Lenovo is one of the biggest enterprise tech companies in the world. Legal, regulatory, and compliance matters are all business-as-usual work for the company’s global legal experts, who work on a wide range of complex matters across many different areas of law.
Alongside these duties, the company’s legal professionals also provide valuable input and advice for other teams inside Lenovo. In the past, one of the big challenges for Lenovo’s legal team was that employees often did not know which legal representative was best placed to address their enquiries. This resulted in time-consuming back-and-forth email and phone exchanges to help legal teams understand the enquiry and direct it to the appropriate person.
Sarah Rosser, Director & General Counsel for Lenovo Solutions & Services Group (SSG), says: “While many questions that come to the Legal and Compliance Teams require guidance from a legal expert, some are also straightforward, practical, and repetitive. If we could use AI to divert these easy-to-answer questions away from our legal team, we know it will enable us to focus on the more complex legal and regulatory matters.”
Fielding common legal questions with AI
To solve this challenge, Lenovo decided to harness the power of its own world-leading AI expertise. The company developed an AI chatbot that can answer the most common employee questions without further human input. In situations where the chatbot is unable to help with the request, it automatically recommends the member of the legal team best placed to assist.
Patricia Johnson, Legal Operations Team at Lenovo, says: “We often deal with complex questions; one of the first challenges is finding the right person to help. Our new chatbot includes detailed information on each member of the legal team and their specific areas of expertise, enabling it to instantly connect employees with the best contact for their request.”
Sophia Arshad in the Legal Operations Team adds: “When we asked senior leaders in the legal department what they’d like to see from gen AI, the overwhelming majority wanted a way to help employees find the right member of the legal team for their inquiry without back-and-forth emails. An AI chatbot addresses this need perfectly, and eliminates the delays involved when corresponding with teams based in different time zones.”
Enabling advanced support for legal experts
Lenovo’s AI innovation doesn’t end there. The company also recognized a major opportunity to deliver AI-powered support to legal experts themselves. The objective was to use the strengths of generative AI—including rapid information capture and analysis—to augment the capabilities of the human workforce.
Simon Wang, Senior Information Technology Manager & Senior Technical Service Delivery Manager at Lenovo, elaborates: “Large-language models have the ability to ingest and digest thousands of pages of information within seconds. By harnessing these capabilities, we can help our legal experts to work faster and more effectively than ever.”
Freeing lawyers from repetitive tasks
To pioneer an AI approach for its legal teams, the company developed Lenovo AI Legal Assistant. Specifically designed for the needs of lawyers and paralegal teams, the solution empowers teams to analyze text documents, emails, and other forms of content at lightning speed.
Wang confirms: “We want to use gen AI to take repetitive and time-consuming tasks off the shoulders of our legal teams, so they can focus on the highest-value activities. Lenovo AI Legal Assistant helps our teams to identify contractual obligations, assess risks, and home in on critical legal issues.”
Using Lenovo AI Legal Assistant, legal teams can focus on areas where humans can add the most value, including deep-dive research, strategic decision-making, and mentoring. “Lenovo AI Legal Assistant can parse and summarize complex contracts, enabling legal teams to focus on the key clauses,” explains Wang.
Transforming in-house legal services
The combination of Lenovo AI Legal Assistant and an AI chatbot for employee FAQs is helping Lenovo to transform its approach to in-house legal services.
As it continues to roll out the chatbot to new users, the company is already seeing new opportunities to expand the capabilities of the solution. For example, the Lenovo Legal Operations Team typically finds that similar questions around company policy come up repeatedly from new hires. By configuring the chatbot to field these questions, the legal team will avoid the need to answer the same queries over and over again.
With Lenovo AI Legal Assistant, Lenovo is one of the first enterprises in the world to use gen AI to accelerate day-to-day work for its lawyers and paralegals. Based on the early success of the solution, Lenovo is now preparing to add several additional languages—including Spanish, French and Japanese—alongside the solution’s existing support for English and Chinese.
“Based on our development work so far, we expect that Lenovo AI Legal Assistant will significantly boost our productivity by saving time and effort,” says Wang. “We also expect the solution to improve access to accurate legal information for our employees.”