Is Microsoft Copilot worth it for Law Firms? - December 2024 Update

Short answer: still not yet. Unless you are occasionally working in Excel and not very experienced, in which case it is worth every penny.

After a year of testing Microsoft’s Copilot across multiple firms, for small and midsize firms, Copilot is minimally usable for legal work. The overwhelming consensus is the Microsoft Teams note taking and summarization is the most powerful feature, and luckily it can be licensed on an individual cheaper basis via a Teams Premium licenses for $7/user/month. The majority of our law firm users are renewing full Copilot licensing for their pilot groups but not expanding beyond that initially group of users.

Other commonly praised functionality includes:

• Help finding simple functionality such as formatting and layouts, especially in Word and PowerPoint.

• Creating formulas in Excel (this is extremely useful for those who do not spend a lot of time in Excel.) This is actually an excellent use case for Copilot but it has a low usage in most firms.

CGP clients have consistently had the following frusturations:

• Using Copilot for searching for data is incredibly inconsistent. This includes prompts such as “Summarize my outstanding tasks from my recent emails.” To get the best results, you have to get incredibly specific such as “Look at my emails from this week and let me know what tasks I need to do for Sarah”

• The writing quality is lacking and requires extensive rewriting to be usable.

What are firms using instead? While CGP has not seen a dominant AI tool for legal in 2024, many firms are leveraging Adobe Acrobat’s AI, and NetDocuments various generative AI features.