Over the course of 2024 and the first part of 2025, the questions I get most frequently from in-house lawyers are about Generative AI and how legal departments can use it to improve productivity.  There is a lot of pressure from the C-Suite on legal departments to adopt AI and show meaningful productivity gains.  While this is a noble goal, there are a number of issues with Generative AI that – rightfully – are causing legal department leaders to want to “go slow.”  Chief among them are concerns about 1) confidentiality, 2) attorney-client privilege, 3) trustworthiness, i.e., trusting the results, and 4) how do I draft “prompts” that get me useful results.  All valid issues that should not be taken lightly or dismissed out of hand.  Second, there is an almost overwhelming amount of information out there about Generative AI, making it hard (exhausting?) to stay on top of the latest developments in the field – so why not wait until things settle down before adopting?  Lastly, the technology is changing quickly, too quickly for most legal departments to understand the changes (and the implications) without a dedicated AI team – something beyond the reach (and budgets) of most in-house legal teams.  In other words, it’s really f$#@ing hard to figure out how to use Generative AI effectively!

So, how do we solve this problem?  In my experience, there are many simple and practical things you can do with Generative AI right now that can drive real productivity gains for in-house lawyers.  And while there may be an ever-growing list of more sophisticated and complicated uses for it, most legal departments are just looking to crawl and not sprint.  For most, crawling is perfectly fine and will get you a lot of useful results from Generative AI.  All of this is a big wind-up for me telling you I think I can help get you started crawling (in the “good” sense)[1] and that’s what I intend to do.  While thinking about this post, I realized it needs to flow differently than a typical “Ten Things” blog.  I’ll still give you ten things to focus on (in this case practical “prompts”), but it will take me a bit to build up to that part because there is some background we need to dwell on first.  Bear with me – I promise we’ll get to the good stuff!  For now, just sit back, grab some coffee and a Cinnabon roll, and set your brain to “learn.”  This edition of “Ten Things” will walk you through practical prompts for in-house lawyers:

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