Legal AI: build, buy, or configure?
By Asım Serdar Yılmaz · Published · Last updated · 2 min read
I have built legal AI tooling on AWS Bedrock inside a large platform company, and I have bought vendor tools for the same team. The choice is rarely build or buy: you can buy a finished product, adapt an enterprise platform to your workflow, or build your own. That middle path is what I mean by configure, and most work belongs there.
Three questions decide it: how sensitive the data is, how specific the workflow is, and how much engineering the team can honestly carry.
Configure is the default, and it is where I would start in almost every case. You still buy the platform; what you own is the workflow on top of it, because enterprise platforms let you wire custom workflows, retrieval and guardrails onto a hosted model you do not own. For contract review and internal knowledge, that captures most of the value for far less maintenance.
Buy the commodity tasks. Transcription, translation and first-pass summarization are mature, well-served categories, and building them in-house means a year spent rebuilding what you could license this week.
Build only for workflows that are both sensitive and differentiating, and go in knowing that building doesn’t remove third parties: our own Bedrock tooling still runs on cloud infrastructure. It is the right call when off-the-shelf terms cannot meet your requirements on data use, retention, residency and audit, and the workflow itself sets you apart. The full lifecycle burden is then yours to carry.
Bloomberg Law reported in 2026 that for roughly 67 percent of large law firms, new-technology spending stayed under 2 percent of the 2025 budget. That counts firms rather than in-house teams, which is worth remembering before anyone quotes it at you, but the signal carries.
Capacity decides the rest. ILTA’s 2024 survey found generative AI use ranging from 20 percent at small firms to 74 percent at the largest, and my read is that the gap follows engineering capacity more than ambition. I could be wrong about the cause; that is a reading of the survey rather than a finding in it.
So the order I would follow is this: configure first, buy the commodity, and build only what you cannot safely hand to anyone else.
Sources
Next: Composing your own agentic workflow: what the canvas gives a legal team →