Gartner has identified six top use cases for generative AI (GenAI) in legal departments, showing how the technology can enhance productivity, reduce risks, and drive innovation in legal operations.
“GenAI – being rooted in text analysis – is a good fit technology for reshaping the legal department by automating routine tasks and providing deeper insights,” says Weston Wicks, senior director analyst in the Gartner Assurance Practice. “The implications are significant, as GenAI can enable legal departments to allocate resources more efficiently and focus more employee time on strategic initiatives.”
Gartner experts evaluated a total of 16 potential legal department use cases for GenAI, ranking these use-cases according to business value and feasibility.
The six use cases with the highest business value that were most feasible to implement and operate in a typical enterprise legal department are as follows:
- Contract Visibility/Data Extraction: GenAI can revolutionize the management of contract data by identifying, extracting, and classifying terms and conditions from legacy and third-party contracts. This creates a searchable database, significantly enhancing productivity for tasks, such as post signature management and M&A due diligence. “GenAI can reduce the administrative burden of manual data extraction, especially in highly regulated industries,” says Wicks. “However, unique and complex agreements may require additional training or custom AI models for optimal performance.
- Automated Contract Review: GenAI can accelerate the contract review process by identifying clauses that deviate from organisational standards and providing automated redlining. This reduces cycle time and legal review requirements, positively impacting business revenue and operational efficiency. “While some solutions offer advanced capabilities like automated negotiation, legal oversight remains necessary for complex agreements, ensuring consistency and risk mitigation,” says Wicks.
- Summarisation of Legal Documents: GenAI can condense complex legal texts into concise, coherent summaries, highlighting key points and essential insights. This increases staff productivity by enabling quick consumption of critical information, supporting informed decision-making. Numerous AI-powered summarisation tools are available, but human review remains essential to ensure accuracy and reliability of the generated content.
- Legal Intake and Triage: GenAI could revolutionise the intake process by swiftly analyzing the details of written requests and automatically categorising them based on type, region, risk level and urgency. This automation prioritises and routes requests to the appropriate legal resources, significantly enhancing productivity. “In some cases, GenAI can provide automatic responses or document templates, allowing legal staff to focus on more complex tasks,” says Wicks. “However, to achieve meaningful adoption, organisations must invest in stakeholder outreach and change management.”
- Transcribe and Summarise Meetings: GenAI can convert spoken discussions from meetings into written transcripts and condense them into short summaries with key points and takeaways. This elevates productivity by freeing legal staff to focus on essential discussion elements rather than note-taking. The technology saves time by automatically producing detailed summaries, and after training, it can be quickly deployed across departments or enterprises.
- Contract Risk Analysis: GenAI can map and score risks within contracts, offering proactive risk management indicators. This use case enhances productivity and consistency in negotiations by providing a risk percentage based on factors such as deviation from standard thresholds. Implementation requires collaboration with vendors to refine risk scoring criteria and establish effective risk management practices. Organizations must also develop their risk assessment capabilities to fully leverage this technology
“Legal departments will have to embrace these technologies to remain competitive and efficient,” Wicks says. “This isn’t a technology that can simply replace people, but as its use becomes more prevalent the ability to harness it effectively for legal work will become table stakes for most employees in the industry.”