The Legal AI Advantage: Inside an Attorney’s Most Efficient Day

Can AI really help attorneys get more done every day? And, if so, what’s the best way for legal teams to integrate it into their workflows? These are increasingly common questions in the industry—questions that Katherine, Managing Partner at Franklin, Burbank & Carter (and our fictional hero) sought to answer herself.

After spending several months familiarizing herself with AI, Katherine made a deliberate effort to spend one day identifying every opportunity to use it in her work and reflect on the quantifiable benefits it delivered. With these insights, she could determine whether the firm’s legal AI investment was delivering the measurable efficiencies they expected or if AI’s promise was falling short. While tracking a full month of usage may produce richer data, a single day could still offer a meaningful snapshot.

With her second cup of coffee in hand, Katherine opens a fresh spreadsheet to record each AI interaction along with the estimated time she saved and the benefits she gained. She also enables her firm’s AI timekeeping automation, which logs time entries for the tasks she undertakes—another efficiency she wanted to monitor.

Contractor Proposals Review

Katherine’s first task of the morning is to summarize six contractor proposals for her restaurateur client, Jack. Historically, reviewing pricing terms, contingencies, fees, and timelines would consume about two hours of her day. Today, she launches a pre-written AI prompt for this specific task from her case management system. The prompt instructs AI to analyze the proposals and generate a clean comparison chart.

After a brief review to ensure accuracy, she asks the system to draft an email to Jack recommending the contractor, Waltham and Sons, Inc. The email, normally a 15-minute task, was drafted by AI, reviewed and refined by Katherine, and sent in three minutes.

Katherine, who would normally feel anxious or guilty about taking a break, leans back in her chair and uses her extra time to call her daughter and hear about her day.

Contested Probate Complaint

Next, Katherine has to draft a complaint for a contested probate matter. Her paralegal had uploaded hundreds of matter-related emails, handwritten notes, financial records, and estate documents into her firm’s case management system, which features a robust suite of AI tools.

Previously, drafting a complaint of this complexity required about two hours, including document review. Today, she launches her AI case analysis workflow, which performs entity resolution, conflict-term detection, and cross-referencing before producing a comprehensive summary: parties, relationships, potential causes of action, relevant statutes and caselaw, and procedural considerations—all in about two minutes.

After a 20-minute review and minor edits, she opens her jurisdiction-specific complaint template and automatically populates it with details relevant to the specific matter. After a quick review to ensure accuracy, she checks it off her list and sends it to her paralegal to review and add appendices.

Struck by how effortless the review was—and now with extra time to spare—Katherine takes the opportunity to connect with her team, respond to prospects, and read her legal journals.

Estate Plan Reviews

Before lunch, Katherine needs to review three estate plans scheduled for execution that afternoon: wills, trusts, powers of attorney, and healthcare directives.

Each line-by-line review typically took about one hour, or about three hours total for the three estate plans. With an AI-assisted document review system, she can confirm key provisions, check demographic data, flag mismatched provisions between spouses’ documents, and identify a missing beneficiary and a misspelled town in about 15 minutes.

She takes another 15 minutes to make the necessary corrections, give the drafts another review, and approve the final versions. Her practice management system automatically notifies her paralegal to print the execution sets.

Draft Letters for Estate Plans

After lunch, Katherine needs to draft two estate plan summary letters—one of her least favorite tasks. Previously, explaining the nuances of trusts and wills in plain language would normally consume about an hour per letter, especially when the clients are inexperienced.

Today, she launches the AI drafting tool. She uses it to quickly review the estate plan packages, distill the essential terms, highlight dispositive provisions, and draft both summaries in ten minutes. She reviews the summaries, has AI incorporate them into emails, and sends the polished client letters—another 30-minute task completed in five minutes.

For the first time in months, Katherine has time to take a long lunch break and finally hit the gym! Refreshed and energized, she returns to the office, calls her friend to plan their evening, and connects with her office manager to discuss budgets and production reports. Her office manager quips that Katherine never has time to meet and is pleased to finally have some quality time with her.

Legal Research Projects

Next, Katherine kicks off a new research project. It involves an estate planning matter with unusual tax implications. She asks two questions in an AI-assisted legal research tool.

The first response provides analysis of the matter documentation and identifies related statutes, complete with citations from a reputable legal database. The second response suggests case strategy and provides additional citations. Katherine asks AI to use the findings to draft a legal memorandum. She then submits it for verification by her legal peers. What normally requires an hour takes 15 minutes.

High-Maintenance Client Call

As she is completing her research, a newly appointed estate administrator calls with a list of urgent questions: Who are the beneficiaries of her aunt’s estate? What is the approximate estate value? What are her duties as administrator?

Previously, Katherine might have spent 30 minutes reviewing the matter file. Instead, she queries the AI matter tool which intelligently reviews the relevant matter details, and produces the answers needed in about five minutes. She confirms the result and confidently returns the client’s call. The client is consoled and grateful.

Katherine reflects on how she gained more time to meaningfully connect with her client. She’d always prefer to spend her day counselling instead of in the mire of paperwork and task after task. She checks the clock and considers how she can utilize the rest of her afternoon.

Legal Blog Article Drafting

With unexpected extra time, Katherine starts drafting the monthly blog article she writes for the firm’s website. She inputs the topic and a detailed prompt into a generative AI tool—permitted under the firm’s AI policy for non-client content—and requests a first draft.

She reviews the output, checks the citations, and requests the AI to make further refinements for voice, tone, and accuracy. With the help of AI, she completes an 800-word article in about two hours—much faster than the four hours it once took to write the monthly posts from scratch.

She even has time to use AI to generate a unique header image for the blog in about two minutes.

Automatic Timekeeping

Katherine typically spends the last hour of her day reviewing her billable hour notes and entering the time into a timesheet. As her AI-powered timekeeping tool has significantly reduced the need for manual time entry, the hour she used to spend on end-of-day timekeeping is largely reclaimed, with only a few minutes needed for review and minor edits.

Reflections on a Transformative Workday

Katherine ends her day with a meaningful client meeting where she discusses, reviews, and executes their estate plans. Now, it is time to review the spreadsheet she began that morning to track her AI-assisted tasks and time savings.

Across her tasks—document review, drafting, research, communication, and client management—Katherine estimates that AI has saved her approximately twelve hours when compared to her more traditional workflows. That amount of time saved surprises her. Although today was especially task-focused and she acknowledges that such considerable time savings may not occur every day, Katherine is excited about the findings and the potential benefits for the future.

Beyond raw efficiency, she realizes that strategically incorporating AI into the firm’s workflows has allowed her to redirect her energy toward higher-value strategic judgment, client counseling, and personal life balance. She also ends her day not exhausted but energized. With fewer routine tasks demanding her attention, Katherine gained time to focus on what she loves most about her work—practicing law and caring for clients.

Inspired by the results, she’s eager to introduce her colleagues to the benefits of AI and the difference it can make in day-to-day work.

Curious to see how AI can transform your firm’s efficiency, freeing up time for more valuable work? LEAP’s award-winning AI tools are seamlessly integrated into our all-in-one legal software solution for case management, document automation, legal accounting, and more. Learn more at leap.us/ai.