Gowling WLG Canada is offering legal teams a practical roadmap for adopting generative AI responsibly, drawing on lessons from a firm-wide pilot involving more than 300 lawyers and business services professionals.
The law firm has published A practical playbook for generative AI in legal practice, a guide authored by Al Hounsell, Senior Director of AI Innovation & Knowledge, and Michelle Fernando, Director of Practice Technology. The playbook is based on a 12-week GenAI pilot conducted in 2025, during which participants completed more than 1,200 tasks across seven leading generative AI solutions with enterprise-grade security and Canadian data residency.
Rather than presenting generative AI as a replacement for legal expertise, Gowling WLG frames the technology as a digital assistant that can support structured, repeatable work when deployed with clear guardrails. The firm found GenAI was most effective for routine administrative tasks, first drafts, clause-level contract review, compliance synthesis, reporting, meeting summaries, and internal knowledge support.
“What emerged was not a case for wholesale transformation,” the firm wrote, “but a clearer picture of where GenAI can add value, where it introduces new risks, and where human expertise remains indispensable.”
The playbook identifies five strategies for in-house legal teams and law firms looking to scale GenAI adoption: start in the “assistant zone,” embed AI into daily workflows, design a lawyer-in-the-loop protocol, build skills through rapid iteration, and use metrics to justify expansion.
Gowling WLG’s pilot emphasized that legal AI adoption is more likely to succeed when tools are integrated into platforms lawyers already use, including Microsoft Word, Outlook, and document management systems. Participants reported that embedded tools were especially helpful for routine, high-frequency tasks such as summarizing meeting notes, drafting follow-up emails, and preparing first-draft memoranda.
The firm also stressed the importance of human oversight. While participants found GenAI useful for surfacing inconsistencies, missing clauses, undefined terms, and potential research gaps, the pilot also identified hallucinated content, incomplete citations, and outdated information—particularly in complex legal reasoning, bespoke drafting, statutory interpretation, and detailed redlining.
Gowling WLG recommends a lawyer-in-the-loop workflow built around three steps: an AI-generated first draft or extraction, review by a qualified lawyer, and, where appropriate, an AI-assisted revision based on the lawyer’s feedback. The firm also recommends mandatory source links, source-freshness prompts, prompt templates, and two-step human review cycles.
Since completing the pilot, Gowling WLG says it has been deploying GenAI solutions in targeted practice and business areas. The firm noted that its work has involved collaboration with legal and technology providers including Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, Harvey, Legora, Microsoft, and OpenAI, across platforms such as CoCounsel, Lexis+ AI/Protégé, Harvey, Legora, Copilot for Microsoft 365, and ChatGPT Enterprise.
The playbook arrives as Canadian law firms continue to move from experimentation to implementation in legal AI. For Gowling WLG, the takeaway is that responsible adoption depends less on speed and more on precision: choosing appropriate use cases, measuring outcomes, training users, and ensuring that professional judgment remains central.
“Responsible adoption is less about pace and more about precision,” the firm concluded. “The legal teams that succeed will be those that treat AI as a tool to be governed, not a shortcut to be pursued.”