Overview / CareersAI Careers in Legal Services
The legal industry encompasses a wide range of services including contracts, corporate law, criminal justice, intellectual property, legal research, litigation, and regulatory compliance. Whether working in a court, law firm, public agency, or regulatory body, success in the field requires copious amounts of documentation, as well as procedural consistency and knowledge of case law and statutes.
Machine learning, with an emphasis on natural language processing, is the predominant way AI is currently being used in the legal sector, primarily for contract analysis, document review, due diligence, and legal research. AI tools help manage compliance and automate routine workflows. AI can be used to identify applicable legal precedent that would otherwise require extensive research or reliance on memory. Generative AI is also starting to support drafting of legal memos and summarizing case files, saving time and increasing productivity.
One major benefit of AI in law is that it enables a new way to interact with legal documents. By asking questions of them rather than just reading them, someone can use AI to understand legal verbiage and get clarity around implications and ramifications.
What would an AI professional contribute to legal services?
An AI professional working in legal services would design, develop, and refine intelligent systems to streamline legal processes by automating document review, analyzing contracts to answer important questions, conducting retroactive and predictive legal analysis, and ensuring AI systems comply with legal ethics and confidentiality standards. The role also includes collaborating closely with legal experts to align AI tools with real-world legal reasoning.
What are the biggest opportunities and challenges for AI in the industry?
Opportunities to integrate AI can dramatically improve efficiency and access to legal services. AI can reduce manual effort, lower costs, increase consistency in legal research, and enhance decision support, not to mention make it vastly easier for people without legal training to understand contracts and other legal documents. It holds promise to democratize legal information, especially for underserved populations and pro bono efforts. Over time, AI may shift the legal profession toward more strategic and advisory roles as machines handle repetitive work.
Major challenges in the field involve data privacy, the ethical implications of automated decision-making, and the risk of bias in AI-trained models. Besides being sensitive, legal data can often be unstructured, posing integration and interpretation hurdles.
Read what MSAI director Kristian Hammond sees as the potential and risks of AI in law.
How does MSAI prepare students to lead in the legal space?
As part of their Practicum project, MSAI students collaborate with clients across Northwestern University on initiatives where AI can provide meaningful impact. These clients include partners from various schools, including the Pritzker School of Law. In these engagements, students contribute to cutting-edge AI applications in the legal domain — ranging from summarizing and analyzing large volumes of legal documents to developing tools that make complex legal contracts more accessible and understandable to the general public.
Where have MSAI students and alumni interned or worked?
- Relativity
- xMentium
Featured Alumni
Kushal Agrawal
MSAI ‘23, Senior Applied Scientist, RelativityRelativity is a software company whose products help users parse large volumes of data to identify key issues during litigation, investigations, and compliance proceedings.
Before Kushal Agrawal secured a full-time job at the company, he was an applied sciences intern, applying lessons learned during his time in MSAI to help innovate and advance Relativity's work.
“The opportunity to work on cutting-edge projects involving artificial intelligence was the most exciting part of my work,” Agrawal said. “I gained insights into project management, problem-solving, and the practical challenges of applying AI in real-world scenarios.”
Nayan Mehta
MSAI ‘20, Principal Machine Learning Engineer, xMentiumNayan Mehta supports xMentium's featured product, a legal language collaboration tool that helps legal teams navigate complex negotiations to reach deals advantageous to both sides.
It's a role she feels properly positioned for. In her eyes, the best machine learning engineers should serve as a bridge between domain experts and the underlying technology they are using.
"Building trust in AI systems necessitates transparency in AI decision-making," she said, "so users can assess why specific results are produced and make an informed decision about how they choose to use AI in their work."
