Beyond Traditional Tools: Leveraging AI for efficient law practice management
Nicole Black.
For many law firms, law practice management software is the backbone of their business. It streamlines workflows, reduces administrative burdens and facilitates efficient billing processes—increasing productivity and profitability. From lead intake and case tracking to managing deadlines and handling payments, law practice management tools ensure effective collaboration and efficient firm operations.
When artificial intelligence functionality is added to law practice management software, the potential for newfound efficiency increases exponentially.
AI features can automate routine tasks, such as document creation and editing, document summarization, text translation and case status summaries. Automating routine and tedious tasks saves time, allowing legal professionals to focus on higher-level tasks, such as case analysis and client communications.
Over the past year, many leading law practice management companies have announced AI plans, ranging from roadmaps and beta releases to public releases of AI functionality into their platforms. Companies have approached AI implementation differently, with features, functionality and pricing varying widely.
Below, we’ll review AI announcements and releases from many companies and provide an overview of their offerings, including pricing when available. But first, let’s review the issues that you should consider when adopting AI tools into your firm.
Choosing AI tools for law practice management
First and foremost, because AI tools are typically cloud-based, you’ll entrust your firm’s confidential client data to a third party. Ethical rules require you to thoroughly vet the cloud provider hosting and storing your firm’s data. This duty includes a thorough understanding of how that company will handle the data; where the servers on which the data will be stored are located; who will have access to it; and how often and when it will be backed up, among other things.
When considering AI tools for your firm, vetting providers requires asking about accuracy rates, how the company will protect your data, and whether your team’s data inputs are used to train AI models to improve responses. To assist you with the provider-vetting process, you can find a list of suggested questions to ask cloud and AI providers here.
If your firm is new to LPM software, take advantage of free trials and demos of the LPM software and available AI features before investing in a tool. If your firm is already using an LPM platform that has begun to roll out new AI features, ensure that you fully understand how the company handles AI data input before allowing the use of those features in your firm.
With that advice in mind, let’s look at the AI landscape for LPM software. We’ll round up many of the companies that have announced AI development plans and features and share pricing information, if available.
Publicly released generative AI LPM tools
Leap’s AI features were announced in July and include a legal assistant tool supported by humans on the back end, AI-assisted document generation, and the ability to ask questions about case-related data and obtain insights.
The website indicates that the AI legal assistant is “included with your Leap subscription at no extra cost in select states and matter types,” but the cost of the other AI features is not provided. Leap’s pricing for its LPM system is also not available on the website.
Next, MyCase’s AI tool, MyCase IQ, was released in beta in January. Since then, MyCase, an AffiniPay company (note that I am employed by AffiniPay), has publicly released generative AI text editing, which allows users to improve their writing or change the tone of text to formal, assertive, persuasive, empathetic or advisory.
Another AI feature recently rolled out publicly is the translation functionality, which allows text to be converted from English to Spanish or vice versa. Additional languages will be added in the near future.
There are plans to add case and matter summaries to the AI roadmap, as well, and AI functionality will also be rolled into other company products, including Casepeer, Docketwise and LawPay. The AI features are currently provided at no additional cost in the pro and advanced tiers, and pricing is available on the website.
Finally, Filevine offers an LPM legal assistant, SidebarAI, which provides customer service support to help navigate the Filevine platform.
It also assists in creating workflows and summarizing the status of the last seven days of a case. It is included in the base tier, but pricing for this tier is unavailable on the website.
For an additional but unstated cost, Filevine also offers LeadsAI, an add-on to its Lead Docket software, and AI-enhanced summaries and analysis as part of the Document Assembly add-on. Stand-alone AI tools include DemandsAI for creating demand letters, which can be integrated with its LPM, and AIFields, which summarizes and extracts information from uploaded documents.
LPM AI tools announced but not yet available or currently in beta
Clio announced its vision for AI, Clio Duo, in October 2023. No information about Clio Duo is available on its website, and it has not yet been released.
The announcement indicated that it will be accessible in Clio Manage once released, with plans to integrate it into other Clio software products, as well. Features are expected to include matter overview summaries, document summarization and generation of simple documents, and reminder prompts for overdue tasks or invoices. Pricing information has not been made available.
Smokeball’s AI features were released in beta in March and have not been released publicly. The beta tools include reviewing and summarizing legal matter documents, drafting emails and correspondence in Outlook, obtaining answers to questions about matters, and generating intake forms.
Smokeball AI intake features are available in LeadPro (intake), and the matter management AI assistant is available as an add-on with two Smokeball tier levels. Pricing for the AI add-ons is not provided on the website.
In September 2023, Caret Legal announced the beta release of its AI document summarization feature, which can extract and summarize clauses and information obtained from legal documents. This functionality is included at no additional cost in every tier except the entry-level tier. Pricing for all plans is available on the website.
Is your firm ready?
If you’re considering investing in AI tools in the near future, you may have to look no further than the LPM that your firm already uses. While many companies are initially releasing a few basic AI features, AI integration into practice management software will become increasingly sophisticated, given the rapid technological advancement. This will undoubtedly happen more quickly than expected, so the earlier that your firm adapts to these changes, the better.
AI-enhanced practice management software will soon be necessary for firms seeking to set themselves apart in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Is your firm ready for the next stage of computing? If not, there’s no better time than now to research your options and invest in the future success of your firm.
Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York-based attorney, author and journalist, and she is the principal legal insight strategist at MyCase, a company that offers legal practice management software for small firms. She is the nationally recognized author of Cloud Computing for Lawyers and is co-author of Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier, both published by the American Bar Association. She writes regular columns for ABAJournal.com and Above the Law, has authored hundreds of articles for other publications, and regularly speaks at conferences regarding the intersection of law and emerging technologies. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) @nikiblack, or she can be reached at niki.black@mycase.com.
This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.
