How AI and co-authoring are revolutionizing the role of legal administrators

Legal administrators wear a lot of hats, ranging from office management and financial reporting, to client relations and case management support. Their already heavy workload keeps growing, as an increasing number of legal tasks such as research or due diligence are being “pushed down” from the top of the organization, with legal administrators expected to lend a hand and take responsibility for these areas.

Fortunately, there are new capabilities in the legaltech world that can come to the aid of busy legal administrators and help them gain control over their growing list of responsibilities. These capabilities have the dual benefit of driving better overall results for both legal administrators and the colleagues they’re assisting – a win across the board.

Research tasks, streamlined

Start with a seemingly unassuming capability like the Microsoft Co-authoring feature that is built into the iManage knowledge work platform. Co-authoring eliminates several of the hassles associated with an explicit checkout model for important documents, where people must manage a schedule around editing a particular document depending on who has it checked out.

With this next generation co-authoring, legal professionals can effortlessly collaborate on documents in real-time or at their own pace, with no need to wait for colleagues to finish before making forward progress. The ability to access and edit content on the iManage platform from anywhere, and co-author documents in real time, reduces friction around collaboration and boosts efficiency, security, and productivity.  

Additionally, document revisions made in real time appear in the iManage timeline view, allowing document owners to instantly see who edited the file and when. Users can also roll back to earlier revisions and catch in-between changes, correct errors, and refine content before locking in a new version.

Let’s see how that might apply to our legal administrator and the new duties they’re being tasked with.

Suppose a senior lawyer gets started on a matter and remembers a case they worked on a year or two ago that has some very useful language they can repurpose and incorporate into the document they’re putting together. They can task the legal administrator with finding that language; meanwhile, the legal administrator can track down the specific clause, copy it, and paste it into the area of the document where the lawyer has left a placeholder – all while the lawyer is drafting and refining different parts of the document – and not having to break their workflow.

Effortless due diligence

Like co-authoring, AI has the potential to remove friction from workflows and boost productivity around the completion of advanced legal tasks – and Ask iManage provides a perfect example of how it can be put to good use.

Ask iManage is a powerful AI assistant specifically designed to accelerate daily tasks for busy professionals. Seamlessly integrated into iManage Work document and email management, Ask iManage empowers users to focus on high-value work by augmenting everyday tasks involving documents – ensuring better outcomes and improved service for clients and stakeholders.

With Ask iManage, users can approach document searches conversationally, posing natural language queries to get direct answers to specific questions or information queries, eliminating the need to spend time developing carefully crafted prompts to get the information needed.

A guided actions interface makes it even easier for users to leverage the benefits of generative AI without the need to be experts in crafting prompts. Guided actions available in Ask iManage include: Overview, to quickly see the main points of content; Extract, to grab exact text and data points from documents; Summarize, to generate summaries for specific topics within content; and Analyze, to check if content meets certain requirements.

Additionally, Ask iManage offers multi-document processing – the ability to run guided actions on multiple documents simultaneously. This capability is particularly beneficial for tasks such as due diligence, compliance reviews, or remediation projects.  

Let’s jump again to our overworked legal administrator who has been asked by a senior lawyer to read through 10 contracts; summarize the main salient points and pull out specific clauses; and present the findings in a table or an Excel spreadsheet. Ask iManage is quickly and easily able to extract the required information and output it in the desired format, allowing busy professionals to dedicate more time to other tasks and other parts of their day – all while they deliver exceptional legal services with confidence.

Learn more at ALA

We’re excited to be at the Association of Legal Administrators’ ALA 2025 conference in Nashville from May 18th-21st. Stop by booth #611 to say hi and check out Co-authoring and Ask iManage in action. 

We are continuously investing in our knowledge work platform to find way to help knowledge workers work smarter, faster, and safer. We look forward to connecting with as many of you as possible to show you what’s new and how it can benefit the work you do every day!