What AI tools are actually helping law firms and legal teams right now?
There’s obviously a lot of hype around AI for law firms, in-house legal teams, and legal ops right now.
Some of it feels genuinely useful. Some of it feels like “AI for legal” being added to every product page without much substance behind it.
I’m curious what people here are actually finding helpful in day-to-day legal work.
A few areas I’ve been looking at:
- contract review and clause analysis tools
- legal research assistants
- client or matter intake automation
- document generation and template automation
- eDiscovery and document review
- internal legal knowledge search
- workflow automation for approvals, routing, reminders, and handoffs
A few tools/platforms that seem relevant depending on the use case: Harvey, CoCounsel, Spellbook, Legora, even Microsoft Copilot, and workflow automation platforms like Zenphi that has a special AI for law firms offer — but this is only when the need is less about “chat with a document” and more about building a serious governed process around intake, review, approvals, document generation, and follow-up.
For those already testing or using AI in legal workflows:
What has been genuinely useful?
What looked promising but did not really work in practice?
Where do you still feel human review is absolutely non-negotiable?
And are you mostly using standalone legal AI tools, general AI assistants, or AI inside broader workflow/process automation platforms?