The legal industry is transforming with AI, and Tempello is at the forefront. Recently named one of Clio’s Top Legal Tech Startups in 2025 (check out the full list here), Tempello is helping lawyers and their staff reclaim hours in administrative work each week while recovering lost billables from every client email interaction. If you’re attending Legal Week New York, don’t miss your chance to see why Tempello is generating so much buzz in the legal tech world.
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Handling high-stakes cases that have a huge impact enterprise-wide, the in-house legal department is undeniably an integral part of the organization. And, given their relatively small size, one that punches above their weight. But historically, legal leaders have struggled to shift the perception of the legal department as a cost center. Legal matters are an inherently expensive part of business operations, but the core view of the legal function does not need to revolve around cost. It’s time for the conversation to move to the value the department delivers.
Siloed by traditional corporate culture, it can be challenging for General Counsel (GC) to demonstrate their team’s performance and communicate their impact. But now their function is being reimagined to operate as a data-driven, proactive company defender, requiring them to adopt a business mindset. This cultural reboot offers an opportunity for legal professionals to actively highlight their impact, shift outdated perceptions and demonstrate how they protect the business.
What does a legal department do and how is that changing?
Anecdotal evidence and formal studies tell us that legal departments are under pressure. Workloads are getting heavier. And their area of responsibility continues to broaden.
According to the 2024 ACC Chief Legal Officers Survey, which surveyed 669 Chief Legal Officers (CLOs) across 20 industries and 31 countries, 59% of respondents said their workload increased over the past year. The majority of CLOs were overseeing at least three additional corporate functions, such as areas like compliance, ethics, privacy and risk. Most CLOs reported having responsibility for helping to lead their company’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) strategies.
As their roles and responsibilities have evolved, in-house legal teams have innovated. New roles like Chief Legal Officer, Deputy General Counsel and Legal Operations Manager now lead these evolving functions, adapting the changing needs of modern organizations.
Corporate legal teams reimagined: 6 core in-house legal department functions
1. Contract management
Contracts are the bread and butter of a legal department’s day-to-day workload. They exist at every level of an organization — internally, such as employment contracts, and externally with suppliers and clients. They’re often processed in high quantities and require the attention of multiple departments.
The in-house legal department is also responsible for ensuring every contract is compliant with ever-changing laws and regulations. Small mistakes can result in significant consequences – financial, legal or reputational.
Contracts keep companies moving, both operationally and financially, minimizing exposure to costly risks.
2. Risk reduction
Identifying potential risks is just the initial step in risk reduction. The approach taken by in-house lawyers needs align with the risk appetite of the business: how much risk is the organization willing to take on? One with a higher risk appetite may chase bold growth opportunities despite higher levels of uncertainty. Whereas another, valuing stability, might be willing to sacrifice some growth for a safer path.
Different business sectors also face industry-specific risks. Where a counsel for a construction company has to handle risks related to land use permissions, their non-profit counterpart must ensure the security of donor and beneficiary data.
Understanding an organization’s risk appetite allows in-house counsel to gain clarity on how much risk is acceptable and where to draw the line. Legal teams can then assess, prioritize and reduce where necessary, striking a careful balance between potential threats and promising opportunities.
3. Intellectual property protection
Intellectual property (IP) in the form of patents, copyright and trademarks allow a business to earn recognition and financial gain from what it invented, created or developed. A corporate legal department helps organizations protect their intangible assets, while harnessing and exploiting the value of their IP.
Whether an organization needs to licence IP to a third party, monitor competitors, file a trademark application or manage cybersecurity, General Counsel are becoming increasingly involved in this critical area of business operations. They empower companies to maximize the potential of their IP portfolios, fitting into their overall business strategy and keeping these assets as powerful tools for competitive advantage.
4. Litigation
Traditionally, the role of in-house legal teams as the company’s first line of defense in litigation was more reactive…they’d get involved after a dispute escalated.
Today’s in-house counsel are expected to be proactive and implement strategies to anticipate and prevent potential litigation. They’re also involved in decisions about alternative dispute resolution such as mediation or arbitration to avoid costly court proceedings.
Compliance audits, advising on dispute resolution strategies and delivering training to other departments are just some of the ways modern in-house legal departments reduce the risk of costly disputes.
5. Employment law and labour issues
Often public, employment law disputes can affect an organization’s finances, brand and reputation. Working closely with the HR team, in-house counsel must proactively identify and mitigate potential risks, determining problem areas and taking steps to avoid problems down the line. Key areas include workplace safety, employee rights and termination.
Corporate legal departments now regularly review employment contracts, non-compete agreements and termination documents as well as navigate complex laws across jurisdictions for larger organizations. Teams are also called upon to conduct audits of employment practices and offer strategic advice for dispute avoidance or resolution.
6. Organizational and reputational management
Increasing regulatory pressures and social expectations mean General Counsel (GC) today face heightened organizational and reputational risks. As information travels faster through more channels, demands for corporate transparency are getting louder. Increasingly, C-suites are measuring success in terms of how actions and outcomes are perceived by major stakeholders and the wider public.
Geri Ann S. Baptista, a Vice President in a global strategic communications firm with 84 offices in 46 countries, said: “More law firms and in-house legal teams are partnering with public relations professionals as PR risk, along with legal risk, is factored into every major corporate action and reaction.”
Now more than ever, a company’s success in managing public opinion depends on a unified strategy that combines the strengths of legal and communications. Legal support is critical for companies devising clear, consistent crises response plans, which will allow legal directors and business leaders to take a structured and transparent approach when incidents occur.
Why legal departments must take ownership of demonstrating their value
General Counsel should not rely on their value being recognized spontaneously. How do you measure the value of a crisis averted? A well-drafted contract that minimizes future disputes? In-house legal teams need to take demonstrating their impact into their own hands.
Traditionally, legal departments were reactive, handling issues as they arose. However, today’s business landscape demands more. In-house counsel are expected to add strategic value and support organizational growth. Over a third of CLOs in the 2024 ACC Chief Legal Officers Survey believe their CEOs want them to sharpen their business acumen and industry knowledge. Additionally, more than 20 percent think their CEOs expect them to improve their financial skills. Meanwhile, business acumen, communication and executive presence are the top three skills that CLOs are seeking to develop for team members.
To understand future trends for these teams, KPMG consulted experts from their Legal Operations Transformation Services. A key forecast: in-house counsel will be assessed based on the value they generate. The experts predicted a legal team’s value would be established by assessing how well they protected the organization’s interests, whether by ensuring compliance with corporate law or avoiding litigation. This will go alongside tracking the revenue legal services drive. For instance, by protecting the company’s IP rights, the legal team can prevent revenue loss from infringement.
Sizing up success
The legal profession is undergoing a data-driven transformation. Brought on by the rise of legal technology, in-house counsel are beginning to focus on numbers and metrics to show their value. Data analytics enable legal operations professionals to analyze swathes of information, extract actionable insights and improve decision-making.
Thomson Reuters, in their three-part guide for legal departments to demonstrate their true value, emphasised: “The language of business is numbers, so smart in-house lawyers must speak that language fluently.”
A legal department must create strategic key performance indicators (KPIs) that effectively showcase its impact. For example, totalling the fines, penalties, damages and settlements paid by a company over a given period. A high quantum may indicate that legal professionals may be too conservative in their approach.
Beyond the numbers
Metrics provide a valuable snapshot but they do not tell the whole story. Alongside determining the quantum, an in-house legal team may also need to understand the root cause — whether it is their department, other business units or external factors. Were outdated contracts not revised to reflect changes in laws or requirements? Was published marketing misleading? Did a sudden change in government regulations put the company out of compliance without time to adapt? These factors are not easily captured in numerical data, yet they are equally important.
Some of the legal department’s most valuable benefits are hard to measure – building brand reputation, stronger business partnerships, stakeholder trust and proactive crisis management to name a few. Client feedback and surveys can offer insight into many of these benefits. This helps the legal team know where to focus, prioritize, improve and drive their impact.
Telling the story
As legal teams are pushed to do more with less, justifying resources and demonstrating impact on the company’s bottom line is particularly important. Investment in technology and an increasing availability of data puts corporate legal teams in a position to capture and analyze data more effectively. In turn, this allows legal professionals to communicate their success and value to the wider organization, utilizing reporting and data to visualize key information.
To communicate their value, legal departments should ensure data collection is comprehensive and the data collected is meaningful. Innovative matter management systems incorporate dashboards that can present this data in a compelling way, telling the story of the team’s performance, and highlighting key contributions over time.
These visual tools simplify complex information into easy-to-understand insights, ready to present at board meetings, the executive team or external stakeholders.
Showcase your legal department’s value with Dazychain
Dazychain offers a unified view of all legal work. By centralizing matters, contracts, billing and insights into a single platform, an in-house legal department can take a holistic approach, streamline workflows and automate routine tasks But this approach doesn’t just make the day-to-day operations easier. It helps your team demonstrate their impact effectively, uncovering valuable data-driven insights that can easily be shared. Book your demo today!
Interested in exploring Dazychain’s solutions?
Live Demos of Reveal’s New GenAI Review Technology Begin March 24, 2025, at Legalweek in New York – Showcasing the Combined Power of AI and Intuitive Attorney Workflows
CHICAGO (March 24, 2025) – Reveal, the global provider of dual eDiscovery and investigation platforms powered by a single, unified AI engine, announced today the rollout of its full GenAI review offering, redefining how legal professionals handle document review using advanced generative artificial intelligence. Officially launching this summer with its formal brand name, Reveal’s GAI-enhanced review technology expertly combines lawyer-intuitive workflows with powerful GenAI to deliver unprecedented assistance, speed, transparency, and cost-effectiveness.
“Legal professionals have been forced to adapt their natural workflows to fit technology limitations for far too long,” said Wendell Jisa, Founder and CEO of Reveal. “Reveal’s approach to AI review flips that equation. We’ve built a solution that intelligently assists lawyers throughout the entire review process—transforming document review from a bottleneck into a strategic advantage.”
With its upcoming summer launch, Reveal further strengthens its leadership in developing AI solutions tailored for legal workflows, cementing its position at the forefront of legal technology innovation. As the creators of Brainspace, Reveal AI and its GenAI search tool ASK, this latest advancement reinforces Reveal’s status as the global leader in AI-driven legal technology.
The new GenAI Review technology directly addresses the most common pain points legal teams face in the review process:
- Eliminates GenAI Blackboxes: Transparent Prompt™ technology provides immediate visual feedback on responsiveness definitions, giving lawyers confidence and control over AI decision-making.
- Optimizes Collaboration: GenAI Active Learning (GAL) enables seamless switching between AI-assisted review, side-by-side collaboration, and traditional approaches.
- Enhances Defensibility: Document-level explanations foster a new era of technology assisted insights.
- Removes Technical Barriers: Intuitive onboarding guides users with automatic calibration suggestions that eliminate the “cold-start” problem typical of other AI systems.
- Controls Costs: Smart AI deployment analyzes only the documents that require generative AI, keeping the process defensible, flexible, and cost-effective at any scale.
- Expands AI Flexibility: Provides users with customizable levels of AI integration, allowing for tailored workflows that balance automation and human oversight—ensuring adaptability across diverse legal review needs.
“Our decade-long expertise on building user-friendly AI solutions for the eDiscovery industry is even more important today, when the technology barrier to entry is low and users are looking for intuitive solutions that supplement and easily integrate into their proven workflows,” Jisa added. “This technology further advances the democratization of legal practice by enabling case teams to focus more effectively on their clients’ core objectives while enhancing accuracy and reliability in outcomes.”
With its upcoming summer launch, Reveal further strengthens its leadership in developing AI solutions tailored for legal workflows, cementing its position at the forefront of legal technology innovation. As the creators of Brainspace, Reveal AI and following the 2024 launch of ASK, this latest advancement reinforces Reveal’s status as the global leader in AI-driven legal technology.
Reveal has revolutionized the legal industry by developing a scalable and adaptable ecosystem supported by two industry-leading platforms, each underpinned by the same powerful AI engine. Reveal is fundamentally transforming how legal professionals, from Fortune 500 companies to government agencies, leverage advanced AI technology to drive the eDiscovery process.
For more information about Reveal’s AI-powered eDiscovery platforms, visit www.revealdata.com. For more information about Reveal’s AI review offering or to schedule a live demonstration at Legalweek in New York, March 24 – 27, 2025, visit www.revealdata.com/ai-review.
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About Reveal
Reveal is a leading AI-powered platform for eDiscovery, document review, legal hold and investigations. The company has a deep history in driving the adoption of legal automation, which is underpinned by its leading processing technology, visual analytics, and artificial intelligence capabilities. Reveal’s software combines technology and human guidance to transform structured and unstructured data into actionable insight. We help organizations, including law firms, corporations, government agencies, and intelligence services, uncover more useful information faster by providing a world-class user experience and AI technology that is embedded within every phase of the eDiscovery process.
CHICAGO (March 24, 2025) – Reveal, the global provider of dual eDiscovery and investigation platforms powered by a single, unified AI engine, announced today the rollout of its full GenAI review offering, redefining how legal professionals handle document review using advanced generative artificial intelligence. Officially launching this summer with its formal brand name, Reveal’s GAI-enhanced review technology expertly combines lawyer-intuitive workflows with powerful GenAI to deliver unprecedented assistance, speed, transparency, and cost-effectiveness.
“Legal professionals have been forced to adapt their natural workflows to fit technology limitations for far too long,” said Wendell Jisa, Founder and CEO of Reveal. “Reveal’s approach to AI review flips that equation. We’ve built a solution that intelligently assists lawyers throughout the entire review process—transforming document review from a bottleneck into a strategic advantage.”
With its upcoming summer launch, Reveal further strengthens its leadership in developing AI solutions tailored for legal workflows, cementing its position at the forefront of legal technology innovation. As the creators of Brainspace, Reveal AI and its GenAI search tool ASK, this latest advancement reinforces Reveal’s status as the global leader in AI-driven legal technology.
The new GenAI Review technology directly addresses the most common pain points legal teams face in the review process:
- Eliminates GenAI Blackboxes: Transparent Prompt™ technology provides immediate visual feedback on responsiveness definitions, giving lawyers confidence and control over AI decision-making.
- Optimizes Collaboration: GenAI Active Learning (GAL) enables seamless switching between AI-assisted review, side-by-side collaboration, and traditional approaches.
- Enhances Defensibility: Document-level explanations foster a new era of technology assisted insights.
- Removes Technical Barriers: Intuitive onboarding guides users with automatic calibration suggestions that eliminate the “cold-start” problem typical of other AI systems.
- Controls Costs: Smart AI deployment analyzes only the documents that require generative AI, keeping the process defensible, flexible, and cost-effective at any scale.
- Expands AI Flexibility: Provides users with customizable levels of AI integration, allowing for tailored workflows that balance automation and human oversight—ensuring adaptability across diverse legal review needs.
“Our decade-long expertise on building user-friendly AI solutions for the eDiscovery industry is even more important today, when the technology barrier to entry is low and users are looking for intuitive solutions that supplement and easily integrate into their proven workflows,” Jisa added. “This technology further advances the democratization of legal practice by enabling case teams to focus more effectively on their clients’ core objectives while enhancing accuracy and reliability in outcomes.”
Reveal has revolutionized the legal industry by developing a scalable and adaptable ecosystem supported by two industry-leading platforms, each underpinned by the same powerful AI engine. Reveal is fundamentally transforming how legal professionals, from Fortune 500 companies to government agencies, leverage advanced AI technology to drive the eDiscovery process.
For more information about Reveal’s AI-powered eDiscovery platforms, and Reveal’s GenAI Review offering or to schedule a live demonstration at Legalweek in New York, March 24 – 27, 2025, visit www.revealdata.com. 
TrueLaw will be live at Booth 1212. Come experience AI Narratives™ in action and see how it converts massive amounts of data into an interactive memo with actionable insights – in mere minutes!
Panel Alert – 11:30 AM Tomorrow!
“From Vision to Reality: Building Proprietary AI Agents of, by, and for Lawyers”
Tired of clunky prompt engineering? This session is for you. We’ll break down why proprietary AI agents – trained on your legal expertise – are more powerful, precise, and scalable than generic AI models.
Learn how to:
- Train AI that truly understands legal nuance
- Improve workflow efficiency in Litigation, Investigations and eDiscovery
- Monetize AI built for complex legal work, not one-size-fits-all solutions
Let’s talk AI, the future of law, and how we can make legal work smarter. See you at Booth 1212 and the panel!
At Legalweek 2025, Relativity showcases the proven impact of aiR, introduces aiR for Review for the public sector and celebrates the legal industry’s AI Visionaries.
AI advancement empowers lawyers and litigation teams to reduce their workload, gain every advantage, and master the facts when working across sets of case documents
LONDON, UK – 24 March 2025 – Today, leading legal software and services provider Opus 2 announced the company’s spring product release and AI Workbench, which is seamlessly built into its award-winning legal case management software, Opus 2 Cases.
AI Workbench empowers lawyers and litigation teams to quickly develop case strategy using generative AI to analyse, summarise, and query sets of multiple case documents. Legal professionals also can chat with AI to quickly uncover deeper insights and organise relevant facts and details to shape strategy faster.
“Working closely with clients, our goal was to create an intuitive, AI-driven workspace where legal professionals can find evidence, build arguments, and extract insights from sets of case documents with unprecedented speed and accuracy,” said Liza Pestillos-Ocat, Senior Vice President of Global Client Success at Opus 2. “AI Workbench does just that, seamlessly connecting the powerful capabilities of our award-winning case management software with the productivity benefits of generative AI.”
AI Workbench expands on Opus 2’s well-received first phase of AI technology launched last year. While Opus 2 Cases has always empowered firms to be more collaborative, efficient, and successful, AI Workbench elevates the case management, strategy, analysis, and preparation solution to a new level—applying generative AI functionality where it is most valuable for lawyers and litigation teams.
“The response to our latest innovations has been incredible, fueling our momentum and expanding our reach across the disputes landscape,” said Greg Blackman, CEO at Opus 2. “With each new offering, we’re redefining how legal professionals approach large and small cases, setting new standards for efficiency and collaboration.”
AI Workbench helps litigation teams process large amounts of information quickly, sense-check their case strategy, and improve decision-making. When users open AI Workbench, they get a complete view of the people, events, organisations, and legal topics contained inside a set of case documents. They can review sourced AI summaries of each and connect the relevant facts to their chronology, witness list, and other case management workflows already within Opus 2. Users also can chat with the query tool in AI workbench using everyday language to get deeper insights from the content inside the set of case documents, revealing crucial details, patterns, conclusions, and more.
Dozens of leading law firms who are clients participated in testing and iterating on the company’s AI offerings, including AI Workbench. Several clients also compared it with other legal-focused AI tools in the market, preferring Opus 2’s results and approach.
Norton Rose Fulbright US LLP, longtime user of Opus 2, has implemented Opus 2’s advanced AI technology that automatically generates multiple types of summaries of deposition transcripts and documents and enables generative AI querying.
“This game-changing innovation significantly enhances the speed and efficiency of digesting deposition transcripts, making the process more cost-effective and efficient compared to traditional human summaries,” said Florinda Baldridge, Director, Global eDiscovery Services at Norton Rose Fulbright. “Our clients will benefit from quicker insights and streamlined workflows, reinforcing our commitment to delivering cutting-edge and cost-effective solutions.”
The spring release includes numerous developments including updates to transcript management workflows, enhanced exports, and user interface improvements.
AI Workbench is a major step forward in the company’s ongoing work to ensure AI is adding value to litigators throughout the case lifecycle. In looking at use cases for AI throughout the litigation lifecycle, Opus 2 has published, Harnessing AI for legal case strategy: Essential tips for litigation teams, which features 20 ways to use AI for litigation.
Find out more about Opus 2 Cases by meeting with the team at Legalweek in New York, March 24-27. Opus 2 will be at booth 2120 in America’s Hall 1.
About Opus 2
For more than 15 years, Opus 2 has developed award-winning solutions trusted by the most successful law firms. Used in thousands of proceedings around the world, Opus 2 transforms how lawyers and other legal professionals work by eliminating inefficiencies and connecting them with the AI-enhanced collaborative software they need to work smarter and more effectively together. The company also delivers the essential technology and expertise needed to conduct resolution proceedings in the most modern, seamless, and secure way possible. Learn more at opus2.com.
Cicerai Launches Groundbreaking Deep Legal Research Engine, Free and Open to All Legal Professionals
Cicerai is launching the Cicerai Deep Legal Research Engine — an AI-native platform that makes legal research faster, smarter, and more accessible.
Built by ex-Google AI experts, Cicerai lets you:
– Search across 10M+ court opinions and 6M+ statutes and regulations
– Access built-in citator, timelines, and treatment summaries
– Combine public law with your firm’s private knowledge
– Generate AI-powered legal reports for litigation and transactional work
It’s free to try. No credit card. No commitments. Just modern legal intelligence, open to everyone.
Now available in beta for the New York jurisdiction, with more states and developer APIs coming soon.
Join the beta or visit us at LegalWeek: www.cicerai.com
Read more in our blog.
San Francisco, CA – BoostDraft, a leading legal tech provider, is excited to announce the launch of BoostDraft Compare, a powerful new product designed to help legal professionals quickly and accurately compare document versions across multiple file types.
With BoostDraft Compare, users can streamline their document review process, making it easier than ever to spot differences, track changes, and ensure accuracy in legal review and drafting. The feature integrates seamlessly into existing workflows, maintaining BoostDraft’s signature ease of use and security-first approach.
Key benefits of BoostDraft Compare include:
- Faster, More Efficient Document Review: Instantly compare different versions of legal documents in whole or in part without wasting time scrolling through lengthy files.
- Cross-Format Compatibility: Compare documents across multiple file types, from Word documents to flat scans and beyond, providing flexibility and convenience.
- Enhanced Accuracy: Automatically detect even the smallest changes to prevent costly drafting errors or overlooked developments in negotiation.
- Security & Reliability: Keep sensitive legal data protected with BoostDraft’s secure, on-premise and on-device processing.
“BoostDraft Compare is a game-changer for legal professionals who need precision and efficiency in their document review process. We designed this feature to eliminate the tedious work of manual comparisons, allowing lawyers to focus on higher-value tasks.” said CEO Yohei Fujii.
BoostDraft Compare is now available to all users. To learn more and request a demo, visit boostdraft.com/product/compare.
BoostDraft will be participating in Legalweek 2025 and offering live demos at Booth #3013. Stop by to see BoostDraft Compare in action.
About BoostDraft
BoostDraft is a leading legal tech company that provides a simple, secure, practical solution for contract drafting and review. BoostDraft’s core product eliminates the need for endless scrolling, searching, formatting, and proofreading, enabling attorneys to focus on actual legal work and waste less time on document minutiae. The company serves over 10,000 users worldwide including Am Law 100 firms, mid-size law firms, boutique law firms, and in-house legal teams.
Knovos is advancing the future of legal technology with AI at its core.
From eDiscovery and legal hold to arbitration and compliance, Knovos is integrating AI not as an add-on, but as a deeply embedded capability across its entire product suite.
At the center of this evolution is Knovos Insight — an intelligent AI companion built to assist legal professionals with faster, smarter, and more secure workflows.
Key capabilities include:
- RAG-powered contextual search
- Intelligent document summarization
- AI Review with relevance tagging
- Contract analytics and clause detection
- Predictive risk scoring
- Sentiment analysis in legal communications
Knovos is committed to building AI solutions that are efficient, explainable, and aligned with real-world legal demands.
Join us at Legalweek 2025 to experience Knovos Insight in action.