To integrate AI into their working practices successfully legal organisations need to move from a “tech-first” to a “people-first” approach, says Jenny Hotchin, customer discovery lead at systems provider iManage

2025 marks a crucial pivot for AI in legal, with the focus shifting from the technology itself to people and processes. While AI tools offer clear benefits for process optimisation, legal organisations – including both law firms and corporate legal departments – face significant adoption hurdles and change management challenges.

If they hope to successfully overcome these challenges, legal organisations must take a more nuanced, people-centric approach to AI. Truly understanding the needs, concerns, and daily workflows of end users is the only way to bring solutions that truly add value, solve problems for professionals, and set the stage for AI success.

Embrace “little and often”

A people-centric approach to AI starts by recognising that busy legal professionals don’t want to be force-fed a new technology like AI – they’d prefer to take small bites.

Think “little and often” here: people should be able to use AI with regularity throughout their day for short routine tasks.

Imagine a junior lawyer in the corporate team – constantly racing against the clock. They’re juggling multiple deals and time is of essence.

Instead of combing through pages of agreements, they ask the AI tool to summarise the key, relevant sections of the document – from conditions precedent to post-completion obligations. The information comes back almost instantaneously, providing an in-depth view of the deal dynamics and a feel for  the pulse of key aspects of the transaction.

The result? With the situational awareness, they have a head start and are empowered to impress in the next meeting.

This type of scenario is equally applicable to the more seasoned individuals in the organisation. A senior partner with a crammed schedule and last-minute client meetings can arrive “armed and ready” when they walk into their client meetings throughout the day, thanks to a quick briefing 10 minutes beforehand from generative AI on the documents they’ll be discussing.

In-house legal teams buried under too many small tasks can lean on AI for routine queries, freeing themselves up to give strategic projects the focus they deserve.

From document overviews to extracting specific clauses, from summarising positions to analysing compliance – in-house counsel can leverage the AI tool to augment the work they do every day. As a result, legal teams turn around requests and provide advice faster, thanks to a quick assist from AI.

Build trust with usable results

The above examples illustrate how a “little and often” approach makes it easy to weave AI into everyday workflows – but it also shows that for people to keep using AI with regularity, it has to provide usable results.

A “usable result” from generative AI isn’t just something that incorporates the appropriate style or tone. It’s a result that allows the knowledge worker to verify the information that’s being drawn upon, so that they can have confidence in the result. If a result cannot be verified, then in most cases it's not usable.

Likewise, while generative AI has an almost magical ability to summarise or paraphrase material, sometimes users want the AI to find and return a clause, sentence, or paragraph from a document exactly as it is, word-for-word, with nothing changed.

The lesson? If you're just approaching AI from a technology point of view, you might think that the most advanced functionality (e.g., sophisticated summarising and paraphrasing of lengthy documents) is all that is necessary.

A people-centric approach recognises that sometimes people will be most comfortable with the AI results if they have the option to extract the original language from a document, rather than a version that’s been interpreted by AI. The latest buzz tech is not necessarily the best way to deliver AI to the user if it loses sight of these subtle nuances.

Make it easy

Another big piece of a people-centric approach to AI is actually making it easy for legal professionals to incorporate it into their daily workflows.

A few pointers here. Don’t give your professionals a whole new tool or technology to learn.

Find ways for AI to ‘piggyback’ onto the platforms and tools that they’re already using every day, so that AI is just right there ‘in their face’, ready to be used.

Not even sure how to introduce AI into the organisation? Take a look at any successful legal tech projects from the last few years within the organisation and then see how generative AI can provide an extra layer of efficiency and value on top of that.

For example, if you are already using document automation to generate amendment letters for contract remediation exercises, how can generative AI help? Can you use generative AI to inform the document automation process?

Finally, in keeping with the people-centric spirit, be sure to create community and a forum around your AI usage, particularly when it comes to success stories. It’s important for people to share those small, incremental changes to their workflow that they’ve made with AI and the small, incremental improvements they’ve seen.

A win is a win – and those small everyday wins add up.

Put people at the centre

Ultimately, AI's transformative potential as a technology can only be realised when it's built around people. Switching from a “tech first” to a “people-first” mindset will enable organisations to avoid any potential missteps that hinder adoption and unlock the true power of AI – allowing them to drive better outcomes and elevate their business to new heights.

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