How AI is Redefining Decision-Making for Legal Professionals

Decision-making has always been at the heart of legal work — whether it’s crafting a litigation strategy, negotiating deals, or filing patents.

Traditionally, lawyers leaned on experience, intuition, and manual research to guide their decisions. But today, AI is transforming that process — not just by speeding things up but by helping legal professionals work smarter, better, and beat their competitors.

Here’s how that’s playing out across a few different areas:

Negotiation

Negotiation is an important part of any job, but especially in the legal profession. Whether you’re litigating or working on a merger, it’s helpful to know what your competitors are thinking so you can negotiate more effectively (and get what you want).

AI is making lawyers more intelligent negotiators.

Say you’re working on a high-value merger, and your client is pushing for specific terms. You may research the opposing counsel to understand what they typically agree to and don’t agree to, with hopes to pull some sort of insight you can use as leverage in your negotiations.

Traditionally, this process would take days (even weeks) — making it not viable on most deals, if the data is available at all. And even if you were able to pull some data to use in negotiations, you may be leaving points on the table.

Today, AI tools like Harvey or Legora are able to sift through mountains of documents and precedents to pull out details like these, which can help take more intelligent and data-driven negotiating positions.

It’s not all about speed, though, but rather the ability to make connections that you otherwise may not. Similar logic applies to litigation.

Litigation

AI is helping legal professionals on the litigation front as well.

Traditionally, prepping for a case meant analyzing old rulings case by case, trying to get an understanding of how a judge has acted in the past.

Now, with tools like BenchIQ, you can analyze a judge's past rulings, preferences, and tendencies in seconds, helping you understand how they’ve acted in the past:

Do they tend to take summary judgment?How do they typically respond to certain situations?

Easy access to this info empowers litigators to build a plan that fits judges’ habits, leading to better decisions and better odds in the court.

We’re seeing AI impact the IP space as well.

Patents

AI’s hitting the IP world hard, especially with patents.

In the past, analyzing patent portfolios or identifying potential infringement risks could take hours of manual work.

Now, with tools like Patlytics, you can automate complex tasks — like creating claim charts, assessing infringement risks, and managing entire patent portfolios — allowing you to focus on more high-value decisions rather than getting bogged down in time-consuming analysis.

Final thought

AI is impacting all aspects of the legal profession — from negotiations to billing.

One thing I’ve noticed?

The most successful AI tools in the legal space don’t focus on time savings and efficiency — like other industries do — they focus on helping legal professionals win.

Sure, some tools are mostly focused on time savings, but the tools that I’ve seen be the most successful are the ones that are focused on giving professionals a competitive edge.

I’m curious: what has been the AI tool that has made the biggest impact on your job? Why?