For decades, law firms and in-house legal teams have operated in a world of data scarcity, with critical knowledge locked away in disconnected systems, poorly labelled documents and inaccessible repositories. That is now changing rapidly, as AI enables legal teams to surface, analyse and act on information at scale.
In this webinar, Legal IT Insider editor Caroline Hill spoke with Jennifer Poon, legal AI solutions director at NetDocuments, about the shift from data scarcity to data abundance – and what the rise of “ambient AI” really means for the future legal workplace.
Poon, who has nearly a decade of legal experience and previously practised at Akin Gump and Simpson Thacher, began by outlining how generative AI is fundamentally altering how legal professionals interact with their data. Rather than relying on fragmented metadata and keyword searches, firms can now extract entirely new information from millions of documents and retrieve existing knowledge using natural language and concepts, rather than exact terms.
A central focus of the discussion was AI profiling – the use of AI to automatically extract and apply structured metadata across a firm’s document management system (DMS). Poon demonstrated how documents can be profiled at scale, with key information such as effective dates, governing law, renewal terms and payment obligations automatically identified and applied. Crucially, this work can be done in the background, enabling firms to hydrate entire repositories that may contain hundreds of millions of documents.
Hill and Poon explored why profiling is foundational to making a DMS “AI-ready” and future-proof. Once documents are consistently profiled, legal teams can filter, analyse and automate workflows far more effectively – from triggering contract reviews to supporting agent-driven use cases in the future. The conversation also addressed accuracy, governance and best practice, including the importance of validation exercises and incremental rollout using a crawl-walk-run approach.
The webinar then turned to semantic search, which NetDocuments formally announced at its recent Inspire user conference. Unlike traditional keyword-based search, semantic search enables lawyers to search by concept, dramatically improving their ability to find relevant precedents, clauses and agreements across large document sets.
Building on this, the discussion showcased the next evolution of search: AI Answers. This capability allows users not only to find documents, but to ask complex legal questions of their entire repository and receive structured, cited answers – such as draft playbooks, issues lists and clause comparisons – grounded in the firm’s own precedents.
Throughout the session, Hill raised questions about common concerns around security, permissions and client confidentiality, with Poon emphasising that existing governance controls, data loss prevention policies and ethical walls remain fully enforced.
Finally, the conversation looked ahead to agentic AI and the role of interoperability standards such as MCP, with Poon explaining how semantic indexing and profiling will be critical enablers of future AI-driven workflows.
Watch the full webinar replay below:
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