Legal tech for practice management and core use cases

Photo credit: REUTERS/ Martin

At its elemental level, legal technology refers to all devices and techniques that help users interact with and navigate the law.

Legal professionals are always looking to replace time- and labor-consuming processes with varying levels of automation and augmentation using legal AI.

We provide a map of legal tech’s present state and where it’s headed. Below are thumbnail sketches of the key types of legal tech, what each can do, and how leaders can move from implementation to adoption.

 

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Why it matters

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Key types of legal tech

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How to implement in your organization

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Build your complete legal tech stack

 

 

Why it matters

Productivity, workflow, and client service are among the ways that legal tech can provide a generational upgrade.

Greater productivity

Legal tech allows lawyers to perform routine tasks more quickly and easily.

Clients are already raising the bar. According to the 2026 Future of Professionals report from Thomson Reuters Institute, 77% of clients say it’s very important, or essential, to see AI-enabled quality improvements from the firms they hire, but only 5% say they’re getting that from most or all of their providers. That gap is exactly what the categories below are built to close.

Optimized workflow

The most common GenAI use cases are for internal work matters, such as research, drafting, and summarization.

However, these uses are increasingly being baked into regular workflows. Among professionals using GenAI currently, for example, more than 80% report using the tools at least weekly. Most also expect this trend to continue, as 87% of professionals say they believe GenAI will be a central part of their workflow within the next five years.

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Estimated time until AI is central to organization’s workflow

21% of corporate legal and 18% of law firm respondents said AI is already part of their workflow.

 

It is currently part of my workflow	21% 18%
Within 1 year	21% 21%
Between 1-2 years	30% 23%
Between 3-5 years	21% 22%
Between 6-10 years	3% 4%
Never	4% 9%

 

Source: 2026 AI in Professional Services Report

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Guided, multi-step AI workflows now suggest and carry out the next step in a project such research, analysis, and drafting. Instead of leaving attorneys to link each task by hand, routine work moves forward while people stay focused on the calls only they can make.

Improved client service

Clients usually want to feel involved in their cases. Now there are easier, yet more comprehensive, ways to keep them in the loop.

The better and more efficient your services become, the more your legal organization’s reputation will grow. More business will soon follow.

Legal tech is becoming a talent issue too. In the same report, nearly a quarter (24%) of law firm professionals say they’d turn down a job offer that didn’t include access to professional-grade AI tools, per the same report.

Key types of legal tech

Emerging technologies in the legal field are rapidly redefining how professionals work. Legal AI has shifted toward augmentation, agency, and even models built specifically for the legal domain that think and reason like a lawyer.

Legal practice management

Practice management is about running the business side of a practice. AI can be used on both the business and practice sides AI closes the gap between the business of law and the practice of law.

Thomson Reuters recently partnered with Smokeball, a practice management platform built for small and mid-size firms. Together, Smokeball and CoCounsel Legal offer an unmatched combination of deep legal content and AI capability with broad practice management functionality.

Practice management solutions like Smokeball bring the day-to-day business of running a firm into one ecosystem: matter and case tracking, document management, calendaring, time tracking, billing, and client communications.

The story is similar for corporate legal departments.

In-house teams can streamline and cut costs in operations management:

Whatever the size of the practice, a good practice management system keeps matters, money, and communication in one place. Lawyers spend less time hunting for information and more time on client work.

Legal research

Whether you’re at a large firm, smaller or solo practice, AI can jumpstart your legal research with faster answers to tough questions. You no longer have to sift through pages of results, then read and summarize each one yourself. AI does that for you, so you spend less time searching and more time advising.

CoCounsel Legal is the only AI in legal tech that reasons from authoritative Westlaw primary law alongside your organization’s data on every matter.

Legal how-to or guidance

Practical Law has been providing legal guidance for decades, with content developed by attorneys who are experts in their practice areas. Legal practitioners rely on it to help them get started on new matters and areas of law.

• Toolkits offer a collection of related Practical Law resources in one place.
• Templates are embedded with drafting notes and clause-by-clause guidance.
• Checklists give an overview of a task or project with step-by-step explanations.
• Comparison charts save you valuable time when working on issues across multiple states.
• Practice Notes with concise explanations of complex issues

CoCounsel Legal is the only AI in legal tech built on trusted know-how alongside your organization’s data on every matter.

Legal drafting

Drafting technology cuts down on errors and reduces legal document creation time.

Whether it’s preparing for a deposition or drafting an agreement, describe what you need in plain language and CoCounsel Legal delivers a polished draft, handling each step from start to finish.

Document automation

Document automation is the behind-the-scenes tool superhero lawyers use on TV shows to move fast. With a few clicks, it turns tedious form and template creation into a breeze.

Lawyers that own document automation as part of their arsenal say goodbye to the drudgery of re-creating the same boilerplate agreement repeatedly and embrace a present where legal work is a story of efficiency and empowerment.

Contract review

AI for contract review is like having a digital concierge. Whether you’re dealing with an indemnification clause, sunset provision, or liability issues, AI finds valuable legal and business data from thousands of documents simultaneously.

It retrieves results in seconds. It searches not just by keywords, but by analyzing the meaning, intent, and content of legal concepts and word patterns.

M&A due diligence

Legal due diligence once meant that junior lawyers spent their weekends at the office sifting through boxes of paperwork. Now via due diligence tools, lawyers can conduct diligence in a paperless environment, able to virtually access a host of databases, whether it’s corporate filings, FEIN numbers, or dockets.

AI-powered systems swiftly analyze this information, retrieving all pertinent information and presenting the findings in an easy-to-digest format.

Streamline due diligence processes from uploading documents, to analysis and classification of all relevant data, to producing charts and summaries.

For instance, when a lawyer needs to search a seller’s documents for non-compete employee agreements, due diligence tech allows them to do so with unprecedented speed and efficiency.

Tracking outside counsel spend

One way to slash outside counsel costs is to have a more accurate means of measuring your spend.

Spend management tools allow you to pinpoint ways to achieve savings — for example, giving users rough estimates of what peer companies do for outside counsel spend, thus comparing your costs with theirs. The use of automated invoice workflows and auditing tools also further reduce counsel spend.

Electronic evidence management

Need to improve case management efficiency?

Employ tools to organize and share evidence with all essential parties in a case. These systems enable lawyers to examine court transcripts, research, and documents found in discovery, then create a graphic timeline to evaluate all pertinent evidence.

Remotely located lawyers can follow depositions live and assess then annotate information with their colleagues in real time.

How to implement in your organization

You may feel overwhelmed once you begin to research legal solutions. A great thing about the variety of applications currently available is that you can customize your own tech stack.

But a problem with this, however, is that many legal organizations feel there’s too much choice. They worry about investing in systems that won’t prove to be the right fit for them and get lost in the sheer number of options out there.

So here are some initial questions to ask when your organization is looking to upgrade its legal tech. Use the answers that you get to lead you towards the applications that will be the best fit for your team.

For in-house teams, read An implementation guide for legal departments

For law firms, read Why law firms are failing at AI implementation

Identify your most vital needs

Ask yourself:

• What do you do now in your team, and how?
• What issues are causing you unnecessary stress?
• In what areas do you feel you’re dangerously lagging your direct competitors?
• What are your biggest cost centers?
• What do your clients say they want most from you?

Research legal solutions

Get your network’s opinions on what they use. Talking to those who are in the know can provide better insight rather than solely getting product demos.

Plan

Investing and installing new legal technology is a big project. You may need external help to help your organization set up, run, and maintain the new solution. Consider hiring someone who can properly implement it and teach you how to use it.

Get buy in by ensuring people and processes can adapt

New technology is a boon to legal teams. But its benefits will be limited if legal professionals are unclear about how to use it or are resistant to using it.

Ensuring that a new system is easy to use, with intuitive prompts that reduce the need for training, and causes minor disruption to a lawyer’s workday, will go a long way towards helping lawyers buy into the new systems. After all, lawyers are busy and asking them to master a new technology suite in their downtime could be a source of discontent.

This tracks with what firms report themselves. In the same report from above, professionals cited the tools not yet being in place (41%), people not feeling equipped to use them (39%), and a strategy that never quite reaches day-to-day work (50%) as the top obstacles to a successful AI rollout. Buy-in isn’t a soft nice-to-have, but it’s the actual bottleneck.

To learn about the other benefits of incorporating technology into your law firm, download our white paper about how technology drives law firm modernization.

Build your complete legal tech stack

The diverse range of legal tech use cases unlocks numerous opportunities for law firms and legal departments. Legal tech stacks of most enterprises peak the day its tools are deployed.

The next generation of CoCounsel Legal is built to do the opposite. Its reasoning capabilities advance alongside the AI frontier, the content it relies on expands every day, and new capabilities reach your team without another procurement cycle.

It’s the only legal AI that reasons from Westlaw, Practical Law, and your firm’s own knowledge. This is Fiduciary-Grade AI™ built to the standard the profession demands.