"In-house legal departments have bought artificial intelligence tools to churn through contracts, speed up workflows, and analyze documents. Now comes the hard part: Proving the software is worth the cost.

Some legal departments say AI software is improving how their lawyers work and boosting quality, but those enhancements can be difficult to quantify in a way that appeases the finance department. At the same time, some AI legal tech advocates worry that trying to demonstrate the tech’s return on investment will squander innovation that shouldn’t be constrained by concerns about the bottom line.

“GCs are caught between CEOs and boards wanting to know they’re using AI to find efficiencies, and concern and skepticism by the same people that they’re not making reckless acquisitions of technology,” said Eric Dodson Greenberg, executive vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary of Cox Media Group.

The demand for ROI analytics is a sign of the maturation and proliferation of AI tools available to in-house lawyers. How much software legal teams are able to buy will depend largely on how effectively they can show benefits.

Legal teams are grasping for data points wherever they can find them, quantifying time savings, increases in output, and decreases in headcount. They’re leaning in to their clearest anecdotes about how AI is helping their teams.

Om Jahagirdar, deputy general counsel at Amtrak, said that legal departments are telling C-suites, “‘I was able to do X matters more. I was able to do this number of projects.’ And sometimes it might be hard to show that efficiency...”

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This article was originally published in Bloomberg Law.