Co-Authored by Hadassah Drukarch and a Marco Mendola
As advancements in AI continue to take shape, organizations across industries are increasingly acknowledging that surfing the AI adoption wave is both necessary and a pre-emptive decision. Like many other industries, this trend in the legal industry is guided by basic market forces aimed at increasing efficiencies and responding to internal pressures from legal teams to alleviate increased workloads, helping firms enhance legal services and address operational challenges in both the practice and business dynamics of law. Central to these considerations is the imperative for legal firms to stay competitive amid evolving client demands, rapid technological advancements, and the widespread availability of consumer tools.
The promise of AI for legal service delivery
Contrary to popular belief over the past several years, Legal Tech can no longer be considered a niche market. As a result of the significant growth of the global Legal Tech market in recent years, industry valuations have surged. For instance, technology market analysts at Gartner have announced that the legal tech market will reach $50 billion in value by 2027 — with GenAI as a source for plenty of additional use cases and the key driver for growth. With GenAI being a top organizational priority for businesses across various industries, a 2024 Deloitte survey revealed that the majority anticipate GenAI will transform their organizations within the next three years. Extending these prospects to the legal industry, expectations are that it too will be part of this transformation through the adoption of GenAI tools in the delivery of legal services and by facilitating the rapid, safe, and ethical integration of this new technology into existing workflows.
Beyond efficiency and productivity gains, GenAI promises to enhance the legal experience for clients and employees in a variety of practice areas, including contracts, legal operations, M&A, and regulatory compliance. At the same time, GenAI is expected to unlock new capabilities to improve legal service delivery through better sensemaking of legal and business data, improved decision-making and more proactive risk management. Though certainly not without adoption hurdles — including financial and resource limitations alongside challenges with developing a compelling business case —, the legal domain continues to be a priority for GenAI investment as evidenced by industry headlines. This includes the most recent announcement that the Swedish startup Leya raised $25 million in a Series A funding round.
Navigating AI adoption challenges in legal
Despite the transformative promise of Legal Tech in recent years, however, the nature of legal work has remained largely unchanged, with technology solutions delivering only incremental improvements; and while legal departments anticipate an ambitious acceleration of AI adoption, this expectation is met with both enthusiasm and skepticism. Enthusiasm surrounds the potential for AI to enhance the efficiency, quality, and affordability of legal services, while skepticism is marked by concerns about its reliability alongside various legal and ethical issues. Moreover, although GenAI adoption is currently regarded as a top priority, only a small fraction of organizations have a clearly defined vision for how they will generate business value from this technology.
If GenAI is to deliver on its promises for the future of legal service delivery, it will become essential for legal teams to cut through the current hype and noise and focus on the essence and core purpose of adopting new technology: identifying and effectively addressing real business problems. In the case of GenAI, this involves legal practitioners getting their hands dirty with this technology to identify and prioritize specific use cases that meet the needs of their legal team and the broader business, thereby driving buy-in from the ground up. Where strategic thinking and theoretical contemplation may take these efforts only so far, hands-on and contextualized exercise and experimentation may push effective GenAI adoption in legal to that next level.
The role of gamification in driving effective adoption of AI in legal
It is precisely in this context that gamification may offer a fitting solution. While it may sound like a new term, the concept of using game-thinking and mechanics to tackle problems is certainly not new. Gamification, or game-thinking, refers to the “incentivization of people’s engagement in non-game contexts and activities by using game-style mechanics”. Translating this to the modern-day legal context, in many legal innovation hubs across law firms and think tanks, gamification techniques are proving to be highly effective. These methods help legal professionals embrace change, a process often fraught with anxiety and resistance, especially when implementing cutting-edge technologies like AI. By making the innovation process more user-centric and fostering a community effort, gamification can significantly enhance the likelihood of successful discovery and effective implementation.
One of the main challenges in AI adoption is ensuring that legal professionals are motivated to engage with the technology. Gamification addresses this by incorporating play and competition, making the process more enjoyable and less intimidating. For instance, law firms might organize workshop contests where teams compete to solve legal problems using AI tools, awarding points or badges for innovative solutions. This not only makes the process fun but also encourages active participation and deeper engagement with the technology, allowing for a more informed exploration of potential use cases and implementation avenues. Furthermore, the rapid pace of technological advancement requires continuous learning, which gamification can promote through rewards systems for ongoing education, such as earning points or certificates for completing training modules and participating in webinars. This approach keeps legal teams up-to-date with AI developments and ready to apply new knowledge in their work.
As the adoption of AI in legal practice often requires cross-functional collaboration, gamification offers a unique way to break down silos and foster a collaborative environment by challenging established practices and requiring creative problem-solving by practitioners across various departments. For example, a law firm might create a gamified workshop where teams from legal, IT, and operations work together to map out AI integration strategies across specific workflow segments. Alongside collaboration, gamification also mitigates resistance to change by making learning gradual and turning disruption into opportunities for growth and innovation.
Adopting gamification to get practical with Legal AI
Gamification is not an exact science or a business strategy but a methodology that can significantly benefit the legal industry’s AI adoption efforts. To translate these efforts into practical outcomes, the player-centered design model, a gamification framework, may offer a particularly useful tool to get started. This model consists of 5 factors:
- Know your player: Understand the motivations and preferences of the practitioners who will use the AI tools. This involves gathering insights into their pain points, goals, and what drives their engagement.
- Identify the mission: Clearly define the objectives and desired outcomes of AI adoption. This could include improving efficiency, reducing costs, enhancing client service, or increasing compliance accuracy.
- Understand human motivation: Leverage insights into what drives engagement and productivity among legal teams. This might involve using intrinsic motivators like mastery, autonomy, and purpose, as well as extrinsic motivators like rewards and recognition.
- Apply mechanics: Utilize game mechanics such as points, badges, leaderboards, and challenges to incentivize participation and learning. These mechanics should align with the overall mission and be designed to sustain long-term engagement.
- Manage, monitor, and measure: Continuously assess the effectiveness of gamification strategies and make adjustments as needed. This involves collecting data on participation rates, user feedback, and performance metrics to ensure the gamification efforts are meeting their objectives.
By creating engaging, interactive experiences, gamification can help legal teams overcome the challenges of integrating AI within existing ways of working, ultimately enhancing efficiency, quality, and affordability in legal services. As legal practitioners continue to explore and experiment with these techniques, our hope is that they will ultimately uncover new ways to drive meaningful and sustainable change in their organizations.
This blog was first published on the Legal Business World media platform in September 2024. The cover image is credited to the LTSW team and their October 2024 event.
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