By Sakar S. Yadav

As this year draws to a close, it’s time to take stock of how far we’ve come in our efforts to build and integrate legal AI and what’s in store for 2025.

Despite being a slow adopter of the technology, the legal world was forced to take notice of the potential benefits of generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLM), especially due to the increasing pressure of pending cases. Due to lack of human resources and staggering delays in our judicial process due to disorganized legal data, we need to rethink our approach and transform the legal field with AI.

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While these solutions present many complexities and risks, law firms and professionals should start exploring the integration of AI into their daily work and not wait for the technology to mature.

GenAI and LLMs have come a long way in the past year in proving their capabilities to help legal teams execute critical workflows. Several legal AI products have addressed well-known challenges such as fraud, privacy, confidentiality, attribution/citations, and copyright and have made the case for using this technology to increase legal productivity.

Although it’s early days, current use cases cover a wide range of tasks that require speed and accuracy.

Practice of Law: Legal research • Drafting of documents

Non-practice: Legal research, drafting documents, drafting legal updates, emails, speeches, and slide decks • Summarizing video meetings and action items

Litigation: Creation of collection summaries and questions • Drafting of investigative responses • Timelines

Transactions + Contracts: Due Diligence • Contract Review (eg, Quotation Clauses, Redline, Comparison to Standard) • Contract Summary

compliance: Answer questions about policies.

Source: Gartner Research

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Recently, when Google revealed its latest quantum chip, the Willow, questions about quantum computing and its potential use in the legal field resurfaced.

Quantum computing can help the legal profession address many challenges in legal research, data security, e-discovery, and contract analysis with its high processing power and computational capacity. It is also capable of simulating legal scenarios – predicting the outcome of legal disputes or determining the impact of policy changes. With AI-powered insights, lawyers, attorneys and judges can make informed decisions for better legal outcomes.

As we look toward 2025, our industry is poised for significant changes with increasing technological advancements, evolving client expectations, and changing workplace dynamics.

Legal self-service tools

In the coming years, the percentage of legal requests answered by self-service tools designed for businesses will increase from the low single digits to at least 20%.

AI models with advanced reasoning

Advanced reasoning capabilities in AI models have the potential to transform tasks such as comparing contracts and handling multi-step workflows with even greater innovation.

Small Language Models (SLMs)

SLMs are ideal for legal tech because they offer better privacy, faster response, and more affordable customization. They are particularly useful for focused tasks such as contract analysis and document drafting. They will not completely replace the larger language models (LLMs), but are useful in specific areas, giving law firms the flexibility to train for specific industry needs.

Enhancement of Recovery Augmented Generation (RAG).

RAG integrating LLMs, SLMs, and external knowledge bases is expected to grow significantly. This will ensure better functionality with creative AI tools generating accurate and relevant information. This trend will revolutionize document management and streamline legal research.

Building GenAI skills for adoption

To maintain document preparation and contract review tools, legal professionals will need to sharpen their quick engineering and data management skills. Bridging the gap between new tech investment and actual consumer adoption will be a major focus in 2025.

AI powered legal assistants

2025 has been declared the year of Agentic AI and will also see the arrival of AI agents and AI-powered workflows in the legal space. These legal AI assistants will find their way into everyday operational tasks, helping firms improve their workflows and improve client service.

We are on the cusp of revolutionizing legal with AI, and our industry needs to trust and invest in these technologies moving forward.

(The author is the founder of Lexlegis.ai. The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of MaliExpress.com.)