Artificial Intelligence in Legal Operations: What You Should Know

If you’re part of an in-house legal team, you’ve probably heard a lot about artificial intelligence (AI)—how it’s changing the way legal teams work, making processes smarter, and helping teams scale without adding headcount. But what does that actually mean in practice?

Well, AI is increasingly being built into the tools that legal departments use on a day-to-day basis—from automating intake and routing requests, to organizing documents and surfacing insights buried in legal data.  

For in-house teams looking to improve how they manage legal matters, AI is becoming a core part of the legal tech stack.

Let’s have a closer look at what AI looks like in legal ops today, where it’s being used most effectively, and what to watch for when evaluating platforms.  

How AI is Used in Legal Operations Today

In many in-house legal software solutions, AI powers the automation, analysis, and decision-making that keeps work moving efficiently.

The most common use of AI in legal operations today is streamlining the flow of legal work—especially at the intake stage. Instead of legal requests getting buried in emails or pinged around in Slack, AI can help create matters directly from chat threads, as well as triage and route those matters to the right person, with the right context, instantly.  

AI legal chatbots are also playing a growing role. Whether embedded in an intranet or integrated into a business messaging application (i.e. Microsoft Teams, Slack, etc.), these bots can handle basic legal queries, walk business users through self-serve workflows, or gather the right details before a matter even hits the legal team’s queue.  

Beyond intake, AI is also helping legal teams organize and analyze their work. That means auto-tagging matters by type, flagging missing information, suggesting next steps based on past matters, or highlighting where bottlenecks are forming across legal processes.

And because legal teams are sitting on loads and loads of data, AI helps make that data useful by surfacing trends, illustrating trends in real-time dashboards, and giving legal ops the tools they need to report up with more clarity and confidence.

AI Use Cases in Legal Ops

AI supports lawyers in taking a lot of the repetitive, manual work off their plates. Here are some of the most common and valuable ways legal teams are using AI today:

📝 Document Review

AI can scan and summarize contracts, spot key clauses, and flag missing terms. That means faster turnaround times, more consistent reviews, and less time spent manually digging through documents—especially for high-volume agreements like NDAs or vendor contracts.

📥 Intake & Triage

AI helps legal teams get out of the inbox and into a streamlined, structured intake system. Whether through smart forms or AI-powered chatbots, requests are automatically logged, categorized, and routed to the right person. This is one of the clearest wins for legal ops—turning intake chaos into clean, trackable workflows.

🔍 Matter Categorization

Instead of manually tagging matters (or worse, forgetting to tag them at all), AI can auto-classify work based on past matters, request type, or department. That means better reporting, easier tracking, and cleaner dashboards with less manual upkeep.

📚 Knowledge Management

AI chatbots make internal legal knowledge easier to find and reuse. By surfacing similar matters or pulling in relevant documents, legal teams can avoid reinventing the wheel—saving time and reducing risk. Think of it as smarter search, tailored to how your team actually works.

📊 Reporting & Insights

AI can analyze legal data in real time to highlight trends, bottlenecks, or spikes in workload. For Legal Ops, this means faster answers to leadership questions like “What’s the legal team working on?” or “Where is legal spending the most time?”—without having to dig through spreadsheets and calculate the metrics manually.

Benefits & Risks of Adoption

AI brings a lot of upside to legal ops—but like any technology, it’s not without trade-offs. Knowing both sides helps teams adopt AI more confidently and avoid common pitfalls.

Benefits of Adopting AI in Legal Operations

• Efficiency at Scale: AI takes over repetitive work so legal teams can focus on higher-value tasks.

• Better Visibility: It automatically captures and organizes data, giving teams a clearer view of workloads and performance.

• Smarter Decision-Making: AI surfaces patterns and trends that help legal ops make more informed choices.

• Faster Turnaround Times: Legal requests move faster when intake, triage, and responses are AI-assisted.

Risks of Adopting AI in Legal Operations

• Data Privacy & Security: Sensitive legal data must be protected, and not all AI platforms meet enterprise-level security standards.

• Inaccurate Outputs (a.k.a. “Hallucinations”): Some premature AI tools can generate incorrect or misleading responses without human oversight.

• Change Management: Even the best AI won’t work without buy-in, process alignment, and proper rollout.

As with implementing any new technology, AI adoption in legal ops isn’t without risks. But with the right tools and thoughtful implementation, it has the potential to transform how legal teams work.

AI Features to Look for in Legal Tech

If you’re looking to bring AI into your legal ops tech stack, here are the key features to look for—so you’re investing in tech that actually supports your team’s goals.

The key takeaway here is to prioritize AI tools that are flexible, explainable, and designed specifically for in-house legal teams.

How Can Checkbox Help

Checkbox is a leading intake, workflow, and matter management software for in-house legal teams that combines all the key AI capabilities legal teams need—without the complexity that usually comes with legal tech.  

With AI-powered intake forms and chatbots, legal teams can capture the right information up front, route requests automatically, and cut out the back-and-forth that slows things down. Matters are centralized and auto-tagged, giving teams a single source of truth for everything they’re working on, from intake to resolution.  

Real-time dashboards offer instant visibility into legal’s performance, including request volume, turnaround times, and team workload—making it easier to report on legal’s impact and plan ahead.  

And because Checkbox is designed specifically for in-house teams, it includes enterprise-grade security, transparent audit trails, and customizable workflows that adapt to your processes—not the other way around.  

As an AI-powered in-house legal software platform, Checkbox helps legal teams bring structure, speed, and insight to their operations—so they can scale their impact with confidence.

To learn more, schedule a call with one of our technology consultants.