FutureLaw 2025: Transforming Legal Work with AI
On 29 and 30 May, Tallinn hosted FutureLaw 2025, Northern Europe’s largest legal innovation conference. The event gathered several hundred participants from over ten countries, including legal professionals, technology developers, designers, and start-up leaders. This diverse group connected to exchange experiences and discuss the future of legal practice amid technological change.
FutureLaw’s interdisciplinary approach highlights that while not everyone is a lawyer, many contribute to creating tools that help legal professionals work more efficiently, accurately, and with better user experiences. This makes the conference a key platform where knowledge meets practical application.
Artificial Intelligence as a Tool for Transforming Legal Work
The conference focused on the practical use of AI in legal tasks and academic research. Discussions and workshops covered topics like large language models (LLMs), document automation, AI-assisted contract review, risk identification, and litigation strategy development.
AI is no longer experimental technology but a standard component of legal infrastructure. Data shows that over half of lawyers using AI save up to five hours weekly, with some saving as much as ten hours. This efficiency boost improves not just time management but the quality of work, allowing lawyers to concentrate on analysis, argument development, strategy, and client advice.
Specific AI applications include:
- Contract review: spotting discrepancies, missing clauses, inconsistent terms, and potential risks that would otherwise require manual checks.
- Regulatory analysis: comparing national laws with EU requirements and tracking case law developments.
- Office automation: drafting documents, answering common client queries, and organizing large data sets.
This automation shifts human effort toward reviewing AI outputs, providing legal judgment, and customizing solutions for each case.
In legal research, AI helps organize sources, identify themes, and offer initial overviews. However, human review remains vital to verify accuracy, relevance, and legal soundness. The shift is clear: AI supports professional reasoning, but its value depends on lawyers applying it ethically and competently.
Artificial Intelligence as an Assistant, Not a Substitute, in Legal Practice
The conference emphasized that the challenge is not technology availability but how lawyers and researchers integrate AI responsibly. AI is now seen as a tool whose effectiveness depends on qualified professionals selecting appropriate applications while ensuring data protection, ethics, and legal accuracy.
This requires lawyers to develop new skills combining legal expertise with digital literacy—understanding how algorithms generate and present information and when to treat AI output as supportive rather than conclusive.
Questions remain about AI’s limits: Can it ever provide legal solutions without human verification? Can algorithmic conclusions replace human judgment?
Experience shows AI processes large data quickly but relies on existing patterns rather than creating new legal interpretations. Legal reasoning—interpreting laws, applying them to cases, and building arguments—still requires human judgment, intuition, and experience.
A key insight from the conference: “The best legal advice is advice that a judge will agree with.” This highlights the difference between AI-generated text and lawyer-provided counsel. Only a human can assess if a solution is legally sound and convincing in court.
Collaboration, Not Competition
Looking ahead, lawyers will not be replaced by AI but will use it as a support tool for data selection, information structuring, and case law identification. The relationship between humans and AI is complementary: AI handles information processing and proposes alternatives, while lawyers apply professional judgment to make final decisions.
This collaboration extends to legal education. Insights from FutureLaw 2025 will inform curriculum development, focusing on technology law, data protection, and ethics in a digital context. Partnerships with LegalTech companies will increase, offering students internships, projects, and applied research, bridging academia and industry.
The conference made clear that the legal field is undergoing significant change. AI is an indispensable part of legal practice, but the human lawyer remains central in pursuing justice and making decisions. Interpreting technology outputs responsibly, taking accountability, and acting according to the rule of law will define the legal profession’s future.
For legal professionals interested in advancing their knowledge of AI applications and digital skills, resources are available that offer practical courses and certifications in AI tools relevant to the legal sector. Exploring such training can prepare lawyers to integrate AI effectively and responsibly into their practice.
Your membership also unlocks:
