AI in a Law Firm: What to Build First, and Where the Lawyer Stays in Charge

A law firm does not need to be told that AI can draft a memo. It needs to know whether the memo can be trusted, where the client's confidences go, and who decides what leaves the building. Those are the right questions.

The answers are knowable. They come down to four decisions, and the order matters.

Start with the firm's own records

A general model knows the law in the abstract. Your firm's value is in how it actually drafts and advises. An assistant that answers from the firm's own records, such as its templates and each matter's file, produces drafts that sound like the firm and point back to the firm's own prior work. It is a search over what you already hold, not a model taught new law.

Which records an assistant may see is a decision for the firm and its own counsel. Make it on purpose, and write it down before anything is connected.

Choose the terms the model runs under

Client confidentiality is not negotiable, so the model access underneath the assistant should be set up under business terms, not a consumer account. OpenAI's API data policy says data sent to its API is not used to train its models unless you opt in, and Anthropic's commercial terms say it may not train models on your content. Ask any vendor for the same in writing before client material goes near it.

Whether a particular use meets your professional duties is a question for your own counsel.

Keep the lawyer in the seat

The assistant drafts and retrieves. It does not send, file, or advise. Anything that leaves the firm waits for a lawyer's approval, and the workflow is built so that approval is a required step, not an optional one. The point is not to remove the lawyer's judgment. It is to remove the assembly work that happens before it.

Fix the process first

Automating a messy intake produces a faster mess. We improve the workflow before we automate it, which is dull, and which tends to separate a tool people keep using from one that gets quietly abandoned.

Our principal's law firm, Clemenza Law Group, has built a client assistant that answers from each client's own matter record and holds any answer that needs legal judgment for an attorney's approval. It stays off unless an attorney turns it on for a matter.