Most people think LegalTech started with AI. It didn’t. Long before Generative AI, AI agents and ChatGPT came into the picture, the legal industry was trying to solve one basic problem: how to bring together legal information spread across different courts, systems and people and create an ecosystem where information is verified, accurate and can be sourced quickly for drafting the next legal steps needed for the matter in dispute.
When we started building technology for the legal ecosystem more than a decade ago, AI was not the starting point. Data and infrastructure were.
For years, legal teams worked with books, printouts, case files, agreements, tracked changes, emails and documents. The challenge was not only finding information but for it to make sense as well.
As information moved into digital systems, LegalTech helped organise and access it. But digitisation did not automatically make legal information easy to interpret. Legal data can come from multiple sources, in different formats, with different levels of structure and context.
That is where the next shift is happening: from managing legal information to understanding it.
How the Legal Function Is Changing
The most important part of business, handling contracts, compliance, litigation, intellectual property, trademarks and other critical areas, has been a legal function. But traditionally, legal departments were often seen as a function that created hurdles by sending contracts back for renegotiation or pointing out what could go wrong, sometimes prolonging business decisions and processes.
The role today is broader. Legal teams are increasingly seen as strategic partners who not only protect the organisation from legal and regulatory risks, but also help build a foundation for scalable and compliant business growth.
A legal professional has to understand the law in context. They may look at previous judgements, the facts of the current matter, the language of an agreement, regulatory requirements and the possible implications of a decision. The answer is rarely available in one place.
This is why the ability to connect and interpret information is becoming so important.
Why AI Fits Legal Work
Legal work involves analysing large amounts of information to develop an actionable plan. The data may be available digitally, but it can still be messy and difficult to bring together manually.
Imagine a lawyer working on a single matter. A contract can take long hours to review. A legal notice may take multiple hours to research, draft and verify. Then there are case documents to read, previous orders to check, hearings to track and updates to follow up on.
Now multiply that by hundreds or thousands of matters. The challenge is not just the legal work itself, but everything around it.
This is where AI can make a difference. It can read and organise large volumes of information, identify relevant details, flag inconsistencies, raise alerts and red flags, track changes and bring matters that need attention to the lawyer’s notice. Instead of replacing the lawyer’s judgement, AI can take away much of the time spent searching, sorting and monitoring, allowing lawyers to focus on analysing, deciding and advising.
AI can also allow legal teams to analyse information across multiple dimensions. It can identify patterns across documents, compare information, highlight trends and provide context-aware insights. Instead of looking at one document or one record at a time, legal professionals can get a broader view of the information relevant to a matter.
The real value is therefore not just automation. It is analysis.
Law is largely about interpretation and context. A lawyer may need to refer to past judgements, legal opinions, relevant laws and digital knowledge bases to understand how the law applies to a particular matter. AI can help bring all this information together, connect the relevant pieces and give the lawyer a much wider context to work with.
The objective is not to make the legal decision for them, but to give them better information before they make the decision.
What Comes Next for LegalTech
As AI becomes more capable, legal professionals will be able to spend more time on strategic areas of their work rather than information-heavy operational tasks. The real opportunity is not just to process more data, but to understand it in a much broader context.
New landmark judgements, legal opinions and a growing body of digital legal knowledge can add to this intelligence. AI can bring these different sources together and help legal professionals analyse them from multiple dimensions, giving them a much broader view of the matter they are working on.
This could also change how legal research and interpretation are approached. Instead of spending most of the effort finding and organising relevant information, professionals can spend more time understanding what it means and how it applies to the matter before them.
There are, of course, challenges. AI hallucinations remain a concern today, particularly in a field where accuracy is critical. Companies developing advanced AI models are actively working on these challenges, and as these models continue to improve, the reliability of AI-generated outputs is expected to increase significantly.
Legal teams can use technology more effectively with the right people and right understanding on how AI works by allowing professionals to spend more time on interpretation, strategy and decisions with human judgement.
To Build an AI-Ready Legal Ecosystem
Technology alone cannot drive this transition. Legal professionals also need to understand the way AI works,and how to verify its outputs to use it responsibly.
India has an opportunity to make a complete use of AI in the growing LegalTech sector. With the right technology, reliable data and human expertise, AI can help professionals develop more complex winning strategies while AI introduces speed and accuracy in administrative efforts.
AI-generated output needs to be reviewed and validated, particularly where accuracy can have legal or financial consequences. The quality of the underlying data also directly affects the quality of AI-driven insights. Organisations will need safeguards in place for confidential information, data privacy and security, and policies on the use of artificial intelligence to support legal function.
The aim should not be to replace legal expertise with algorithms, but to allow lawyers and other professionals to combine their skills with AI, enabling them to interrogate more data, understand it better, and spend more time focussing on higher level analysis, judgement and decision making.
India can build a true AI ready legal sector when the legal ecosystem adopts AI more openly.
Article Contributed by Hitesh Jirawla, Founder & CEO, Cubictree
