The first step in being able to leverage your content with generative AI is getting your data house in order. Steve Turner, the director of IT applications at law firm Ice Miller, knew the whole office was overburdened with digital and paper documents scattered across different platforms and locations. With employees’ stress and frustration increasing and productivity being wasted every day, Ice Miller switched to a legal document management system.
One place for finding every document
“When we got all 23 million documents and emails together in a place where we could actually find them, a lot of people in the firm suddenly realized, ‘Wow! I’ve got so much out there, and I can find all this information about a client or matter,” he says.
Legal offices seeking to make digital inroads are doing more than exploring generative AI this year. But trying to add GenAI functionality across the multiple locations documents are stored can make it harder to reap the technology’s benefits and presents major information governance challenges. In 2025, the most productive legal teams will be simplifying by choosing a single document management system that has automation and GenAI seamlessly baked in, integrating easily with other programs, including Microsoft Copilot.
The staff at Ice Miller can now find emails and documents with one simple search. They can easily identify the most current version of a document within an organized matter workspace. The NetDocuments Document Management System ensures that the organization and structure of their data will allow for future technology integrations, making the company IT team’s job easier too.
Automation you didn’t know was possible
NetDocuments’ PatternBuilder MAX capability streamlines workflows by automating document drafting, ensuring consistency, and reducing errors. One firm said the GenAI feature allowed the team to process 30,000 pages of text in just a week versus countless hours of manual human review.
The right combination of automation, GenAI, and a law office’s documents can be leveraged to automatically generate complex documents; quickly analyze, summarize, and translate; free up time for more strategic work; and create custom solutions with a full GenAI toolkit versus a single tool.
The ability to develop custom, bespoke solutions greatly extends the value of the solution. Alex Bazin, the chief technology officer at Lewis Silkin, says their lawyers saved more than 100 hours shortly after implementing PatternBuilder automation. “Some of the firm’s clients are already benefiting from reduced fees and exploring the opportunity to self-serve automations,” he says. Having happier clients and employees experiencing less stress while handling more meaningful work is an ideal situation.
Take it up a notch with more speed and accuracy
According to Harvard Business School research, AI can help knowledge workers do their work 25% faster and complete 12% more of their tasks. Participants in the study reported performance improvement of more than 40%.
NetDocuments’ products show what supercharged productivity looks like in law firms. Easily finding a document is only one of many core time-saving DMS features. Getting at the insights and answers that reside inside documents is what really changes the game. With the new ndMAX AI Legal Assistant, legal teams can directly query their documents for answers to the numerous day-to-day questions they and their clients have. If a lawyer needs to know, for example, if a purchase agreement includes any language about contract sizes, the Legal AI Assistant can tell them quickly. If he then needs input on reworking the language in the purchase agreement, he can have a quick chat with the Assistant, and it’s done.
Document management underpinned by automation and AI has transformed work at Common Ground Condo Law. “Questions that would otherwise take about 15 minutes of lawyer time to answer can now be handled instantly by any member of our staff by running the PatternBuilder MAX app. This allows us to deliver the best results to our clients both faster and cheaper,” founder and principal Chris Jaglowitz says.
Another firm has improved decision-making and reduced contract review time by 60% using an integrated DMS system. These results are transforming lawyers’ lives and practices.
Guardrails ensure responsible applications
Users needn’t be cautious about trying new things with GenAI: NetDocuments builds guardrails into its platform to ensure responsible use — letting legal teams combine their expertise and the intelligence from their data with the platform’s industry-leading security.
Blake Rooney, chief information officer at Husch Blackwell, says that NetDocuments’ automation- and AI-infused DMS provides the capabilities and innovation their legal office needs “with tremendous care and foresight, securely and reliably, natively within the platform” to address the company’s “current and future needs and technology ambitions.”
With the NetDocuments DMS, instead of uploading copies of content to other AI solutions, users bring AI to their already safely stored content — providing full protection for the firm’s intellectual property, client confidentiality, and ethical responsibilities — to capitalize on the benefits of GenAI.
Webinar | Harness the Dual Power of AI with NetDocuments ndMAX Legal AI Assistant + App Builder
NetDocuments is hosting webinars on Nov. 13th, 19th, and Dec. 10th to show how its ndMAX AI suite with Legal AI Assistant and App Builder (powered by PatternBuilder MAX) unlocks opportunities for legal teams to improve efficiency, reduce errors, and deliver better results. The session will introduce the new Legal AI Assistant described above and show how it enables quick, meaningful conversations with documents using natural language.
Register for an exclusive webinar and see how you can work smarter, faster, and better through a thoughtful, secure AI strategy.
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