that scales with your team.

Strengthen Workflow Automation

AI can trigger workflows automatically based on the type of request, its urgency, or specific predefined rules. When paired with no-code automation, this reduces the need for manual handoffs, improves consistency across matters, and frees up legal teams to focus on higher-value work. Workflow automation ensures repeatable processes stay repeatable, even as demand grows.

With Checkbox, AI-powered logic routes work exactly where it needs to go. Whether it’s a simple NDA or a high-priority investigation, automated workflows ensure requests follow the right path from day one. Legal teams can set conditions, approvals, and escalations in minutes. No IT required.

What Still Doesn’t Work Well (Yet)

Generative AI and Hallucinations

Generative AI, including large language models (LLMs), can be helpful for drafting, summarizing, or brainstorming. But they come with a known issue: hallucinations. This happens when the AI generates text that sounds confident and plausible but is factually incorrect or misleading. In legal contexts, even small inaccuracies can carry big risks. That’s why generative AI should always be used with human oversight, especially for anything involving legal nuance, risk, or regulation.  

Checkbox takes a different approach by focusing on structured, rules-based AI rather than relying on open-ended generative tools. Our platform uses your team’s pre-approved content, decision logic, and templates to ensure responses stay grounded, accurate, and repeatable.

Lack of Legal Context

Most off-the-shelf AI tools aren’t built for legal. They lack the training and structure to understand how legal teams think, work, and make decisions. That includes the ability to apply legal reasoning, interpret nuance, or factor in jurisdiction-specific rules and obligations. As a result, they can misclassify requests, surface irrelevant information, or overlook critical context that only a legal-trained system would recognize.

That’s where Checkbox’s purpose-built approach comes in. Our AI is trained on structured, organization-specific inputs, so it understands how your team operates and why that matters. Rather than guessing at legal nuance, it applies consistent logic and routing based on your policies, priorities, and internal standards.

Data Privacy and Confidentiality Risks

When legal teams use public or third-party generative AI tools, there’s often limited control over where data goes or how it’s used. Even anonymized queries can expose sensitive information, creating risks around confidentiality, data retention, and compliance, especially in highly regulated industries. That lack of transparency and governance is a major reason many legal teams have avoided experimenting with AI altogether.

Checkbox takes a different approach. Our platform keeps all data securely within your environment or a fully governed, enterprise-grade system. AI features are built into the platform itself, not layered on through risky third-party plug-ins. That means your legal data stays private, secure, and compliant, while still unlocking the efficiency benefits of AI.

Why AI Is a Game-Changer for In-House Legal Teams

More Time for Meaningful Work

AI doesn’t just save legal teams time; it unlocks the capacity to focus on higher-value work. By automating intake, triage, and repeatable workflows, legal gains space to think proactively, not just reactively. That opens the door for better support across the business and stronger alignment with strategic goals.

With Checkbox, automation starts at the front door. Requests are routed, tasks are assigned, and standard documents are generated without manual lift, helping legal stay responsive without getting buried in the operational weeds.

Prove Legal’s Value in Real-Time

When legal can see what’s happening across the request lifecycle in real time, they gain more than insight; they gain credibility. Visibility into volume, cycle times, and blockers enables more accurate forecasting, better staffing decisions, and data-backed conversations with leadership.

Checkbox captures structured data from every step in the workflow, making it easy to track performance and report with confidence. That means fewer surprises, more transparency, and a clearer case for the resources legal needs to scale.

Run Legal Like a Business

AI-powered systems create the operational foundation legal needs to lead, not just support. With reliable data and automated workflows in place, legal can step into a consultative role, flagging trends, shaping business policy, and advising on risk before it materializes.

Checkbox gives teams the tools to do more than just move faster. It helps them connect their work to business outcomes, report on their contributions, and become a proactive partner in decision-making across the organization.

How to Prepare Your Legal Team for Responsible AI Adoption

Educate and Empower Your Team

AI adoption isn’t just a tech decision. It’s a people one. Invest in training so lawyers understand what AI can do, where it fits, and when human judgment is still critical.

Checkbox makes AI approachable with use cases grounded in real legal workflows. You and your team can see how it works and why it helps, without needing a technical background.

Start with Low-Risk, High-Volume Work

Use AI to automate tasks like triage, NDA generation, or policy FAQs. These are easy wins that build confidence without introducing major risk.

Checkbox lets you launch pre-built intake flows and document automations in minutes, helping your team start small and scale based on proven impact.

Establish Governance Early

Define where AI is used, how it’s monitored, and how decisions are made. Responsible AI frameworks reduce ethical, legal, and reputational risk.

With Checkbox, governance is built in. Admins can set rules, control access, and track decision logic, ensuring every automation follows legal’s policies and risk thresholds.

Ready to See What Actually Works?

AI can’t do everything. But what it does well can transform how your legal team makes the most of its time (especially when it’s an AI-powered tool built for legal).

Checkbox combines secure, AI-powered intake with self-service automation and real-time reporting. So legal teams can focus less on triage and more on meaningful work.