Many law firms and legal departments are considering building their own AI language models instead of using commercial large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT or Anthropic’s Claude. At first glance, it sounds like a great idea. You can train the model on your own documents, customize it to generate responses with your firm’s unique voice, and perhaps keep the data more secure. 

While intuitively that seems appealing, it may not be as attractive or cost-effective an option as you might think. Before investing time, money and energy in a private LLM, ask these five questions: 

1. What are the training costs and efforts required?