That’s so NEON? AI in Litigation: Why Strategy Remains a Lawyer’s Job

The first letter we had drafted with the help of artificial intelligence at NEON was polite, complete and legally correct, but unusable for our purposes. It lacked the one thing that matters: our own professional signature.

How can AI be used so that it delivers not only legally correct results, but also meets the strategic and communicative demands of specialized litigation? This is the question addressed in the article “That’s so NEON? AI in Litigation”, published in the new LTV Magazin on “The Future of Collaboration between Legal Departments and Law Firms in the Age of AI”. It shows how NEON Disputes integrates AI into its workflows and where its limits lie.

 

The DNA of Our AI: Training Instead of Uploading Files

Every law firm develops its own standards for strategy and communication, rarely written down. A model that knows nothing about them delivers, at best, legally correct mediocrity.

At NEON, we therefore spent weeks correcting AI drafts and documenting the differences from the letters we actually sent. The result is a continuously evolving set of working instructions available to the entire firm.

 

Three Areas of Everyday Application

• Incoming mail and correspondence: Court documents are assigned to the right proceedings, the status is captured and next steps are suggested, in a tone suited to in-house teams and private clients alike.
• Outgoing letters: Structure, tone and wording depend on the recipient, the purpose of the letter, the client’s role and the litigation strategy.
• Brief review: Before filing, the AI checks briefs against six categories for formal errors.

 

Investment in Quality, Confidentiality and Scalability

The starting point is weeks of daily correction that cannot be delegated but must take place at experienced lawyer level.

Because the instructions build on confidential client information, NEON relies on Claude by Anthropic on dedicated European infrastructure via Google Cloud; the data does not leave the EU. The instructions are managed in NEON Brain, a model-independent hub developed together with our engineering partner iurAI.

The payoff is not only speed: AI allows us to handle proceedings in a number and complexity that capacity limits previously ruled out.

 

The Limits of AI: Strategy Remains a Lawyer’s Job

AI cannot replace legal strategy. Which leverage works with which recipient, and which arguments to raise and when, follows not from a rule but from the situation of the specific proceedings.

In addition, models write too much. A client update that goes out at NEON is typically only about 40% as long as the AI draft. What gets cut is rarely wrong, but often harmful, for instance remarks on objections that the other side would not have thought of on its own.

 

New Opportunities for Litigation

• Firm-specific working instructions ensure consistent quality and communication.
• AI-supported workflows create capacity for extensive and complex proceedings.
• Strategic decisions, tactical restraint and the final assessment by a lawyer remain indispensable.

 

For NEON Disputes, AI therefore means above all one thing: more room for what matters in litigation, namely legal precision and the right strategy.

Read the full article here.