By Jitendra Gupta, Head of AI & Data Science
Barely three years after ChatGPT reshaped the technology landscape, AI has moved past experimentation and into daily legal operations. It is now helping streamline bill review, matter management, and countless back-office workflows.
And the pace is accelerating. With each new generation, AI is refining its ability to make legal operations more efficient, strategic, and aligned with business objectives. One of the most important leaps forward is agentic AI — AI that doesn’t just answer prompts, but can plan, reason, and execute actions with far less human input.
Unlike earlier generations of AI that required constant prompts or manual oversight, Agentic AI acts with a level of autonomy — learning from interactions, adapting to context, and driving workflows on its own. This advancement may help many overburdened legal operations teams move from reactive task management to proactive, strategic decision-making.
Questions legal ops leaders need answered
The debate over whether agentic AI belongs in legal operations is already settled — the answer is a clear “yes!”. What remains are the practical questions. Legal operations leaders want specifics. They’ve seen the hype, heard the vendor claims, and been encouraged to adopt AI as a cure-all, but legal ops teams still search for answers to how, when, and what use cases to implement:
- How do we implement agentic AI efficiently so that it provides the most significant ROI?
- Which use cases should we target first?
- How can we implement trustworthy, responsible AI?
They want actionable tools that support their priorities without adding complexity to their jobs. They want to demonstrate to their leadership team that they're using AI in ways that deliver measurable and sustainable value to their organizations. Anything else is just noise; they need to know how these advancements in technology can help them now, right now.
The value of agentic AI
Agentic AI’s strength lies in tackling problems with the right balance of autonomy and oversight. It is particularly well-suited to the high-volume, high-rules work legal operations teams manage every day, including:
- Matter management — Auto-tracking key dates, tasks, and surfacing relevant documents
- Billing oversight and spend control — Flagging anomalies, enforcing guidelines, and tracking budgets in real time
- Document workflows — Routing contracts, extracting structured data, and triggering downstream actions
By taking on these repetitive, data-intensive tasks, agentic AI frees legal operations teams to focus on what truly matters: delivering strategies that drive efficiency, reduce risk, and create measurable value for the organization.
Learn more
Check out my white paper to learn more about agentic AI and how it’s empowering legal operations teams to streamline processes, optimize resources, and deliver greater strategic value: Unlocking the potential of agentic AI in legal departments
Agentic AI is not the future of legal ops; it's here now, ready to help teams scale efficiently and become a key strategic driver.
