Inventory how a legal department actually uses AI
For in-house legal teams and legal operations leads.
Why inventory individual AI uses when procurement already lists the products?
One approved product may serve several workflows with different inputs and consequences. List each use separately so the department can see which people, data and decisions are involved. Start with a task a team member can describe from beginning to end.
Interview the people doing the work
Ask a lawyer, contract manager and operations specialist to describe their last few recurring tasks. For each AI-assisted step, capture the product, account or plan, feature, person responsible and downstream recipient. Include embedded AI features in familiar software. Distinguish a proposed experiment from a tool people already use.
Request a representative description using public or invented material. Keep privileged content, credentials and client documents in the systems approved for them. When a person cannot establish where data goes or which settings apply, record the question and assign an owner to resolve it.
Give each use its own row
Record the input category, permitted source, action the system can take, person checking the output, destination, approval basis and date last checked. Describe the human decision that follows. Drafting an internal summary for a lawyer and sending a summary directly to a business contact can warrant different entries.
Useful status labels include proposed, restricted pilot, approved for a named scope, paused and retired. Cite the decision record behind the label. A software subscription or an enthusiastic manager's account of a pilot cannot establish authorization for every use.
Review the inventory where work changes
Revisit the row when the product, data type, recipients or degree of automation changes. Give the owner a review date and keep the former scope visible for comparison. NIST's voluntary AI Risk Management Framework Playbook offers questions on intended use, context and governance that can inform those reviews.
Worked example
Illustrative example. A department lists a tool used to summarize public regulatory notices. During interviews, a reviewer learns another team wants the same tool to summarize confidential investigation notes. The inventory gains a second row with a different data category and a pending review. The existing public-material approval still has a clear boundary.
Primary sources
Related work at Agentic Attorney
This in-house inventory guide participates in the shared Agentic Attorney resource collection. Its hub describes AI consulting and implementation for legal teams. Explore Agentic Attorney’s approach to AI implementation.