Articulating Core Benefits in Legal Tech

If you work in legal tech, whether as a developer, product manager, innovation lead, or another role focused on delivering technology solutions, you’ve probably faced the challenge of explaining your work clearly. It’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing on technical implementation, discussing APIs, automation frameworks, compliance logic, or data integrations and yes, while these details matter to those building the technology, they don’t always translate well for lawyers, compliance officers, or clients.

I learned this the hard way. Early in my career, I focused on technical specifics when explaining projects. But as I started working closely with clients and project managers, I realised that the value of our work often got lost in translation. Moving into legal services made the challenge even greater, the gap between technology and legal workflows felt huge, and bridging it became critical.

Why Translating Matters

Whether you’re developing legal tech or implementing it within a firm, technical achievements alone don’t always translate into business value. If stakeholders can’t clearly understand the benefits, projects risk being undervalued, deprioritised, or misunderstood. Communicating the impact of legal tech effectively is just as important as building or deploying it.

Using LLMs as Translators and Sounding Boards

Large Language Models (LLMs) can help bridge this gap. They can act as translators, turning technical descriptions into clear, stakeholder-friendly benefits. They can also serve as sounding boards, allowing you to test how your messaging resonates with different audiences.

However, it’s crucial not to blindly rely on LLM outputs. They provide a starting point, but you must read, refine, and ensure the message makes sense in the right context. This process becomes part of your learning journey, as over time you’ll develop the confidence to articulate these benefits naturally, without AI assistance, ensuring you're actually prepared to discuss them face to face (or screen to screen I suppose).

Here’s how you can use LLMs effectively:

Testing Benefit Clarity

To ensure that benefit statements resonate with different stakeholders, more detailed LLM prompts can help assess clarity and impact more effectively. So rather than asking it to simply "analyse clarity", refine the process to:

• Identify specific jargon or assumptions that might not be accessible to a non-technical audience.
• Suggest alternative phrasing for better comprehension.
• Assess the emotional and persuasive impact of the benefit statement.

Here are some more detailed prompts to improve the benefit clarity:

• Rewrite this benefit statement for three different levels of technical expertise: beginner, intermediate, and expert.
• Highlight any jargon in this statement that might be misunderstood by legal professionals, and suggest a simplified alternative.
• Analyse this benefit statement’s persuasive impact—does it make a compelling case for investment in the platform? If not, suggest how to improve it.
• Given this benefit statement, generate five alternative versions, each increasing in specificity and quantifiability.
• Provide a stakeholder-centric rewrite of this benefit statement. Make one version for a tax partner, one for a compliance officer, and one for a client relationship manager.

Contextualising Features into Workflows

To communicate how technical features fit into legal workflows, LLMs can help refine explanations by:

• Identifying where specific technical capabilities provide the most value in a given workflow.
• Highlighting how a feature streamlines an existing legal process.
• Suggesting role-based descriptions tailored to different stakeholder needs.

Here are some more detailed prompts to improve workflow contextualisation:

• Describe how this feature impacts day-to-day work for a paralegal, a senior associate, and a general counsel.
• Analyse whether this feature eliminates, accelerates, or automates an existing step in a legal workflow, and describe its impact.
• Rewrite this explanation to focus on reducing risk and compliance burdens rather than efficiency gains.
• Provide a real-world example of how this feature has been used in a regulatory, transactional, or litigation context.
• Generate a use case where failing to implement this feature could create operational or legal risks.

Ranking Benefits for Different Stakeholders

When presenting benefits to multiple stakeholders, it’s important to frame them according to their priorities. LLMs can assist by:

• Ranking benefits based on relevance to different roles.
• Highlighting which benefits are most likely to influence decision-making.
• Suggesting alternative phrasing to make benefits more compelling.

Here are some more detailed prompts to refine stakeholder-focused benefit rankings:

• Identify the top three benefits for each stakeholder group and explain why they are most relevant.
• Reframe this benefit for a financial decision-maker versus an operational leader.
• Generate a persuasive pitch that highlights the biggest gain for each stakeholder role.
• Assess which of these benefits is most likely to drive adoption, and suggest supporting evidence to make it more compelling.
• Provide counterarguments a stakeholder might raise against this benefit and suggest ways to address them.

A Practical Way to Reframe Technical Features

Here's some pratical examples that showcase how you can reframe very technical benefits into something that resonates with everyone.

Example 1: API-First Approach

• Technical Description: "We implemented an API-first architecture to expose RESTful endpoints using OAuth 2.0 protocols."
• For Legal Teams: "You can securely control exactly who sees client data, with clear records of every access. That means stronger evidence if something ever gets challenged."
• For Client Partners: "Our systems easily plug into client environments. We reduce manual data handling by about 70%, which means fewer errors and quicker insights."
• For Risk and Compliance: "We standardise data access and permissions, reducing the chance of someone seeing information they shouldn't."

Example 2: Legal AI for Contract Review

• Technical Description: “We’ve developed an AI model that extracts and categorises contract clauses.”
• For Lawyers: “You can instantly find key clauses without manually searching through lengthy contracts.”
• For Clients: “We can quickly highlight key contractual risks, helping you make informed decisions faster.”
• For Compliance Teams: “Ensures every contract includes required regulatory clauses, reducing compliance risks.”

Explaining the benefits of technical work in legal tech isn’t just about better communication, it’s essential to your project's success. Clear, straightforward descriptions help everyone appreciate the real value of your technical efforts.

I’ve learned that when you clearly show how technology improves daily legal work, stakeholders become strong supporters of what you’ve built. Effectively communicating the value of legal tech solutions isn’t just about better messaging it’s key for getting that adoption, buy-in, and long-term success.

However, LLMs are a tool, not a substitute for understanding. The more you engage with the outputs, refining, questioning, and improving them then the stronger your own communication skills become. Over time, this ensures you can confidently discuss benefits in meetings, calls, and client presentations without relying on AI.

If you’re leading a legal tech project, try reframing technical features using these approaches and see how they resonate in your next stakeholder discussion.

Note:

When using these techniques, remember that context is everything. You’ll need to provide as much information as possible about your projects, your team, your stakeholders, and overarching firm-wide priorities to get the most relevant and actionable insights.