Forward-looking legal departments have made big strides over the past decade using advanced technology applications to automate processes and create new cost efficiencies. Powerful new tools allow us to manage complex, high-volume legal matters more effectively. A prominent example is technology-assisted review (TAR) in e-discovery, which has proven to be transformative for legal teams tasked with sorting through hundreds of thousands or even millions of documents to find the most relevant information. With TAR, we can do that work many times faster and much more accurately than was possible just a few years ago, and with significant reductions in cost.

But TAR is only one example in which artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like analytics, predictive modeling and machine learning are making it possible for legal departments to control both cost and risk with unprecedented granularity—and AI is not just another application in the legal department.