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Legal advisory services, a routine yet central area of legal practice, are confronting both the challenges of technological innovation driven by artificial intelligence and the opportunities for enhanced efficiency and value creation. AI technologies, such as automated document generation and language processing, can now perform tasks including contract drafting and review, legal database updates, corporate anomaly monitoring, case data analysis, and case search and prediction.

For the author¡¯s legal team, which is an integrated corporate-style team, optimising advisory service models and enhancing service capabilities in the AI era has become a pressing issue, particularly when supporting hundreds of client organisations.

While the complexity and uniqueness of legal matters mean that AI cannot fully replace professional expertise and judgement, legal teams must proactively embrace technology and harness AI as an accelerator for upgrading legal advisory services.

Restructuring competitiveness

In the era of AI, team-based legal advisory services must strengthen their core competitiveness by tailoring service processes, knowledge management and talent development to the specific demands of legal counsel work.

Redefined service processes. Traditional legal advisory services have relied on manual analysis, but the introduction of AI is set to transform established workflows. For example, contract review is shifting from line-by-line manual checking to an AI-assisted initial screening followed by human verification, necessitating a redesign of internal collaboration and division of labour.

While a 24-hour response commitment for routine matters remains a competitive advantage for the author¡¯s legal team, AI now enables more differentiated response mechanisms, such as automatically assessing the urgency of client emails and assigning them to appropriate priority queues. Additionally, AI can be used to collect and analyse data on advisory services, generating service quality reports that inform ongoing process improvements.

Intelligent upgrades in knowledge management. For corporate-style legal advisory teams, knowledge management systems such as case databases, document libraries and big data reports are already well established.

The next step is to integrate historical service cases, legal instruments and broader work outputs with categorised reference models into AI systems, creating a more comprehensive and structured knowledge base. This approach will streamline the development and training of team lawyers, accelerating the transformation of individual expertise into organisational capability.

Refined talent development. The expectations for advisory lawyers have evolved from simply understanding industry and business to a new ¡°law plus technology¡± paradigm. Legal teams must now provide regular AI tool training to enhance lawyers¡¯ technical proficiency, while also encouraging deeper sector expertise.

Lawyers should be supported to immerse themselves in client industries such as renewable energy, technology and entertainment, leveraging AI-driven data analysis and policy trends to deliver more forward-looking compliance advice.

Upgrading customer experience

Enhanced service capabilities. AI tools can now swiftly identify vulnerabilities in contract clauses and offer preliminary revision suggestions, as well as provide real-time access to the latest regulations, judicial interpretations and case law, generating concise legal summaries. This enables legal teams to respond rapidly to client enquiries and improve service delivery, particularly for advisory teams handling high volumes of business contracts that requires efficient feedback.

By analysing historical business data, AI models can generate compliance risk lists and flag potential disputes. Legal teams can then tailor risk prevention strategies for clients, shifting from reactive responses to proactive intervention and adding greater value to their services.

Optimised client experience. AI chatbots are now widely used in sectors such as finance and technology. In legal advisory services, implementing an AI legal Q&A system ¨C supported by intelligent customer service and a comprehensive knowledge base ¨C can provide clients with round-the-clock access to routine legal advice. This not only reduces lawyers¡¯ workloads but also enhances the overall client experience.

Automated service records generated by the system facilitate future tracking of client needs. Now the author¡¯s advisory team uses AI tools to transform quarterly or annual service reports and legal analyses into visual formats such as charts and flow diagrams, enabling business leaders to better understand legal risks and improving both communication and service efficiency.

Integrated service resources. Advisory lawyers can leverage AI tools to gain deeper insights into the customised needs of businesses, ensuring that AI solutions are aligned with each client¡¯s operational context, industry background and specific requirements. This approach facilitates the integration of external resources between clients and lawyers.

For example, lawyers can connect businesses with cross-industry expertise, sector-specific resources and strategic information relevant to future business development, thereby strengthening operational engagement with the clients and enhancing the value-added services provided.

Takeaways

Competition in legal advisory and lawyer services has never been determined by expertise or any single factor. In this context, AI technology has become a key element in strengthening a team¡¯s capabilities in technology adoption and resource integration.

For legal teams, maintaining a client-centric approach and building a service ecosystem that combines legal expertise with industry knowledge, technology and effective human-AI collaboration is essential to remain competitive in today¡¯s legal services market.

Practitioners must recognise the positive impact of AI while upholding the core values of legal services, using innovation in tools and process optimisation to enhance both professional efficiency and the client experience.

Li Weiming is a partner at Blossom & Credit Law Firm