The current generation of legal AI tools is automating tasks that previously required substantial staffing. But here’s what’s crucial about this new efficiency: These aren’t just cost-saving tools—they’re capacity multipliers. Legal departments can now expand their portfolio beyond their previous resource constraints.
In our legal department, we’ve deployed contract review tools that have made that process much more efficient. But the additional revelation has been AI’s ability to seamlessly integrate complex concepts within existing frameworks.
I’ve always prided myself on weaving elaborate concepts into the drafting frameworks developed by counterparties. It’s a skill honed over many years: Junior lawyers often simply cross out existing sections and substitute their preferred new language. But I’ve now seen firsthand that AI can operate as a sophisticated drafter.
The business impact is measurable. Our AI-enabled contract review and management systems allowed legal to absorb functions historically handled by finance, displacing their outdated and underutilized tools. The transformation expanded legal’s reach within the enterprise, while reducing overall costs by several hundred thousand dollars annually.
‘Off-Label’ Use
The opportunity extends beyond the nominal purpose of these tools by synthesizing their broader potential with the demands of a particular in-house practice. For example, in our legal department, we’re finding new “off-label” use cases and deploying legal tech in ways the developers hadn’t envisioned.
Our company operates television and radio stations. During election seasons we receive a high volume of political advertisements that must be reviewed carefully for defamation risks. What we discovered was that technology improving contract review processes could be adapted to improve our responsiveness with our business team selling political ads. This enhanced our ability to both ensure compliance and increase the speed of closing valuable advertising deals.
The legal department’s ability to combine enhanced technology with skilled deployment has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars annually while reducing the risk of legal bottlenecks and maximizing business agility.
READ PART ONE: GCs, Look Beyond Automation. Al Will Spark Legal Team Reinvention
Quantifying the Transformation
When AI handles even routine tasks, legal teams experience dramatic productivity gains. Contract velocity improvements are transforming deal-making timelines. Orangetheory Fitness reports that it reduced franchise agreement review from more than two hours to roughly 30 minutes—an 80% improvement. Open, a neo-bank, cut average contract-approval time by 90% after deploying AI review engines. This accelerated due-diligence cycles during critical funding rounds.
The economics of litigation discovery have been revolutionized entirely. In high-volume cases, AI-led technology-assisted review now processes document sets in 26 seconds that previously required 92 minutes of lawyer time. This saves about 94% of review hours and associated costs.
According to a 2024 outlook report on legal professionals, AI could free up four hours of a professional’s time per week. This translates to approximately $100,000 in new billable time per lawyer annually. A study published in Minnesota Law Review found 10% to 30% increases in speed across core attorney work.
Some specialized applications show even greater gains. Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession documented cases where AI-powered systems reduced associate time from 16 hours to three or four minutes for high-volume litigation tasks.
Some Assembly Required
Despite these wins, not every product is a home run. Sometimes technology that dazzled in demos proved cumbersome and inefficient to implement. We’ve acquired tools that are undeniably powerful but required levels of training or upfront resource investments that, as a practical matter, prevented us from fully realizing the anticipated efficiency gains.
This reveals a critical gap in legal technology adoption. The “some assembly required” element can be sufficiently taxing that the drag it puts on implementation almost negates the value of the product.
A plug-in that works immediately can be far more valuable than sophisticated software requiring complex system integration. Legal professionals aren’t looking to write code or become system architects.
But when implementation works, the applications can extend far beyond initial use cases—and extend the reach of the legal team. The tools we used for both contract review processes and internal communications reflect what makes AI adoption successful—a culture in which the team is encouraged to think expansively about technology, where success in one area spurs others to look for opportunities for process improvements and multidimensional efficiencies.
The next article of this series will explore how AI tools through their pattern recognition capabilities can be used as strategic advisers that supplement—but don’t replace—human judgment in high-stakes matters.
This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.
An immaterial amount of this content was drafted by generative artificial intelligence.
Author Information
Eric Dodson Greenberg is executive vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary of Cox Media Group.
Write for Us: Author Guidelines
To contact the editors responsible for this story: