Coheso Team
Coheso Team
AI-powered tools are transforming how corporate legal teams operate. The professionals who adapt their workflows to these tools—while understanding their benefits and limitations—will have the most success in this rapidly evolving space.
But rolling out AI requires building confidence across your organization. Here's how to do it right.
The Role of Subject Matter Experts
Subject matter experts (SMEs) in corporate legal teams have domain expertise spanning legal, regulatory, and compliance issues across the enterprise. Depending on the organization, SMEs may include:
- Attorneys
- Compliance professionals
- HR professionals
- Contract specialists
These experts are essential. They break down complex legal and compliance requirements into simple, actionable advice, helping business colleagues make proper decisions. Their tailored insights and risk-based guidance enable business teams to tackle pressing legal questions while keeping the organization aligned with strategic goals.
The Challenge: Routine Questions Drain Expert Time
In many organizations, business users direct routine questions to the legal team or other SMEs. Queries like "How much parental leave can I take?" or "Who can sign a sales contract over a certain value?" flood SME inboxes alongside more complex questions like "Can we agree to the enhanced liability clause proposed by the counterparty?"
While the value of these queries is not equal, subject matter experts often spend the same amount of time answering routine, lower-value questions as they do higher-value strategic queries.
This creates several problems:
- Slower response times - Business users seeking quick answers get delayed
- Strained relationships - Delays adversely affect how other departments view legal
- Workload imbalance - SMEs handle simple questions that don't require their expertise
- Job dissatisfaction - Lawyers feel their skills are underutilized, reduced to FAQ responders rather than strategic advisors
How AI Can Help
AI-powered tools like Coheso can act as junior members within corporate legal teams, addressing routine inquiries and providing immediate responses to many questions from business colleagues. These "digital workers" alleviate the workload of lawyers and other SMEs, enabling them to concentrate on complex, strategic issues.
Based on our experience, there are several features that give legal teams the confidence to roll out AI-powered tools for managing routine questions.
Evidence-Based Responses
AI hallucinations—when a large language model generates erroneous or misleading responses—have caused many legal professionals to hesitate in adopting AI technology.
The solution is grounding responses in source documents. By providing users with answers that cite the specific policy, guideline, or contract they're based on, users can verify that responses are supported by their company's own documentation. This boosts trust and reliability.
It's equally critical that AI systems recognize what they cannot answer. When Coheso can't find relevant information in uploaded content, it:
- Tells the requestor it's unable to generate a response
- Offers the option to seek help from the legal team
- Routes the message with all necessary details to the right SME
Business users receive prompt responses 24/7 to routine questions, while complex issues still reach the experts who can handle them.
Escalation Pathways
AI can also help triage more complex queries. With Coheso, complex requests are seamlessly directed to the legal department through:
- Dynamic intake workflows - Fully customizable to capture all necessary details for specific use cases
- Intelligent routing - Requests are automatically directed to the right team or SME based on expertise
- Trend monitoring - Analytics reveal recurring issues, allowing teams to address root causes and update knowledge bases proactively
This ensures every query reaches the right person with the right context.
Logs and Audit Trails
Human oversight is key to building organizational confidence in AI systems. Detailed audit trails allow SMEs to review:
- Questions asked by business users
- Responses generated by the AI
- Requestor details and timestamps
For organizations rolling out AI for the first time, Coheso offers an optional review step—requiring legal to approve AI-generated responses before they reach business users. This intermediary step builds comfort during initial rollout phases.
Supporting both prospective and retrospective review gives users more control and builds lasting trust in AI tools.
The Future of Legal Work
AI-powered platforms like Coheso sit at the intersection of human expertise and artificial intelligence, supercharging productivity and efficiency in legal departments.
This doesn't mean SMEs will become obsolete—far from it. Instead, their roles will continue to evolve alongside new ways of delivering legal services. Organizations that adopt AI tools foster a culture of innovation, boost job satisfaction, and improve the delivery of legal services across the enterprise.