From streamlining RFPs and client intake to enhancing business development and attorney bios, GenAI is unlocking new efficiencies beyond the traditional legal practice, law firm technologists say
Key takeaways:
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GenAI streamlines law firm business functions — Law firms are leveraging generative AI not only for legal practice but also to transform core business operations like RFP management, client intake, marketing, and HR, resulting in significant time savings and efficiency gains.
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Custom AI tools enhance security and adoption — Proprietary AI tools such as Ballard Spahr’s X-Ray RFP repository and Ask Ellis chatbot help firms provide needed insight into data while simultaneously addressing privacy concerns.
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AI-driven content boosts client engagement — Baker Botts has bolstered client experience through the ability to spot and anticipate emerging client issues, while automated attorney bio generation optimized for online search helps improve firm visibility.
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NEW YORK — The rise of generative AI (GenAI) has greatly impacted the daily lives of lawyers, in the process becoming a top-of-mind business priority for law firms of all sizes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of these GenAI conversations have focused on how the innovative technology can impact the practice of law and attorneys directly, through legal research, discovery, contract generation and analysis, and more.
However, the practice of law is far from the only place GenAI can have an outsized impact on a law firm. The workflows that underpin the business of law firms — business development, marketing, client intake, HR and talent, and more — could be transformed just as thoroughly as the practice of law. Since these areas impact attorneys indirectly, however, sometimes these GenAI applications are left relatively unexplored.
“It’s almost like in the business of law side, you need to demonstrate your value twice as much as on the practice of law side,” says Andrew Hutchinson, chief revenue officer at legal technology company Nexl. “What can we do on the other side of the coin?”
Hutchinson moderated a panel at the Inside Legal AI conference that showed some real-world applications of business of law AI from two law firms, Ballard Spahr and Baker Botts. The examples show that even a small amount of AI investment can have an outsized impact on the firm at large when applied to the firm’s real business pain points.
Use case 1: RFP repository
The request for proposal (RFP) process is widely recognized as one of the most tedious tasks facing firms. Especially in a large firm like Ballard Spahr, these RFPs can vary widely between clients, practice areas, and offices, leading to little standardization or ways to extract useful data from any single RFP.
Lisa Mayo Haynes, senior director of technology innovation at Ballard Spahr, realized that GenAI may be the perfect way to bring these disparate documents together. Using Microsoft cloud and GenAI, her team then built X-Ray — a large-scale document repository geared towards RFPs that can hold up to 2,000 documents in each instance, plus a chat feature that allows users to ask questions directly of the documents.
Haynes said her team built the tool first to solve wider problems, then set out to talk to practices to find individual use cases. “When we talked with our IP lawyers, they came up with this interesting problem,” she explains. “They’re the smallest department at our firm, but they had the highest win rate on RFPs.” The IP team wanted to maintain autonomy in RFPs rather than work through the firm’s Marketing team, but it still wanted access to the broader knowledge of the firm.
In response, Ballard Spahr built tagging into X-Ray, allowing for easy identification of relevant documents and re-use of newly generated documents across the firm. “Now, once we had that use case, that spread to our other practice groups who said we want the same thing,” Haynes says, adding that partners estimate they save about two hours per RFP because of this tagging.
Use case 2: AI assistant
More broadly, the Ballard Spahr team also wanted to expand its GenAI abilities to a wider audience. However, the privacy and security of an open public tool like ChatGPT was a non-starter for firm leadership. Thus, Haynes’ team set about building a new proprietary tool, Ask Ellis.
The Ask Ellis chatbot started as a common chat with drafting and analysis capabilities and has since grown to include more specific use cases including creating visuals from Excel, analyzing an image, text to speech, and deposition analysis. Ask Ellis is regularly used to craft emails, convert text from legalese to plain language, and answer surveys and awards submissions within a text limit. Today, Ask Ellis has 900 active users and growing.
“We try to give [users] those practical use cases, so they know how to use Ask Ellis in their daily life,” Haynes explains. “We tell people it’s not a legal research tool, but just for simple, every day, make-your-work better tasks — it’s really been huge.”
Use case 3: Opportunity spotting
At Baker Botts, one of the main roles for the data science team is to help lawyers begin conversations with clients more quickly and with more authority. If the firm hired a new attorney, for example, the firm wants to prepare that attorney to “very quickly become well-versed in all the firm’s capabilities,” says Lynne Kilgore, associate director in competitive intelligence, data science, and analytics at Baker Botts.
Previously, that preparation job consisted of 24 hours of research to gather documents and data; but once a new data scientist came on board, their first task was to use GenAI to cut that time by more than half. The result is a new tool — built within the Google system with Gemini — that not only provides background information on a client, but also uses a combination of publicly available information, financial data, and proprietary firm info to give a low, medium, or high score of a current or prospective client’s anticipated legal needs in a given practice area.
“Business developers and lawyers can go in, run the search themselves, and in two minutes of querying they have a readout with a score,” Kilgore says. This allows for more fruitful client conversations without the need for background info or to get up to speed.
Use case 4: Website bio generation
About one year ago, Kilgore says the firm’s COO ran into a problem. They were perusing the web, doing an online search for best lawyers in the Houston area, and Baker Botts popped up — along with information for attorneys that had retired from the firm more than five years ago.
The COO wanted the data science team to not only update the firm’s website, but also to do so in a way that would propel the firm’s visibility in online searches. Using a combination of secure and vetted AI tools, the data science team built a new tool that draws from lawyer time sheets, the knowledge management platform Foundation, and public websites to create a more comprehensive view of the work that a specific attorney actually does, which in turn allows for more up-to-date information on clients, cases and matters, and the attorney’s status within the firm.
The data science team established guardrails then asked the tool to optimize the resulting output. “We went from really generic bios, to… bios that are more likely to be picked up through answer engine optimization,” Kilgore says. “Now if somebody asks, ‘Who’s the best energy private equity lawyer in Houston?’, we want to be the one that pops up.”
You can find out more about the challenges and opportunities that advanced tech brings to the legal industry here
