What are the Best AI Tools for Legal Departments in 2025?

Since 2023, artificial intelligence (AI) has seen an exponential increase in popularity and is quickly becoming essential for legal teams that wish to scale efficiently, prioritize high-impact work, and stay competitive. 

From AI-powered intake bots and smart routing, to contract analysis and predictive insights, the right tools can make the difference between acting as a service provider and adding strategic value to business decisions.

Let’s break down what AI can actually do for legal teams today and spotlight the top AI tools that are helping GCs, CLOs, and Legal Ops leaders drive efficiency, improve visibility, and elevate legal’s role in the business.

What Can AI Do for Legal?

AI offers practical solutions to some of the most persistent challenges legal teams face. It helps to amplify their impact and free up time to focus on the work that truly needs their expertise.

Here are four powerful ways AI is reshaping how legal work gets done:

🤖 AI-Powered Chatbots for Intake & Triage

Problem: Manual intake is slow, inconsistent, and labor-intensive.

Capability: AI legal chatbots can handle requests 24/7 by understanding details, capturing data, asking clarifying questions, and instantly routing requests to the right team or workflow.

Outcome: Legal teams respond faster, reduce email back-and-forth, and stay on top of every incoming legal request.

🕵️‍♀️ Text Analysis for Contracts & Documents

Problem: Reviewing contracts and documents takes up valuable time and introduces risk when done manually.

Capability: AI can instantly analyze contracts, extract key clauses, highlight deviations from playbooks, and summarize terms.

Outcome: Faster contract cycles, better risk management, and more consistency across reviews.

⤵️ Smart Routing Based on Capacity & Expertise

Problem: Manually assigning work often leads to uneven workloads, causing burnout or delays.

Capability: AI can assess team bandwidth, matter complexity, and expertise to automatically assign the right work to the right person.

Outcome: Optimized workloads, better resource utilization, and happier, more productive teams.

📊 Predictive Reporting & Legal Insights

Problem: Legal teams struggle to track performance or demonstrate value to leadership.

Capability: AI can surface trends in volume, turnaround time, risk exposure, and more, automatically compiling data into dashboards or reports.

Outcome: Data-driven insights that support strategic decisions and prove legal’s business impact.

📄 AI-Generated Matter Summaries

Problem: With hundreds or even thousands of open matters, it’s hard to stay on top of what’s happening, especially when jumping back into something after a delay.

Capability: AI can generate concise, real-time summaries of each matter, pulling in key details, recent activity, and status updates.

Outcome: Legal professionals get instant context so they can work more efficiently and make faster decisions.

Best AI Tools for Legal Departments in 2025

With AI delivering tangible impact across intake, document analysis, routing, and reporting, the legal tech landscape has quickly evolved. And the best AI platforms are those that solve real problems legal teams face every day. Here’s a list of the top AI tools legal departments are turning to in 2025, categorized by function and value:

1. Checkbox 

Checkbox is an AI-driven legal work management platform that centralizes intake, triage, matter tracking, and reporting all in one place. It consolidates requests, automates workflows, and enables real-time visibility into workload and performance. Some of its standout legal AI features include intelligent chat-style legal intake, smart routing based on pre-defined rules, and auto-generated summaries.

2. Kira Systems

Kira uses machine learning to extract and analyze contract data with high accuracy. This reduces manual review time and increases consistency during M&A, audits, or repapering projects. Kira is especially useful for large document sets and due diligence work.

3. Relativity AI 

Relativity uses AI for document review, redaction, and identifying patterns in large datasets during litigation or legal investigations. This helps legal teams handle sensitive or complex cases more efficiently. Relativity AI is typically well-suited for in-house litigation support and compliance-heavy industries.

4. Luminance

Luminance applies AI to legal documents to detect anomalies, uncover risk, and visualize trends. This enables faster, smarter compliance reviews with built-in dashboards. Luminance is  most commonly used in audits, investigations, and regulatory compliance.

Key Takeaways

Legal teams that embrace AI are not only working more efficiently, but also gaining the visibility and data they need to lead strategically. 

Whether you’re trying to reduce manual intake, streamline contract review, or make better use of your team’s time, AI offers practical solutions that deliver immediate value.

AI-powered in-house legal software tools like Checkbox helps legal teams take control of their workload, automate manual tasks, and scale their impact with intelligent intake and matter management.

Ready to leverage AI tools and improve your legal operations? Book a demo today to see how Checkbox can help.