Logs can also provide further evidence, subject to privacy and security requirements. Useful records may include access, material prompts or transactions, approvals, exceptions, overrides and changes to system configuration. Retention periods ought to align with the organisation’s legal and records obligations.
Prepare For Change and Incidents
AI systems, embedded features and organisational uses change. Legal function AI readiness therefore depends on recurring review.
Define events that trigger reassessment, such as a new model, changed service terms, an expanded use case, new data types, poor output quality, a security incident or a regulatory development. Keep a change record showing what was reviewed and why continued use was approved.
Incident procedures should tell staff how to report inaccurate outputs, inappropriate disclosures, unauthorised use and other control failures. The record should show who assessed the issue, what was contained, whether affected stakeholders were notified and what preventative measures were put in place afterwards to mitigate the risk going forward.
What Audit-Ready Legal AI Governance Looks Like
Audit readiness does not mean producing more paperwork than the risk requires. It means connecting each AI use case to a purpose, owner, risk assessment, control, and review record.
General Counsel can begin with a focused internal exercise: select the most significant AI use cases and test whether the team can produce the evidence an independent reviewer would request. The gaps will show where governance exists only on paper and where operational controls need strengthening.
The objective is not simply to be ready for an audit, but to ensure AI governance is embedded into everyday legal operations in a way that is visible, accountable and defensible.
Lawcadia is a legal technology company with a cloud-based platform that in-house legal teams and their law firms use to manage intake, matters, engagements, RFPs, and spend. It enables users to be more efficient, control processes and spend, and have visibility across the legal function.
An award-winning, easy to implement, intuitive and affordable end-to-end legal operations platform, Lawcadia incorporates no-code workflow automation and logic-based processes with a collaborative and secure interface.
Clients include corporate and government legal teams and over 150 law firms.
Founded in 2015, Lawcadia is headquartered in Brisbane, Australia with clients in Asia-Pacific, UK and the US.
