Agentic AI in Legal: Rethink Legal Team Productivity

As Forbes reports, 87% of lawyers indicate that AI is already making a significant contribution to their work. This is more than just automation, it's about smart systems becoming trusted partners. 

Unlike conventional tools, agentic AI systems can recognize context, make choices, and act independently within defined parameters. 

They help with activities like contract analysis, legal research, and risk assessment, making it easier for lawyers to concentrate on strategic and client-related work.  

This article discusses how adopting agentic AI into your legal practice, specifically in managing contracts, can improve efficiency and decision-making.  

We will discuss the potential roles these AI systems can serve, considerations for implementation, and how to prepare your team for this technological shift.  

Key Takeaways 

• Fast AI Adoption: Lawyers are rapidly adopting AI, with adoption rates accelerating over the last few years. 

• Increased Efficiency: Agentic AI can automate mundane tasks such as contract analysis and legal research, leaving lawyers more time for high-level work. 

• Strategic Emphasis: Automating repetitive tasks allows lawyers to focus on strategy, advocacy, and client relationships. 

• Implementation Considerations: Integration will be successful only with clean data, defined workflows, and constant monitoring. 

• Future Readiness: Adopting agentic AI places legal practices in a position to evolve with changing client expectations and industry norms. 

Understanding Agentic AI and Why It Matters to Law Firms 

Let's begin by deconstructing what agentic AI is and isn't. 

Generative AI tools are familiar to most of us. They're good at answering prompts, creating text, or summing up content. 

But they don't go further. Agentic AI makes a huge leap. 

These systems don't merely wait for commands, they aggressively seek objectives. 

What that implies is they can schedule tasks, decide contextually, shift with changes along the way, and even improve on their own outputs without inordinate human intervention. 

Whereas generative AI is a friendly assistant in wait of directions, agentic AI is a junior associate who knows the case, is aware of deadlines, and takes initiative to advance the work. 

For law firms that deal with large numbers of documents and close deadlines, the transition can be revolutionary. 

Agentic AI assists in minimizing human error, enhancing consistency, and saving time for legal professionals to concentrate on more valuable work such as negotiation, client planning, or planning litigation. 

In contract management alone, these AI agents can monitor the life cycle of agreements, review risk across multiple contracts, and even make recommendations for improvement based on previous experiences. 

In brief, agentic AI is a new type of teammate for your company. 

One that's never tired, aware of context, and can lift a surprising amount of weight. 

The earlier companies realize how to effectively integrate these systems, the more competitive and robust they'll be. 

Key Advantages of Agentic AI for Legal Teams 

For legal teams, increasing workloads and more stringent client requirements, many firms are coming under pressure. 

That's where agentic AI comes in, not as a flash toy, but as a useful solution to actual bottlenecks. 

Time saving 

Agentic AI does not await instructions on what to do. It knows your priorities and begins working towards them. 

Whether sorting through a case file, looking through a client's portfolio of contracts, or detecting risk in hundreds of documents, it goes about its work in the background, keeping lawyers up to speed. 

Consistency 

Legal teams handle so many moving parts that errors can fall through the cracks. 

Agentic AI mitigates that possibility by adhering to set rules and benefiting from learned decisions. 

This produces more consistent work, particularly when drafting or reviewing contracts, regardless of who is on the team. 

Decision-making 

These machines can analyze enormous amounts of data in a flash, identify patterns that might elude humans, and provide insight to inform legal strategy. 

It's like having a second brain, but one that never needs to rest and won't forget things. 

Client Responsiveness 

With the AI doing the legwork, attorneys can answer more quickly with more information. 

Imagine being able to inform your client not only what's in a contract, but what's not, and how it stacks up against hundreds of similar contracts. That level of value creates trust. 

Scalability 

Legal departments usually have a catch-22: increase the business, but don't grow headcount. 

Agentic AI provides a solution. It allows firms to take on more work without overloading already strained teams. It's like adding capacity without hiring. 

Agentic AI in Contract Management 

Contract management is a great use case for agentic AI. 

Why? Because it's all about structured processes, repeatable tasks, and high risks. 

Every missed clause, deadline, or compliance requirement could cost time, money, or reputation. Agentic AI can assist with taking that stress off your team. 

Conventionally, contract management is a multi-step process: drafting, reviewing, negotiation, storage, tracking, and renewal. 

Most companies still do this manually or with disparate tools that don't "speak" with one another. That's where errors and delays occur. Agentic AI presents a wiser alternative. 

To start with, it can scan huge amounts of contracts in minutes, extracting major terms, highlighting inconsistencies, and verifying missing clauses. 

No more scanning PDFs line by line manually. This is particularly useful in the case of checking third-party paper, whose language and tone tend to change. 

It can also track obligations automatically, like payment terms, renewal dates, or notice periods, and send reminders before deadlines pass. 

That means fewer surprises and less scrambling at the last minute. 

In the drafting stage, agentic AI is able to produce first drafts using your standard templates and previous agreements. 

It does not copy-paste, but learns how your company writes, what clauses you like, and how to respond based on the situation. 

There is even potential for negotiation assistance. Though AI won't ever substitute judgment, it can offer alternative fallbacks, indicate what is negotiable based on previous patterns, and even conduct various deal scenarios as a simulation to allow you to make decisions quicker based on information. 

And most importantly, these AI tools don't work once and then sit idle. 

They learn from every new contract they review. As time goes on, they become more in line with your firm's risk tolerance, desired vocabulary, and industry requirements. 

The outcome? A contract process that's not only quicker but smarter. 

Wider Uses of Agentic AI in Law Practice 

Agentic AI is not only for contract work, it's transforming the way legal teams work in general. 

Legal research 

Agentic AI programs can scan through thousands of cases, regulations, and statutes to pull out pertinent information in seconds. 

They don't simply spit back search results, they summarize, contextualize, and structure them. 

This provides lawyers with a solid foundation to work from, particularly when working under tight deadlines. 

Litigation support 

AI agents can examine historical case outcomes and the strategies of opposing counsel to determine trends and evaluate risk. 

They aid in discovery by rapidly marking pertinent material in huge document collections, freeing up weeks of hands-on review. 

They can even assist in plotting out scenarios and responses, functioning as a fluid co-counsel in the background. 

Compliance monitoring 

With rules continuously changing, agentic AI can remain current on rule updates, alert on areas of non-compliance, and even suggest measures to minimize risks. 

For in-house counsel, this can drastically limit exposure while liberating time for strategic efforts. 

Due diligence 

Agentic AI also can assist with due diligence in mergers, acquisitions, or large business transactions. 

Rather than having teams of people review financial and legal records for red flags, AI can perform a first pass, highlighting potential issues, inconsistencies, or missing documents for closer examination. 

Policy review and development 

Then there's policy development and review. Whether it's an industry guide or a corporate manual, AI can assist in reviewing, drafting, and keeping internal policies up to date with existing laws and best practices. 

It's especially useful when working across multiple jurisdictions or in a rapidly evolving legal environment. 

What binds all of these uses together is the move away from reactive legal work. 

Agentic AI doesn't merely wait for directions, it thinks ahead, tracks reasoning, and learns by doing. 

This allows law firms and in-house legal teams to be more adaptive, better-informed, and future-focused. 

Selecting the Right Legal AI Tools and Implementation 

Deploying agentic AI in your law firm isn't about selecting the most trendy tool, it's about identifying the one which best suits your people, processes, and priorities. 

Begin with the why. What is the problem you need to solve? 

That will determine the type of agentic AI system you require, and how it will integrate into your team's workflow. 

Next, think about data readiness. AI agents function optimally when they receive clean, structured data to learn from. 

If your contracts, templates, or case files are disorganized or inconsistent, that's something to take care of ahead of time. 

A good data foundation makes AI integration easier and more effective. 

Final Thoughts 

Although these autonomous systems are yet to come, the mindset they encourage, smarter workflows, data-driven decisions, and proactive legal assistance, is already a reality. 

For law firms and legal departments, gearing up for this change entails investing in solutions that deliver tangible benefits while preparing your team for future innovation. 

Our Microsoft 365-based, AI-enabled contract management solution assists legal departments in automating contract tracking, extracting critical data points, and streamlining document review, freeing you up to do more strategic work. 

Book a free demo today and learn how Dock 365 can assist you with your path into the next generation of legal operations.