Why Legal Tools Need Personal Context

Most legal tech tools are good at single tasks. Give them a contract and they’ll flag the clauses. Drop in a dataset and they’ll produce a neat summary. Useful, but limited. They don’t remember what your client was promised last week, which negotiations keep going in circles or the fact you’re still early in your training and might need more context than a senior colleague.

The idea of “personal context” has been rumoured in consumer tech for months. Apple, for example, is said to be working on an assistant that remembers what you’ve been sent and what’s already been said. Translated into a legal setting, that might look like asking: show me the draft lease the client sent over last week, or find the email where the partner told the client the indemnity cap was acceptable.

Whether or not those features land exactly as described, the principle is clear: systems that adapt to you are more useful than ones that start from scratch each time.

Legal work is crying out for the same benefits.

Remembering the matter, not just the document

The real challenge in practice isn’t finding files. It’s remembering what counts. A context-aware system could:

• Spot that the client’s TUPE query was answered two weeks ago in the diligence pack
• Recall that indemnity caps were pushed on three previous deals and eventually resolved through a phased approach
• Pick up that ESG policies are missing from one entity but mentioned in filings at Companies House
• Stop you from sending contradictory advice by nudging that Bob told the client ZYX last week, so you may want to align before sending XYZ.

That’s more than retrieval, that’s continuity.

Cutting through the inbox

Every lawyer knows the inbox flood: horizon scanning alerts, FCA updates, client newsletters. All potentially valuable, most impossible to keep up with. You either skim or risk missing the line that matters.

With personal context, the inbox would stop being a firehose.

The system could match updates to the matters you’re working on, surface only what’s relevant, and deliver a digest you can act on. Instead of noise, you’d see a filtered stream aligned to the work on your desk.

Context about the lawyer

It isn’t just the matter that needs memory, it’s the person. A junior may need prompts that explain why a point is significant or suggest where to look next. Someone mid-career benefits more from links back to work they’ve handled before. For senior lawyers, the real value is less noise and sharper context with the assistant surfacing that a position has already been tested in other deals this year.

To do this well, the system needs a picture of who’s using it. That could come automatically from HR systems by knowing someone’s level, seat history, or practice group or even by asking the user directly when they first start. The important point is that it adjusts, so the support feels natural rather than generic.

That’s not hierarchy, it’s relevance.

Learning in the workflow

Much of legal training relies on spotting patterns across years of files and emails. Most of those patterns are invisible until someone points them out, usually in a passing comment from a supervisor or through trial and error. A system with personal context could change that by surfacing those links at the exact moment they matter.

Imagine working on a transaction and the tool reminds you that a similar drafting issue came up only last week, showing how it was resolved. Or you’re reading through a regulatory circular and the assistant highlights how it ties directly to the disclosure exercise you’re drafting that afternoon. Instead of abstract theory, you’d see connections anchored to live work.

The impact goes beyond efficiency. It makes professional development more dynamic. Rather than storing knowledge in training manuals or static precedent banks, context becomes part of the workflow, a stream of just-in-time guidance that adapts to your career stage, your recent matters, and the areas where you’re building confidence. For trainees, it could accelerate the steepest parts of the learning curve. For more experienced lawyers, it could sharpen judgement by constantly reinforcing how issues play out across different deals and disputes.

With personal context, learning stops being something you catch in hindsight and becomes part of the way you practise in real time.

The questions worth asking

Speed and accuracy are the usual sales points, but the sharper questions are fewer and more telling:

• Does it carry context across matters and time?
• Can it cross-check advice against what has already been told to the client?
• Does it adapt to practice area and level of experience?
• Can it cut through inbox overload to surface only what matters now?

If AI assistants are even rumoured to be moving towards personal context, legal tools can’t ignore the direction. Clients don’t care about model size, they care about consistency and confidence.

The real benefits in these tools won’t come from clever parsing of clauses. It will come from tools that remember the client’s questions, the firm’s advice, and the lawyer’s own journey. This is the difference between a tool that parrots answers and one that behaves like a colleague you can trust.