5 ways AI is revolutionizing how our legal team works

Despite the legal and compliance considerations that come from implementing artificial intelligence (AI) into your organization, many legal professionals are moving ahead with advanced AI tools to improve efficiencies, reduce costs, and serve their clients more effectively. It's no longer just a question of if AI fits into legal work, but how best to make it work for legal teams.

While there are some who are concerned that AI could replace human lawyers, we at Zoom have integrated Zoom AI Companion into our work in a manner that boosts our efficiency and delivers even greater value. For our legal department, AI doesn't remove the human element from work, but enhances it. By automating routine tasks, enhancing research and analysis, and offering data-driven insights, AI allows our legal department to spend more time on strategic thinking, advocacy, and client service.

Here are some of the most impactful ways we've included AI Companion in our workflows.

A great deal of a lawyer's time is spent analyzing contracts, regulatory materials, and other documents. Our lawyers are increasingly using AI tools to process and analyze these types of documents, significantly improving our efficiency and our accuracy. AI Companion is particularly effective at comparing and analyzing contracts, quickly identifying the differences between versions, which is essential for commercial contract management. We do this while making sure that our lawyers remain at the center and in control of this process.

Try it for yourself, either in Zoom Docs or the AI Companion side panel in Zoom Workplace. Attach files from Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, or locally from your own device, and ask AI Companion, "What's the difference between these two documents?"

We've also found that advanced summarization features reduce the time we spend reviewing lengthy documents by extracting critical points and presenting them in a more digestible format. We can also use AI Companion to generate executive summaries and project trackers directly from contracts, facilitating better communication with our stakeholders and improved project oversight.

Legal research is a foundational, yet time-consuming, part of legal work. Lawyers must sift through countless volumes of materials and databases, seeking answers to complex problems.

When our legal team identifies regulations relevant to a particular issue or initiative, we use AI Companion to generate initial summaries that highlight key provisions. This allows our attorneys to check for accuracy and nuance, and to focus on analyzing the implications rather than spending time on first-pass reviews. By streamlining the early stages of regulatory research, AIC supports faster legal insight and more responsive guidance to the business.

For example, you could import a document or text into a Zoom Doc and ask AI Companion to provide a summary of it, review and edit that summary directly, and then share it with your team.

A global business needs to be able to function across jurisdictions with clarity, precision, and consistency. Our legal team uses AI Companion to quickly and accurately convert legal texts, contracts, and correspondence between languages, preserving legal terminology and context.

AI Companion can also provide translated captions in meetings, which helps facilitate real-time communication with clients and international legal professionals, improving communication speed and minimizing errors.

We also find AI Companion useful when drafting new documents and communications. By providing grammar corrections, style refinements, and context-aware suggestions, AI Companion improves language clarity and drafting accuracy, enabling our team to produce clear, consistent, and legally sound documents more efficiently.

Our Legal Compliance and Trust and Safety teams are increasingly using AI Companion to streamline and enhance their operations. By rapidly analyzing large volumes of text with AI Companion, our team is able to more quickly complete reviews for legal documents and conduct compliance checks to identify regulatory alignment and potential risks.

We also draft customer notifications and policy documents with greater consistency and accuracy, while reducing manual effort. AI Companion has helped us generate standardized forms for complaint and dispute intake more efficiently, enabling faster resolution and improved record-keeping.

In fraud detection and due diligence, particularly when working with foreign third parties, our team uses AI Companion to gather relevant data and assess risk, helping maintain compliance with international regulations and contributing to overall productivity.

Check out our legal and compliance guide to AI Companion.

Zoom Workplace supports secure, reliable video, audio, and chat, helping remote and hybrid teams communicate and collaborate effectively. For lawyers, Zoom's secure environment and easy-to-use interface support everything from client consultations to internal team discussions.

Our team uses AI Companion meeting summaries, action item tracking, and real-time transcription to reduce the need for manual note-taking and maintain focus on legal strategy and analysis.

We protect client confidentiality and privilege by customizing our Zoom settings to enforce strict security measures. This helps ensure that sensitive legal discussions remain private and compliant with professional standards, giving lawyers and our business partners peace of mind while still taking advantage of tools that improve efficiency and support day-to-day legal work.

One practical application we've found helpful is the ability to create a new document directly from a meeting transcript or AI Companion summary in Zoom Docs.

As AI Companion takes on time-consuming tasks, our legal professionals can spend more time solving complex problems, advising on risk, and guiding strategic decisions. While some worry that AI can replace jobs, our experience has been different. AI Companion enhances the work we do by helping us focus on what matters most: thinking critically, communicating clearly, and serving the business with confidence.

If you're ready to implement AI in your organization, check out our guide.