AI automation for law firms

AI automation for law firms covers the operational work that sits around legal work rather than replacing it: capturing billable time that currently goes unrecorded, running conflict checks at intake, moving documents through iManage or NetDocuments, monitoring regulatory and SEC filings, and reviewing contracts at a volume that manual review cannot reach. The constraint in legal is rarely capability — it is confidentiality, privilege and professional responsibility. A firm cannot send privileged material to a general-purpose model and treat the question as settled, and ABA guidance and malpractice carriers have both moved on what they expect a firm to be able to demonstrate. The posts below deal with both halves: the operational case for automating a specific workflow, and the data-sovereignty and governance questions that decide whether a given approach is usable at a firm at all. Several are written for the build-versus-buy decision specifically, including where a practice-management vendor genuinely covers the need and where it leaves a gap.