We know that every legal team is currently under pressure to adopt AI and to do so quickly. But that should not stop you from running a proper evaluation process. Committing to the wrong platform risks undermining the institutional knowledge, standards and hard-won experience that made your firm a leader in the first place.
The firms that win in the next decade will not be the ones that adopted AI fastest, but the ones that activated what only they own.
Before you commit, ask these three questions:
Do you ingest all of our data?
Most platforms tell you they ingest your data. Maybe they can to a certain extent, but it is usually only a fraction of your firm’s documents - around ten contracts, not the full history of your firm, not your best work or what gave you your competitive advantage.
What about the full archive of matters your firm has built over decades? The precedents refined over years of work? The decisions, positions and standards that make your firm different?
There is a deeper problem behind this ingestion limitation. When ingestion is manual, you can only retrieve what someone thought about uploading. The deals, precedents or positions which are only remembered by one lawyer are all invisible and so (obviously) not being retrieved and presented to you when you need it. Your system is bounded by the discipline of your weakest curator.
So ask the vendor directly: how much of our data is actually being used to inform our decision making? And how does it get there - automatically or only when someone remembers to upload it? If you don’t get a clear answer, you will not be making decisions with the full knowledge of your legal team behind you.
Is the platform built on a shared model and who owns our data?
Most legal AI platforms are built on the same underlying models - the same GPT or Claude that your competitors use. Because of this, the model cannot be the advantage; only what you build on top of it is.
The question is what happens to what you build. If your data is used to train the vendor’s model, you are subsidising a product your competitors also use. Your firm’s edge becomes shared infrastructure.
Ask: who owns our data? Is it used to train models that improve a product our competitors also use? And what happens to it when our contract ends?
At Aloi, your data is yours. It surfaces when you need it and improves your system over time - no one else’s.
When you say ingestion, do you mean activation too?
Ingestion is data sitting in a database. Activation is data showing up in the workflow at the moment of a decision. Most platforms do the first but call it the second.
Activation is when the right precedent appears before you even ask for it, when you need it most. Think: the deviation flagged before it reaches the partner; the junior lawyer making a decision backed by everything the firm has learned.
Ask your vendor to show you, on your own data, in a real workflow, how the firm’s knowledge surfaces the moment a lawyer needs it.
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If you want to see how Aloi answers these questions, we would love to show you in your own data - sign up for a demo here.
