Now, we’ll take a dive into the use of AI in the legal world. How big is the legal tech market? How do lawyers use AI in their practice, and how do students use it? These are all questions you’ll discover the answers to over the course of this section.

Though it may not seem obvious, AI already plays an indispensable role in the world of legal practice. From document review software to legal research and drafting, many lawyers use AI every day in their practice – if not multiple times a day.

This means that AI in the world of law equals big money.

Market research firm Gartner has estimated that the global legal tech market will be worth $50 billion by 2027 due to generative AI. A 2024 survey by LexisNexis has found that many law firms set aside a budget specifically for AI tools.

But what do these AI tools do, specifically? Here’s an overview:

When they first receive a case, a lawyer may use Clio to organize client information, manage communications, and schedule tasks efficiently. Once they start fact-finding, a lawyer may use Relativity or Everlaw for e-discovery, leveraging AI to quickly review and categorize large volumes of documents and emails for relevance to the case. When they begin researching the law, a lawyer may use CaseSnappy, or the AI features of tools such as Westlaw or LexisNexis to identify and understand relevant case law and precedents. When drafting documents for the case, a lawyer may turn to tools like Harvey AI to generate initial drafts of contracts or submissions based on templates and legal standards, saving time and ensuring accuracy. When presenting their case in court, a lawyer may use tools like TrialPad for organizing and displaying evidence digitally. When the case is resolved, a lawyer may use Smokeball to automate billing, generate client reports, and make notes of lessons learned from the case for future reference.

Closer to home, as a student, you may have used AI in your legal studies with CaseSnappy. Sometimes legal judgments can be extremely long – and overwhelming. For example, you may need a quick understanding of the landmark decision in Miller I [2017] UKSC 5 - but the full judgment in that case is 98 pages and 43,438 words long! What's more, there seems to be a trend that legal judgments are getting longer and longer. Barrister Alexander Chandler KC wrote in 2021 of his view that:

over the span of the last 150 years, judgments have progressively got longer: Victorian judgments (or at least the reports of Victorian judgments) rarely took up more than a dozen pages and, as the 1970s and 1980s, even complex litigation resolved in judgments of at most 20 pages.

Of course, sometimes it can be necessary to read a legal judgment in full. But other times, you just need a snappy and digestible summary. Therefore you, like thousands of other students, might use CaseSnappy’s structured AI summary of the case, leaving you with more time for in-depth research and other higher value work.