“Can You Just Give Me the Gist?”: AI Summarisation in Legal Practice

“Can you just give me the gist”

Do you ever open a document and think, 'I just want to understand what’s going on without spending hours untangling pages and pages of heavy legal terminology' ?

That’s exactly where AI summarisation has stepped in..

Right now, tools that can read legal documents and produce summaries are becoming more popular in law firms. They promise speed and efficiency. From a summarisation perspective, some tools aim to help users quickly understand cases and legal materials by providing concise overviews, making it easier to get a sense of a document before reading it in full. Meanwhile, ContractPodAI approaches summarisation through contracts, helping teams identify key points and understand lengthy agreements more efficiently. Looking at both shows how AI summarisation is already being used to support understanding and summarise document-heavy work, while still requiring careful review by legal professionals.

However, after spending a lot of time researching this space, I have realised that at a point where the technology, especially AI, is genuinely useful, it can also be misunderstood as being the perfect solution.

What are the current challenges?

The most obvious issue is accuracy. AI systems can produce summaries that sound confident and well-reasoned but contain subtle errors. We see this with general AI tools too, and sometimes the mistakes aren’t so subtle, like when it calmly walks you through how 2 + 2 could be 5, or politely agrees when you present a completely wrong statement. In legal contexts, even small inaccuracies can have significant consequences, which means outputs can never be taken at face value.

There’s also the problem of hallucinations, which are situations where a system generates information that appears true, but is not accurate and could even be entirely fabricated by the system. This creates a tension between efficiency and reliability, because while the summary may be helpful, it still requires careful verification (by a human).

Ethical considerations add another layer. Legal documents often contain sensitive information, raising questions about confidentiality and data handling when using AI tools. We wouldn’t really want our personal or client affairs uploaded onto a system without knowing exactly how that data is stored or used.

Transparency is another concern. Many AI systems operate as “black boxes,” meaning it isn’t always clear how a summary is produced, what sources are prioritised, or why certain points are emphasised over others. This lack of explanation makes it harder for lawyers to assess whether an output is reliable, especially when professional duties require a clear understanding of the reasoning behind legal conclusions.

Finally, there’s a concern around professional development. If routine analytical tasks become heavily automated, there’s a risk that lawyers, particularly those early in their careers, may have fewer opportunities to develop the deep reading and reasoning skills that build the foundation for their legal judgment.

How could AI shape the legal practice going forward?

Looking ahead, it seems likely that AI summarisation will become a normal part of legal workflows, but not as a replacement for human expertise.

Instead, these tools are likely to function as support systems that help lawyers navigate information more efficiently while leaving interpretation and decision-making firmly in human hands. Research has shown that AI summaries can be made more reliable, for example, by evaluating the summaries using technical evaluation methods like ROGUE (Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation), which involves comparing the AI summaries with a human- written summary.

The broader shift would likely result in lawyers spending less time on initial document review and more time on planning next steps and preparing their case. At the same time, firms will need clear policies and training to ensure these tools are used responsibly.

Ultimately, the role of AI summarisation will depend on how carefully it is integrated into practice. However, in the legal industry, it is almost impossible to rely solely on artificial intelligence to do your job for you, as the advocacy, debating and client interaction aspects of the job would have to be entirely human.