Build or buy: legal AI for a small firm
Build or buy legal AI is a question more transactional firms are asking as the technology matures, and the honest answer depends on what you are actually comparing.
What building really means
Most firms that consider building their own legal AI end up describing something closer to a custom configuration than a purpose-built model. Developing AI capability from scratch requires machine learning expertise, fine-tuning infrastructure and a document dataset large enough to produce reliable output. For a practice of 20 to 100 lawyers, this is rarely a realistic option in terms of cost, time or available talent.
What firms often mean by building is: configure an existing model using their own documents, arrange hosting and manage the output themselves. That is a more achievable ambition, but it still requires technical resource that most transactional practices do not have in-house, and it creates an ongoing maintenance commitment that tends to be underestimated at the outset.
The hidden cost of the build route
Even when a firm gets the initial configuration right, building creates a maintenance burden. The model needs updating as documents evolve, as new lawyers join and as the firm's practice areas shift. Someone needs to own that work. In most transactional practices, that person does not exist, or exists and has other priorities.
The build route also tends to produce tools that work reasonably well on the day they are deployed and gradually drift out of alignment with the firm's actual practice over the following year.
What a good buy looks like
Buying does not mean accepting a generic off-the-shelf tool. The right question is whether the vendor's product can be configured substantively around your firm's own precedents, your preferred clause positions and your practice areas. If the answer is yes, and if the tool works inside Microsoft Word rather than requiring lawyers to use a separate portal, buying gives you specialist capability without the infrastructure cost.
The compounding argument for buying
A well-built commercial product also compounds in ways that a self-built configuration rarely does. It captures institutional knowledge systematically, delivers negotiation intelligence over time and improves as your team uses it. The knowledge asset that results belongs to your firm, not the vendor, and grows with every transaction.
If you are weighing this decision for a firm of 20 to 100 fee earners, book a demo with Scriptum and we can walk through what configuration on your own documents actually looks like in practice.