Building is hard. Scaling is harder. Getting results shouldn’t be.
Legal teams are under pressure to move fast on GenAI. With increasing demand and limited headcount, many are leaning into internal efforts: spinning up pilots, launching custom LLM workflows, or tasking innovation leads with AI integration.
But even small-sounding solutions come with hidden costs.
Training, calibration, stakeholder alignment, risk management, and constant iteration can make internal build efforts — whether by innovation teams or legal ops — more resource-intensive than expected. And by the time a solution is live, the legal or business need may have evolved, or the model itself may have.
GenAI's pace of change is relentless. Meanwhile, legal workflows are complex, multi-stakeholder, and rarely standardized. The result? Many legal departments stall — not because of a lack of tools, but because they’re missing a practical way to engage with AI that delivers value now.
The ROI Math Doesn’t Always Add Up
According to Factor’s 2025 GenAI in Legal Benchmarking Report, a quarter of legal departments are spending $100,000 and $500,000 annually on specialized GenAI tools. Nearly half have upgraded legal tech licenses to access AI features. Yet only 18.9% of respondents feel very confident using them, and 21.2% aren’t even sure if their stack includes AI at all.
That gap between spend and impact isn’t just a tooling issue. It tells the story of what it takes for AI to become a useful, accessible part of daily work within legal departments.
One of the most overlooked costs is integration. Off-the-shelf GenAI tools often appear simple in isolation but embedding them into complex legal work is another matter. Getting AI into the flow of real work — across contract review pipelines, Slack threads, Outlook inboxes, Tableau dashboards, or shared databases — often looks straightforward, but proves more demanding in practice. It takes orchestration, normalization, clause variant recognition, and user trust – for starters. Without the right connective tissue, even well-built tools become shelfware, used for simple tasks like summarizing documents, far below their potential.
What DIY Often Misses
Even when teams have the skills to test AI tools internally, expectations often derail progress. Legal teams are trained to spot edge cases, but GenAI can’t interpret what it hasn’t been given. We’ve seen DIY pilots stall because success was measured in perfection, not progress … and fail at achieving scale and material impacts.
Building your own legal AI solution — even a “light” one — requires more than model access. You need:
• Governance protocols
• Security reviews
• Prompt calibration
• User guidance
• Stakeholder trust
And even then, you’ll need to support ongoing maintenance, updates, and process integration. As many legal teams have found, the question isn’t whether legal can build something, it’s whether they can sustain and scale it without draining time, trust, or resources.
A Shortcut to Results
Many legal teams are looking for another path — one that gets them working outputs fast, without the overhead of full internal builds or the risk of poorly aligned vendor solutions.
Control matters. But so does time. Legal teams want results, without the overhead of building everything themselves.
Support that plugs into their existing tools. Outputs that land in their familiar tech stack, not another platform to learn. Responses guided by lawyers, backed by AI, and delivered in hours, not weeks.
They don’t need a transformation roadmap. They need relief.
Innovation in legal is rarely linear. Trying to apply legacy rules to GenAI workflows slows progress and drains momentum. That’s why many teams are skipping lengthy planning cycles and opting for low-friction support models that evolve with them.
What Getting Started Can Actually Look Like
SenseDesk is Factor’s AI-enabled legal support layer — designed to accelerate drafting, redlining, and contract intelligence work, embedded directly into legal workflows and activated without the lift of traditional implementation. With SenseDesk, legal departments can access embedded, AI-enabled support in a matter of days. Requests come in via Slack or email. Redlines, clause summaries, or risk memos come back, QA’d by legal experts and tailored to real business context.
The technology is ready. What matters is what legal needs from it.
This model doesn’t require retraining AI. It’s about calibration: learning your preferences the same way a skilled lawyer would. It’s the same process you’d use to onboard a skilled attorney: show them the nuances, explain the context, and let them build muscle memory. The tech learns the same way.
There’s no deployment cycle. No complicated user onboarding. No six-month roadmap.
Just a way to get contracting work done better, faster, and in the background.
This isn’t another pilot. It’s a working layer of support, calibrated to your workflows, embedded into your systems, managed by legal experts, and ready to deliver value while you decide what to build next.
When AI is a Capability, Not a Project
The most effective legal teams aren’t treating GenAI like a system to stand up. They’re treating it like a capability to tap into. That means:
• Delivering fast-turn work with AI-human collaboration
• Avoiding tool proliferation and upskilling fatigue
• Driving adoption by meeting lawyers in their current workflows
It’s not about owning the tech. It’s about owning the outcome.
For many legal teams, SenseDesk is not just a faster path to results, it’s also a bridge. It provides immediate capacity lift and AI-enabled support today, while giving teams the space to identify what they actually want to build long term. Rather than rushing into a high-stakes platform decision, teams can stabilize day-to-day demand and then move forward with clarity.
Simplicity Wins
DIY might seem cheaper. But too often it stalls, bloats, or burdens the very people it was meant to help.
Meanwhile, a frictionless AI-enabled service like SenseDesk now exists, delivering clause analysis, contract triage, and risk summaries with no platform learning curve, no integration delays, and no additional headcount.
GenAI doesn't have to be a binary build-versus-buy decision. It can be a plug-in to the legal work you're already doing.
Because at this stage, what most teams need isn’t a custom tool. It’s a clear path to capacity.
Find out how your team could be up and running in days with Factor’s SenseDesk here.
