You may not be fully on board with generative AI for legal work, but parts of your team already are. Whether it’s through ChatGPT or other web-based applications, someone on your team is almost certainly incorporating these tools into their daily workflows. They’re using them to redraft difficult clauses, polish language before circulating a draft, explain redlines to clients, or summarize agreements for non-lawyers. And they’re doing it quietly—without visibility from leadership or IT.

This is Shadow IT, and in legal practice, it represents a significant blind spot. Sensitive client information is being entered into public interfaces. Internal knowledge—such as playbooks, precedents, and gold-standard templates—is leaving your controlled environment without oversight. Legal advice is being generated outside your regulatory perimeter, exposing your firm or department to unmonitored risk.

Why is this happening? It’s not simply a matter of juniors bypassing established protocols. Your team is under pressure to draft faster, gain insights more quickly, minimize administrative tasks, and improve overall productivity. In many cases, the official tooling available to them hasn’t kept pace with what they actually need to do their jobs effectively.

Banning generative AI tools may feel like the safe choice, but it doesn’t eliminate usage—it just drives it underground. The more effective path is to meet the demand with a secure, intuitive solution that aligns with your compliance, confidentiality, and control standards. That’s what Sonar Legal is designed to offer. Built as a Microsoft Word add-in, it brings generative AI directly into the environment your team already uses. It delivers context-aware drafting suggestions with a level of speed and accuracy that transforms how legal work gets done.

Sonar Legal is purpose-built for the legal profession. It incorporates legal-specific logic and real-world workflows. No data leaves your organization without explicit permission. Nothing is ever used for model training. It supports jurisdiction-specific suggestions, draws on your internal precedents and templates, and integrates seamlessly into Word—encouraging adoption through sheer usability and relevance.

If generative AI is already part of your team’s workflow, it’s time to make sure it runs on your terms—not someone else’s.