Artificial intelligence (AI) has reduced the time for research and documentation by 20-30%, and even more in big cases, according to law firms. Even clients have started demanding clarity on the use of AI-powered tools.
“Consider an arbitrator or a lawyer with 10,000 pages in a case, needing a chronology of events. Previously, this might have consumed a month. With Jurisphere (an AI tool), it takes under ten minutes,” said Varun Khandelwal, founder of the Greater Noida-based platform offering AI services to law firms.
“With generative AI, the fundamental impact extends to 40–60% of daily legal workflows, and this figure will rise as AI capabilities deepen,” Khandelwal told Mint. “We have seen adoption skyrocket, both among the largest law firms in India and at the Supreme Court level.”
Jurisphere’s clients include MZM Legal, Burgeon Law, Wadia Ghandy and IndusLaw. Such tools use generative AI, which can create text or images based on patterns and data fed to it during training.Also Read |
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AI is primarily used in law firms for legal research, document review, organizing and summarizing large volumes of documents, tabulation, compliance reviews, and drafting standard contracts or letters. It automates manual and time-consuming tasks. However, complex legal analysis, negotiations, and final legal judgments still require extensive human oversight and expertise.
The larger law firms are prepping for “hybrid billing”, a mix of fixed or flat fees for AI-driven work regardless of the time spent and hourly billing for more complex legal advice.
“The introduction of AI-powered legal research tools has not yet changed the way the firm bills clients. But we can clearly see we’re headed in that direction,” said Suchorita Mookerjee, chief technology officer at MZM Legal. This Mumbai- and Delhi-based law firm, which has expertise in white collar crime cases, saw a 25% drop in research efforts, though it had to increase quality checks.
According to a Mumbai-based senior partner at one of the top three law firms, clients have started asking them how much of the work is done by AI. “We have to disclose the quality and the quantity of work done by our in-house AI tool,” said the partner who did not wish to be named. “The billing is getting decided only after that. In case a law firm chooses not to come forth, there is always a risk that the client may find out from its own checks and balances.”Open to using AISmaller law firms, especially those that work on a fixed fee, were among the first to try out new AI tools. “We have not reached a stage where cost-efficiency through AI can be passed on to clients,” said a partner at a Mumbai-based boutique firm. “Small-to-medium-sized law firms bleed on fixed fee mandates, and the legal AI research tool can operate to save the leakage by minimizing it.”
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