Across the legal sector, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools are helping to drive significant efficiency, differentiation, and growth improvements. Their continued adoption among forward-thinking legal service and technology businesses is also creating new, highly appealing M&A opportunities for investors and buyers.

To uncover how GenAI is influencing the legal space and its leading companies, senior professionals from our Business Services Group and Technology Group recently sat down with four notable CEOs:

• Charles Besson, Questel: Questel is a worldwide provider of tech-enabled professional solutions for intellectual property, innovation, legal operations, and localization management.
  

• Andy Macdonald, Consilio: Consilio is a global leader in eDiscovery, document review, risk management, and legal consulting services that brings together an end-to-end legal services and technology platform with worldclass expertise, innovations in technology and data, and workflows.
  

• Tim Noble, Chambers and Partners: Chambers and Partners is the leading research and business intelligence platform for the legal ecosystem, giving key decision-makers the tools and insights for when it matters.
  

• Michael Talve, Expert Institute: Expert Institute connects attorneys with the world’s top experts, giving lawyers access to useful resources, intelligence, and legal technology.
  

Below, each shares their point of view on GenAI’s impact on their industry, the benefits of integrating innovative tools into their operations, and where they see this technology heading in the future.

How Is GenAI Affecting the Legal Sector and Unlocking Growth Opportunities?

Charles Besson, Questel: “The conversation around GenAI is growing rapidly across the legal landscape. Cutting-edge technologies like these will always be important considerations for Questel and have long been a component of our broader roadmap.

Our company is a key player driving change in the IP space, as well as the broader legal space. Legal professionals need the tools and services to deliver top-quality outputs without any drop in accuracy or quality, even when adopting new tools.

GenAI will bring out the 'cream of the crop.' Top firms and professionals will become more efficient and effective, enabling them to focus on bringing more value to their clients. As GenAI tools continue to improve and offer greater benefits, their adoption by leading companies will only become more essential.”

Andy Macdonald, Consilio: “Today, ingesting large volumes of data is a time-consuming and machine-intensive process for all types of legal tech and services companies. GenAI technology is constantly improving to better analyze data in a cost effective and timely manner. As such, these tools will be highly beneficial in answering specific questions about any given matter, provided that the data can be accurately located within the model being analyzed.

In the near-term, GenAI can be beneficial for investigative workflows. One example is asking questions based on a corpus of documents in a highly optimized search scenario. In addition, GenAI can be used to classify and group documents by relevance to speed up review processes. With more training, it can also summarize information from documents identified as relevant to be potentially used for brief preparation.

As excited as we are about what lies ahead, we are still counseling caution when leveraging a GenAI platform in legal matters. Although GenAI will get better over time and become more important to implement, there are still a fair number of unknowns within these systems. Predictive coding and technology-assisted review, both powered by AI, took time to be widely accepted due to the ever-evolving nature of the technology. Our teams are still gathering hands-on experience to understand all the potential applications and implications.

The time will rapidly come for broader use of these solutions. But with the amount of uncertainty currently, our approach will remain measured yet optimistic when adopting GenAI-based workflows in our daily operations.”

Tim Noble, Chambers and Partners: “As a practice tool, some AI developments have already taken hold with eDiscovery and documentation review platforms using traditional AI to handle large volumes of data. However, new, more advanced GenAI models are now coming online that use large language models to do legal research, due diligence, and contract review work.

On the workload front, AI regulation is coming into force, which is generating governance work for law firms in many big markets. The rise of AI is also leading to litigation relating to IP infringements, data protection, and human rights. Several organizations are now preventing AI models from scraping their websites, showcasing greater awareness and protection of data flowing through into legal work.

Within legal marketing and business development, GenAI will streamline workflows, make teams more efficient, and ensure compliance with legal standards. Specifically, GenAI can enhance market research and client engagement, automate lead generation, improve event planning and client feedback processes, enable content personalization, and optimize resource allocation.

Ultimately, GenAI is helping law firms and legal professionals save time and resources across its use cases. At Chambers and Partners, we’re excited to keep taking advantage of GenAI’s power through better data collection, automated content production, and faster technical development.”

Michael Talve, Expert Institute: “There’s no shortage of information and data to cull through when evaluating expert witnesses. For our business, obtaining the most relevant data and information has always been a tremendous challenge. Organizing it, distilling it, and turning it into actionable intelligence is the next problem to solve.

GenAI is already providing us with tremendous leverage in this area, and we’re still in the early innings. Our clients—including powerhouse litigation firms, corporate legal departments, and the most successful commercial litigators in the country—recognize that information is a scarce resource.

With GenAI and other proprietary machine learning tools developed at Expert Institute and ExpertIQ, we can process information faster than ever before. This results in better outcomes, tremendous efficiency, and unparalleled insights in the context of complex litigation concerns and the expert witnesses required to process those claims.”

Generating M&A Potential

GenAI adoption throughout the legal sector is accelerating thanks to its evolving applications that span legal workflows. Both legal tech and legal services firms are looking to capitalize on the expanding use cases of GenAI to better meet the needs of law firms and in-house counsel.

Legal services businesses best able to use GenAI to deliver a better client experience will be prioritized by investors, as will legal tech providers helping to drive this transformation. M&A investors stand to benefit from keeping a close eye on this evolving space.

To discuss value-creation opportunities within the legal sector in detail, please contact our senior professionals.