This year’s Artificial Lawyer annual predictions are different: fewer people, longer insights. Part Two’s predictions include: Megan Ma from Stanford, Hélder Santos at Bird & Bird, Jim Wagner from The Contract Network, Daniel Lewis from LegalOn, and Electra Japonas from Law Insider.
Additional thoughtful views will be shared this week on the question of what to expect in 2025 in terms of innovation and legal tech change. Enjoy.
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Megan Ma, Associate Director, CodeX and Law, Science, Technology Program, Stanford Law School
Below are areas that I think are worth more attention in the coming year:
- Research in UI/UX for legal applications (i.e., what’s beyond integration with MS, chatbots, copilots, agents)
- Evolutionary Model Merging: the role of small models for questions of sustainability, efficiency, and enablement of ‘biodiversity’ in legal AI development.
In the former, we have an opportunity to build with a raw material (LLM technology) that is sufficiently malleable such that we could appropriately assess what types of interfaces and design patterns enable lawyers to work more effectively. The legal industry has historical issues with knowledge capture, and unintuitive user design (e.g. pains of MS Word formatting). Future-facing tools should consider lawyer-user engagement as a priority.
In the latter, considerations around environmental sustainability, efficiency of inferencing and reasoning, will become important to the long-term operational use of LLMs. Furthermore, being able to customize and leverage strengths of existing tech stacks will become a rising matter. Frontier research in this area will encourage identifying solutions that are much more tailored to internal practices and specialities, while also bringing to the forefront stronger use cases for small language models.
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Jim Wagner, CEO, The Contract Network
Legal Tech and Innovation in 2025: Practical Evolution
Evolution, Not Revolution
Despite the accelerating pace of technological advancement in 2024, the legal sector is unlikely to experience universal or dramatic disruption in 2025. Many organizations still lack the permissions, processes, platforms, or business models needed to drive transformative change. Instead, 2025 will serve as a foundational year. More legal professionals will integrate AI into their daily workflows, setting the stage for broader shifts by late 2025 or early 2026.
Innovation Leaders: Redefining the Status Quo
A select group of firms and in-house teams will capitalize on AI’s potential to disrupt the market—or even themselves. These pioneers will not merely adopt new technologies; they’ll reimagine delivery models and pricing to reflect AI-driven efficiencies. Their mantra: ‘If AI does the work, why shouldn’t it cost less?’
Cutting Through the Red Tape
For the legal sector to harness the benefits of AI, it needs to streamline its operational framework. Current bottlenecks requiring extensive negotiations over engagement letters, security questionnaires, and data usage protocols create substantial friction. While due diligence remains essential, streamlining these processes will enable professionals to focus on what matters most: delivering impactful results.
Identifying ‘Low Hanging’ AI Applications
Legal professionals will hone in on high-confidence use cases for AI, prioritizing practical over revolutionary applications. Examples of this include automated document drafting and concise matter summaries, both of which offer immediate, tangible value. These aren’t speculative moonshots—they’re proven approaches that can be quickly integrated into everyday practice.
Platform Integration Over Proliferation
AI capabilities will increasingly be embedded into existing platforms – litigation support, document management, and more. Legal professionals value the status quo when it comes to most of these things, and AI applications will face increasing pressure from familiar incumbents.
Testing Litigation Technology
The intersection of litigation and AI will face substantial scrutiny. As potential benefits in discovery, research, and analysis are tested in real cases, some approaches will emerge as standard practice while others reveal limitations. This evolution will be closely monitored, with any failures likely drawing significant attention. Legal professionals must ensure responsible AI use and prepare for both positive and negative public discourse.
The Repository Challenge
Organizations are sitting on massive document collections packed with untapped insights. Challenges in accuracy, missing information, and security persist, but the potential value of generative AI to unlock repository insights is too significant to overlook. Every major platform will make major investments in their AI capabilities to unlock their clients’ information at scale.
The Frontier of General-Purpose AI – No Tuning Required
General-purpose AI models continue to advance at an incredible pace and, contrary to some early opinions, are nearly certain to outperform fine-tuned or specialized legal models. Studies on the performance gap between foundational AI models and legal-specific models will surprise many, though perhaps not in the ways initially predicted. This trend will raise serious questions about the necessity of domain-specific training.
The Era of Multi-Agent Workflows
By late 2025, multi-agent AI systems will begin executing comprehensive and complex legal workflows. These systems will coordinate tasks, evolving from today’s isolated automation tools into end-to-end solutions.
The Human-AI Partnership
Perhaps the most critical change will be the need to train legal professionals on effective collaboration with AI. Success will depend not only on legal expertise but also on the ability to combine human and artificial intelligence effectively. This involves balancing an understanding of AI capabilities and limitations with professional judgment and ethical standards. Developing lawyers’ ‘AI collaboration skills’ should be a top priority for firms, in-house departments, and law schools in 2025.
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Daniel Lewis, US CEO, LegalOn
More and more lawyers will think ‘How did I ever do this work without AI’?
In-house legal teams will take centre stage. They’ll be showcasing the successful use of AI tools and demonstrating efficiencies in contract review, redlining, and answering questions from across the business. Law firms, not so much.
Legal AI will not upend law firms’ billable hour, but it will continue to enable and accelerate the flow of legal work moving in-house.
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Hélder Santos, Head of Innovation, Bird & Bird
As we approach 2025, the legal industry will continue to have transformative change driven by advancements in Legal Tech, particularly the continuous rise of Generative AI (GenAI). Legal Tech is expected to integrate more deeply into legal practice, with AI and automation playing central roles. AI-driven tools will likely enhance legal research (and we will see more legal knowledge providers coming to the game), contract analysis, and predictive analytics, delivering unprecedented accuracy and efficiency. Predictive analytics will become increasingly prominent as algorithms allow users to forecast case outcomes, estimate settlement values, and suggest optimal strategies.
We are moving toward modular platforms and custom app development, enabling firms to create tailored tools that integrate seamlessly with existing systems. This shift shows the importance of structured data for strategic growth, enhanced client service, and operational success. Solutions must address the unique demands of law firms, moving away from one-size-fits-all platforms to more bespoke options. However, balancing innovation with security will be vital for maintaining compliance while chasing advancements.
The role of AI or GenAI will enhance compliance and operational efficiencies within firms compared to 2024, expanding its utility beyond drafting and research to encompass tasks such as managing team workloads and tracking project statuses.
I’ve already highlighted the importance of data, which is becoming essential for strategic decision-making and client service. Structuring data to track outcomes, ensure accountability, and drive predictive analytics for innovative pricing models is more relevant than ever.
Regarding ‘simple’ innovation and experimentation, we will see more encouragement in fostering a culture where experimentation is embraced, failures are expected, and learning is promoted. This approach involves starting small but thinking big, focusing on modular products and services that can be easily adapted as new technologies emerge. But this is not new; I believe it will be more accepted in law firms and force lawyers to embrace what comes from the outside, like in GenAI, the FOMO moment.
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Electra Japonas, CLO at Law Insider and Founder at oneNDA
The legal world will increasingly embrace contract standards as a way to improve efficiency, reduce friction, and enable scalable legal operations. The reason this matters is that in an economy of speed, companies that adopt widely accepted standards like oneNDA or oneSaaS will negotiate faster and operate with fewer legal bottlenecks giving themselves a significant competitive advantage.
I also predict that AI tools will move from buzz to business-critical, with in-house teams adopting AI not just for drafting but for proactive risk analysis and decision-making. Lawyers will shift from reactive problem-solving to strategic enablers, with AI doing the heavy lifting.
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Thanks to all of the above for their predictions and insights. Look out for Part Three.