Webinar replay: AI Masterclass with NetDocuments

In this practical, strategy-focused masterclass, we walked through the five steps that make up NetDocuments’ 2025 Smart Firm Checklist for using AI and how firms can work smarter, not just harder.

Legal IT Insider’s editor Caroline Hill spoke with NetDocuments’ legal AI solutions director Jennifer Poon and director of product marketing Michael Owen Hill. Poon is a former corporate associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and subsequently litigation counsel at Akin Gump, so she’s seen both sides of the coin and brought the practice angle to our conversation. Hill cut his legal tech product teeth at Thomson Reuters as a product manager for FindLaw and then subsequent products including Practical Law and Thomson Reuters practice management solutions. He reminded us of the continuous need to think of the human at the centre of the technology.

We looked at smart integrations and ‘cutting the toggle tax’; AI co-authoring and avoiding version chaos; automation of repetitive, routine work and best-case use cases; semantic search; and building security and governance directly into your workflow.

This was a really thoughtful conversation, make sure you listen HERE.

We had a few questions that we didn’t get to during the webinar and you can see those, and the answer from NetDocuments, below.

Further to Caroline’s point re: teams’ knowledge banks – how can in-house Knowledge Teams utilise the AI searching to augment and support their existing knowledge banks?

From Michael Owen Hill: There are many opportunities to support Knowledge Teams with AI and automation:

Automating intake, evaluation and tagging of documents submitted for inclusion in the knowledge bank (not as a replacement for expert judgment, but to streamline the process by greatly reducing the administrative hassle).
Automating creation of clause banks, playbooks, process guides, etc. One of the barriers we often encounter, particularly with smaller firms or newer Knowledge Teams, is that creation of these foundational assets can take a huge amount of time and effort. There are apps that can, for example, literally generate a playbook from a relatively small set of vetted exemplar documents.
Enabling users to more readily find the most relevant, on-point precedent or guidance document through a combination of traditional and AI-powered search.
Encoding of gold standard content and best practices into the very tools lawyers use to create work product. This is, to my mind, the most impactful capability. Even with automated intake, creation of knowledge assets, and AI-powered search, you are still reliant on the lawyer to submit, look for and use knowledge resources. What AI and automation offers is the ability to literally encode knowledge, best practices, standardized processes, etc. into applications that not only save lawyers time, but more predictably produce impeccable, consistent work product. For any Knowledge Team, the ability to know that their hard work is actually being applied, consistently and measurably, in the creation of work product should be exciting.

Between Word, OneDrive and SharePoint, which is the most efficient, in your opinion?

From Michael Owen Hill: As is often the case, it depends. Real-world efficiency is often strongly correlated to familiarity. I would say, in general, that most legal professionals – and probably most knowledge workers – prefer to use the desktop version of apps like Word, Outlook, etc. because a) they are more familiar, and b) they often have objective usability advantages over web-based versions. This has been a real challenge specifically in the context of co-authoring (two or more users editing documents simultaneously), which is often restricted either to native integrations with Office Online apps or to workarounds involving pulling potentially sensitive content out of the secure DMS environment and storing “working versions” inside SharePoint (or OneDrive). That risks creating a “shadow repository” that may not be subject to the same rigorous permissions, access controls and ethical walls. We recommend that anyone evaluating software solutions that you would expect to integrate with Microsoft 365 applications (e.g., DMS, practice management platform, etc.) to dig deeper than “do you integrate” and focus on whether that integration is intuitive, includes additional controls and guardrails to support granular security, whether it’s a native integration or leverages a workaround (like moving files back and forth between SharePoint and the DMS), and, ultimately, whether users can just open up Word on their computer and use it the way they have since the first report they wrote in primary school.

I’m seeing inconsistent AI results in NetDocuments when different users run the same prompts on the same documents—any fix for this?

The AI suggests downloading output in Word or Excel, but I get a 404 error—will the new version resolve this?

Open service ticket—can you share the expected response timeline?

From Michael Owen Hill: This attendee has an open ticket with our support group. If you’re comfortable passing along the name/organization, we can ask that team to provide an update on the ticket. Otherwise, I don’t have visibility to our support ticketing system.

For more from NetDocuments, click HERE.