This article first appeared in Blickstein’s Group 18th Annual Law Department Operations Survey

This year’s Law Department Operations survey reports that close to 80% of legal department operations teams are responsible for technology selection and deployment as part of their overall charter.

Additionally, half of survey respondents note that implementing AI is a major challenge for the coming year. This is a telling statistic when more than 60% of legal operations indicate that AI is not deployed in their current tech stack. This “challenge” is compounded by pressure from the C-suite to both implement AI and demonstrate its value.

So, where to begin? The survey surfaces three areas of concern in adopting AI: the in-house team’s lack of AI skills, training needs, and adoption concerns. Yet many organizations ignore this “team readiness” and jump directly to tool selection, security, and rollout.

Organizations taking that first important step to upskill teams, while wanting to minimize the difficulty of picking and deploying the “right” tool to enable successful AI, should consider the following:

• Establish a general AI awareness training program: Do not assume that ad hoc use of ChatGPT for simple tasks by in-house lawyers and support teams means they have AI proficiency. Take the time to get everyone on the same page with basic terminology training, use case identification, do’s and don’ts for security, and beginner practice with prompt engineering.

• Optimize your existing environment: Understand if you are in a Microsoft environment with access to Copilot. Your IT team will be your supportive partner if you are beginning your AI journey in a secure environment they trust and a platform that is already licensed. There is also a wealth of training available directly from Microsoft that can help your team gain a strong foundation in AI capabilities. For Google environments, a similar training path is possible. Let people start with AI meeting or document summaries, or providing advanced search within Outlook or across Teams channels.

• Put internal pilot projects in place: Many technology vendors and/or alternative legal services providers (ALSPs) can help initiate a pilot taking on the task of licensing the technology, while also expediting getting started. Pick a use case like routine transaction redlining that takes work off your team and moves it to a partner who will leverage technology on your behalf.

• Leverage your partners: Look for partners who have invested in AI expertise along with process design and workflow automation. They can introduce AI capabilities to support your in-house lawyers without requiring your teams to engage directly with the AI application. Your partner can also provide the human in the loop to assure quality and reliability. You can get all the benefits of AI with a low-touch, low-effort approach.

Ease your team into AI by getting everyone on a firm foundation and then allow partners to learn first, deploy, and share as a simpler path to AI adoption. It gives your in-house team exposure to AI capabilities without overburdening their time. They get to see the results of AI use, gaining comfort and knowledge that will ease their own use of AI for more complex capabilities in the future. Meanwhile you get breathing room to see AI at work in processes with measured efficiencies that contribute right away to your organization’s productivity. And importantly, you will be able to demonstrate to your C-Suite concrete AI progress without the risk of investing in the wrong solution.