Artificial intelligence (AI) is not new to the legal tech world. For years, leading legal tech vendors touted the power of machine learning to help lawyers work more efficiently and effectively. With the advent of generative AI, the promises are even greater.
However, AI solutions are not all created equal. It’s easy enough for some vendors to promise that they’ll help legal teams work faster, but faster isn’t always better. We’ve all heard about lawyers who placed too much faith in AI platforms that weren’t engineered for lawyers, with disastrous results.
That’s why it’s important for buyers to look for legal tech solutions that have been built specifically to solve the unique challenges that lawyers face – and why it’s important for software developers to listen to their customers.
In fact, that’s how BoostDraft got its start: a lawyer and a coder sat down together and started thinking about the possibilities. It was important to both of them to invent something brand-new that would add real value to the legal tech landscape.
That ethos continues to guide BoostDraft today. We listen to our customers to understand their needs, and they tell us about their pain points. That mutually beneficial relationship has led us to understand that the solutions we create must be practical, simple, and secure – including AI applications.
AI in legal tech must be practical
Legal tech industry leaders agree: in 2025, experimental AI is done. Real organisations need real solutions to the challenges they face every day.
Lots of vendors sell bloatware, overloaded with features that customers didn’t ask for. It’s important for legal tech providers to focus on the actual pain points that legal teams face.
There are myriad practical applications for AI in legal tech. AI tools are streamlining contract lifecycle management (CLM) by automating aspects of contract drafting, review, negotiation, and risk analysis. AI is revolutionising e-discovery by quickly analysing high volumes of digital data to identify relevant evidence, reducing the time, cost, and risk of discovery in litigation.
Lawyers are deploying AI chatbots and virtual assistants to handle routine client interactions, answer FAQs, and assist with basic legal inquiries. And these are just a few of the real-world applications for AI in law.
At BoostDraft, creating practical solutions is a direct result of listening to our customers and what they tell us about the challenges they face every day in the practice of law. We listen to our customers because they help us make BoostDraft even better on an ongoing basis. Every feature we add is a direct response to a genuine customer need.
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AI in legal tech must be simple
We’ve heard lots of horror stories from customers of never-ending AI software implementations. Teams should be able to get started using new tools in a relatively short timeframe. The business landscape changes quickly, and competitive businesses change with it. If a team adopts software that isn’t ready to use until a year later, the business will have changed by then – and that software may no longer be what they need to get their work done.
Beyond implementation, there’s the question of actually using the software from day to day. If customers don’t know how to use the software’s latest features, they can’t get any value from those features.
For us, keeping it simple means providing a lightweight solution that complements the way our customers work. It’s a plugin that installs quickly in Microsoft Word, the platform that lawyers already use every day to draft, review, and edit contracts. A straightforward user interface makes our tools easy for end users to learn and adopt.
AI in legal tech must be secure
It’s not enough to deliver work product without regard to quality. Lawyers place high importance on the quality of their work, from the validity of their legal advice to the lack of typos and basic grammatical errors. As a legal tech vendor, it’s therefore essential to deliver results that legal teams can trust.
AI outputs for legal teams can’t be rife with hallucinations. It’s crucial to understand the limits of the algorithm, and to be upfront about what it can and can’t do. No lawyer will ever turn over their job completely to the software; they simply want to work more efficiently. That means AI solutions must support and enhance an attorney’s workflows with useful, reliable outputs.
Also Read: The future of work with AI: 2025 and beyond
Security also entails responsible, transparent use of customer data. Software developers must use industry-standard practices such as data encryption to ensure that vital customer data doesn’t fall into the hands of malicious actors. They must also be forthright about how they train their AI models, and set up safeguards to ensure that customer data is not used to train AI without permission.
At BoostDraft, security entails transparency about the use of customer data. Our software works on-premise and on-device, so it doesn’t require users to upload documents to the cloud. We don’t access customer data to train our models. And of course, we use industry-standard security practices. That lets customers know they’re in safe hands.
Strengthening the vendor-customer relationship in legal tech
Listening to customers and creating practical, simple, secure solutions to their challenges. What’s the result of developing solutions that follow these principles?
Our customers have rewarded us with an exceptionally low churn rate. Once legal teams get started using our software, they keep using it. That tells us that we’re on the right track.
Of course, we acknowledge that different vendors address different market segments and problems. Legal tech solutions can potentially target not only transactional practices, but also lawyers who focus on litigation, bankruptcy, employment law, and other areas. Some vendors build highly tailored solutions for enterprise customers, while others do better with SMB or midsize customers.
All of those legal teams, though – from law firms to in-house counsel, and from corporate to litigation and beyond – benefit from practical solutions that they can use to securely address their challenges today.
And lawyers looking for solutions should focus on customer-centric providers who follow those principles.
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