Legal AI Use Policy
How to define what AI use is acceptable in a legal department — what data it can touch, what decisions it can support, and where legal judgment must remain the final authority.
A use policy is the reference point every later governance decision gets measured against. Without one, each new tool gets evaluated from scratch, by whoever happens to be asked, using whatever judgment they bring to it that day.
What a Use Policy Actually Needs to Answer
A legal AI use policy is not a values statement. It is a working reference document that tells someone evaluating a new tool exactly what they're allowed to do without asking, what requires review, and what is off the table entirely.
A policy that can't be applied by someone outside the group that wrote it hasn't done its job. If every new tool still requires a special conversation to interpret the policy, the policy is too abstract to be useful.
The Core Questions a Use Policy Should Settle
What data can be exposed?
Which categories of information — privileged material, PII, financial data, unreleased corporate information — are off-limits to AI tools entirely, and which are permitted under specific conditions.
What decisions can AI support?
Where AI output can inform a draft, a summary, or a first pass, versus where a decision requires independent legal judgment regardless of what the tool produces.
What requires human verification?
Which AI-assisted outputs must be reviewed and confirmed by a person before they leave the department or get relied upon.
Who has approval authority?
Who can approve a new tool, under what conditions, and at what point a decision needs to escalate beyond an individual team.
The core issue
A policy that only addresses tools legal purchased directly misses most of the actual exposure. The bigger risk is usually AI capability that arrives inside tools the department already uses.
Where Policies Commonly Fall Short
Too General to Apply
High-level principles with no concrete guidance on the specific decision someone is trying to make right now.
Written Once, Never Revisited
A policy drafted before certain categories of AI use existed, with no defined process for updating it as capability changes.
Not Tied to a Review Process
A document that states principles but isn't connected to any actual intake point where a new tool gets checked against them.
Legal Judgment Stays in the Loop
A well-built use policy doesn't remove legal judgment from AI-assisted work — it defines exactly where that judgment has to apply. AI can accelerate a first draft, surface relevant precedent, or summarize a long document. What a policy should never permit is treating AI output as a substitute for the judgment a lawyer is responsible for exercising.
The goal is not to write a policy that anticipates every possible tool. It's to write one specific enough that someone evaluating a new use case can apply it without needing to ask what it meant.
Where This Fits in the Governance Model
The use policy is the reference standard. The governance workflow is how a specific new tool gets checked against it. The two need to work together — a policy with no attached process gets ignored, and a process with no clear standard behind it produces inconsistent decisions.
Once a policy exists, the department has a defensible basis for every approval decision it makes going forward, and a starting point for reviewing decisions made before the policy existed.
A use policy is only as strong as its answer to the next specific tool someone wants to adopt. If it can't answer that question clearly, it isn't finished yet.