Former lawyer Dan Hauck (Chief Product Officer, NetDocuments) is passionate about delivering enabling technology to the legal industry.
AI is already transforming legal operations. But in the very near future, the success of firms and corporate legal teams will be greatly influenced by how effectively they integrate agentic AI into workflows. Across multiple verticals, the story is the same: The global market for autonomous and agentic AI is expected to exceed $70 billion in value by 2030.
Why Agentic AI, And Why Now?
In many ways, 2024 was the year AI went from early adoption to mainstream use in the legal industry. Nearly half [of legal professionals] have used AI to digitize/automate activities in the last 12 months”—with organizations working to unlock efficiency and productivity benefits.
Agentic AI is the much-anticipated next stage in the technology’s development. Going beyond just responding to user prompts, generating and summarizing content, these agents work autonomously—completing tasks set for them by humans. Working in an intelligent and adaptive manner, AI agents will use their own perception, reasoning and planning capabilities to execute on the goals set for them—while continuously learning, refining and improving.
For lawyers and legal professionals, the opportunities are extremely appealing. At the last few industry events I attended, it was clear many people couldn’t wait to get started—and for good reason. AI agents don’t need constant supervision, so they can free up talent to focus on higher-value strategic work and client services. For starters, you can let AI do the heavy lifting on repetitive, time-consuming manual tasks like drafting and reviewing documents, case preparation, document classification and metadata tagging.
Three Prerequisites For Success
Success isn’t guaranteed. There is work to do: To successfully adopt agentic AI, organizations need to identify high-value use cases, manage security risks and build user trust. They also need a strategy for integration: “More than a third (37%) of law firm employees and 42% of their corporate counterparts say they experience challenges in integrating GenAI with existing legal systems and processes.”
Here are three key areas law firms and corporate legal departments need to focus on for successful agentic AI adoption:
Identify Use Cases Where Agentic AI Adds Value
AI won’t deliver value unless it’s applied where it actually helps. Start with legal-specific, repeatable tasks that are easy to monitor.
For instance, agentic AI could be asked to redline contracts that don’t align with the firm’s playbooks, extracting key data from documents (for example, during due diligence work) and drafting clause suggestions or responses. Agents could also be employed to autonomously generate timelines and summaries for cases. All of these use cases would enable legal professionals to work more efficiently and focus on delivering better legal services, faster.
Keep Confidential Information Safe
Digital transformation rarely succeeds unless risk is properly understood and managed from the start. The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) has listed multiple ways malicious actors could target large language models (LLMs).
Even well-intentioned use of AI tools can expose organizations to reputational and compliance risks if sensitive information is mishandled. With agents working in an autonomous way, having a complete understanding of how they access and process sensitive information will be important.
To mitigate the risks, firms and legal teams need to ensure that safety guardrails are built in when agentic AI is deployed. They should consider embedding AI into existing, trusted platforms—ones that already contain an organization’s corpus of knowledge, like document management systems—to make sure that sensitive information stays in secure environments and is not shared with standalone AI tools. It’s all about bringing AI to the content, rather than the other way round. Not only will this help minimize data protection risks, but it could also help improve the accuracy and consistency of underlying data.
Build User Trust Through Familiarity And Control
Finally, don’t forget who will be using this technology. Without end-user buy-in, it’s unlikely that deployments will succeed. Just as office workers trust Excel to perform complex calculations, lawyers need to feel confident about AI outputs. That trust comes from clear use cases, consistent results and operating within familiar platforms.
At the recent ILTACON legal conference, I was struck by how quickly legal practitioners are understanding the practical, day-to-day application of AI agents. Across the industry, people are building the use cases and beginning to put agentic to work. For instance, I had a discussion with one law firm about how an agentic AI editing tool could enable its lawyers to quickly update deal terms across potentially hundreds or thousands of pages of complex agreements, reducing the risk of missing pieces or introducing errors.
These kinds of use cases bring huge benefits to legal professionals and, more importantly, an opportunity to impress the client with the firm’s efficiency, speed and attention to detail.
If legal professionals are using AI as part of existing systems they rely on every day, it will be easier to build trust in agentic AI outputs. This will improve adoption and shorten the time it takes to realize measurable value—ultimately benefiting your business, your people and your clients.
Responsible Adoption Delivers Lasting Value
Adoption of agentic AI must be done in a responsible manner, or organizations may find themselves exposed to elevated levels of financial, reputational and compliance risk.
Choosing clear, relevant use cases, embedding AI into existing, secure systems and building user trust through familiarity and results gives the legal sector a clear pathway to success. Agentic AI is set to truly empower legal professionals to spend more time doing what they do best. No organization can afford to ignore its transformative potential.
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