Artificial Lawyer: “A new study by LexisNexis, conducted for them by Forrester, and using a model inhouse legal team of a hypothetical $10 billion company, found that if they were using AI tools at scale internally it could reduce work sent to law firms by 13%, based on the volume of matters handled. Other key findings included:

• ‘A 25% reduction in annual time spent advising the business on legal inquiries’ (i.e. advising the business the inhouse team is within).
• And, ‘Annual time savings of 50% for paralegals on administrative tasks’ (i.e. paralegals employed by the inhouse team).

To get to these results the consulting group Forrester interviewed four senior inhouse people ‘with experience using and deploying Lexis+ AI’ in their companies. They then combined the four companies into a ‘single composite organization based in North America with $10 billion in annual revenue and a corporate legal staff of 70 attorneys and 10 paralegals. Its legal budget is 0.33% of the organization’s annual revenue’. This scenario was then considered over three years, taking into account broad use of AI. Now, although there is a clear effort to be empirical here, the dataset is very small – four companies – and the extrapolations on cost and time savings are from a composite entity over three years. So, let’s not get carried away here. It really is a model, not a set of facts. That said, if all of the Fortune 500, for example, used AI tools across their inhouse teams at scale – and every day, not just occasionally – and actually were able to reduce the amount of work sent out to law firms by 13% in terms of the volume of matters, then that would total many $ millions in reductions of external legal spend across the US Big Law market…”