You Have 15 Days of Budget Left. Here's How to Use It

Over the past few months, I've had countless conversations with law firm partners and innovation leaders about legal AI. The same question keeps coming up: “We know we need to do something, but how do we actually evaluate these tools?” What strikes me is how many firms are stuck in analysis paralysis, waiting for the ‘right time’ to run a demo. Unfortunately, there's never a perfect time. But there is budget sitting on the table right now that disappears in 3 weeks. I wrote this guide to help firms use that window productively, whether or not they end up working with August

The case for a year-end pilot

Running a legal AI pilot in December might feel like one more thing on an already full plate. But there's a strategic reason to start now rather than pushing it to Q1.

Most firms that delay until January find themselves competing with new budget cycles, fresh priorities, and the inevitable backlog from the holidays. By contrast, starting a pilot now means you can lock in budget that's already allocated, get vendor agreements through procurement while teams are still focused on closing out the year, and enter January with real data rather than starting from scratch.

A pilot doesn't require everyone's full attention every day. It requires a handful of people testing the tool on work they're already doing. The evaluation happens in parallel with regular work, not instead of it.

What you can accomplish in these weeks

A well-structured demo process can answer the questions that matter:

Does the tool fit our actual workflows? Not the hypothetical workflows from the vendor demo, but the NDA reviews, diligence summaries, and client memos that fill your associates' days. You'll know within two weeks whether lawyers are finding reasons to use it or finding excuses to avoid it.

Is the accuracy good enough? Legal AI lives or dies on reliability. A month gives you time to run contracts through the tool, compare against human review, and build a simple scorecard of hits and misses. You're looking for patterns: Does it struggle with nested clauses? Does accuracy drop with non-standard templates?

What's the realistic time savings? Vendor claims are easy. Internal data is harder. Track actual time-to-task for a handful of common assignments with and without the tool. Even rough numbers give you something to build a business case around.

Will the vendor be a partner or just a vendor? The pilot period tells you everything you need to know about support quality. How fast do they respond to questions? Do they customize training to your practice areas? Are they iterating on feedback or reading from a script? If engagement is lukewarm during the pilot, it only gets worse after you sign.

The evaluation criteria that matter

Not all evaluation criteria carry equal weight. Based on patterns from dozens of firm pilots, here's where to focus:

Accuracy and reliability (30% weight): This is the gate. If the tool hallucinates authorities, misses key clauses, or produces inconsistent results, nothing else matters. Pay close attention to how the tool handles edge cases: nested provisions, non-standard templates, documents with unusual formatting. Ask the vendor how they measure accuracy internally, and whether they can share benchmark data. A tool that's 95% accurate on simple NDAs but drops to 70% on complex credit agreements isn't ready for real work.

Efficiency and ROI (25% weight): Partners making budget decisions need concrete numbers, not vague claims about ‘working smarter.’ Track actual time spent on specific tasks with and without the tool. How long does it take to review a 50-page contract manually versus with AI assistance? If the tool saves 20 minutes per contract but requires 15 minutes of verification, your real savings are 5 minutes. Measure what matters.

Integrations and workflow fit (15% weight): The best AI capabilities are useless if lawyers have to leave their existing tools to access them. Does the platform work inside Word and Outlook, where lawyers already spend their time? Can you move context seamlessly between the web app and desktop plugins? A tool that requires copy-pasting between windows or switching applications mid-task will see limited adoption regardless of its underlying quality.

Document review and summarization (15% weight): This is where AI can deliver real leverage, particularly for tasks that would otherwise require junior associates to spend hours on tedious work. Think tabular extraction across hundreds of contracts, identifying deviations from standard terms across a diligence set, or consolidating key terms from a stack of leases into a single comparison matrix. Test whether the tool can handle these structured, high-volume tasks at scale.

Drafting assistance (10% weight): Does it use your precedents, or generate generic boilerplate? Does it match your firm's style?

User experience (5% weight): Will busy lawyers actually use this on day two?

Why now

Legal AI tools have matured significantly in 2024 and 2025. The question is no longer whether to adopt, but which tool to adopt and when.

Firms that run pilots now position themselves to deploy in Q1 2026 with training complete and workflows ready to go. Firms that wait until January lose two months to budget cycles and procurement processes.

You have a few weeks of budget and a slower period ahead. Let’s make the most of them!