ABA’s recent survey shows that although Legal AI is making good progress overall, still only 10% of law firms currently use AI. When we look at corporate legal departments, however, adoption is on a more positive trajectory (see Thompson Reuters report ‘Ready or not: artificial intelligence and corporate legal departments‘), at present only a fraction of the total market has been captured.

While historically slow tech adoption in the legal industry is a significant barrier to market penetration for Legal AI providers, other challenges around the resourcing and capabilities needed to initially deploy and train AI solutions have also slowed up-take beyond the early adopters.

So what is the solution?

One option is to pre-train your AI product so your clients do not need to, and while many AI companies have built out robust pre-trained products, it can be very hard to pre-train your product for every client eventuality. Additionally, clients themselves rarely have the resources, capability, or willingness to do any custom training. This leaves the AI company in a difficult position of having to provide significant implementation services which distract them from focusing on their core product and can slow down the sales process.

As a result, a number of Legal AI and Contract Management companies have started outsourcing implementation and custom AI training to external specialists, helping them to:

• reduce barriers to entry for clients, enabling and shortening sales cycles
• remain a product company with higher VC valuations, not a service provider
• build on external subject matter expertise, broadening their product capabilities

Already working with leading AI partners, Cenza provides a range of managed services to LegalTech, RegTech, and FinTech companies. Here are a couple of examples of recent projects: