5 Key Takeaways From Legal Week

Artificial Lawyer just spent the whole week in New York, here’s some key observations after dozens of interactions at Legal Week.

Legal AI Has Surpassed Where Firms Want to Get To

AL was hearing from the top team of LexisNexis, including CEO Sean Fitzpatrick, about their plans for the provision of 10,000 workflows – mostly short, specific, and accurate actions – that are pre-built for nearly every possible legal need, when it struck this site that law firms can now do much more than they really want to with legal AI.

AL mused that as these workflows are broken into controllable segments that lawyers could trust, you could then chain them into a much longer series of actions, which in turn you could also rely upon. That would avoid the risks involved in the most full-on agentic approaches, where you let the agent figure everything out on its own. And that would be really powerful.

The end result is a million miles away from where many lawyers are now with AI use, where it’s still often used as a little side-kick, e.g. ‘Summarise this for me; check for X; help me draft this email.’ What you can get now is something AL has been banging on about since Day One: the real industrialisation of the legal production line.

I.e. you can now, with confidence – if you take the ‘segmented’ approach above – handle, to put it simply, a lot of work, all in one go. And this moves legal AI from the assistant, the little copilot, the handy buddy etc role, to effectively a multi-skilled lawyer in its own right.

But, as AL sat there listening with interest to all that you can do now, or will soon be able to do, with LexisNexis’s AI capabilities, one other thought struck me: we’ve now reached a point that many law firms don’t want to get to – and certainly not beyond.

I.e. while lawyers are happy to have a ‘little helper’, which has no real impact on billable work, as it’s used for non-billable donkey work, or such ‘edge work’ that adds little to the bills, they understandably don’t want to use AI that really can handle big chunks of a matter all in one go. That would be too efficient, too effective….and simply too destructive to their business model.

In short, legal AI has surpassed the point where law firms want to tread. And that’s a problem.

For them.

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It Feels Like Law Firms Are Just Avoiding The Subject

Building on the point above, and after hearing several very smart innovation people on how their firms are engaging with AI, it was also abundantly clear that – at least in public – the large commercial law firms are totally dodging the issue. 

What issue?

This one: that their business model is coming to its end.

AL heard several speakers come up with very incisive takes on how AI can be used, but no-one from any law firm AL spoke to, really got to the heart of the issue everyone else in the room was potentially aware of.

This produced a strange sensation, for sure. It reminded AL of the PR guy during the Iraq War, who came on TV every night to tell the world that ‘everything is fine’, even as you could see Cruise missiles slamming into targets in the background.

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Big Law Russian Roulette, AKA The Inevitability of Change

And that in turn led AL to the next observation, that a new conversational game has arrived in legal tech land, namely: when will the model break? In fact, in nearly all of the most memorable conversations during the week, the Big Law Russian Roulette issue came up.

This can be defined as:  

• Big Law didn’t really want AI (after all, why would it?)
• Due to a mix of marketing opportunities, the potential to perhaps remove some low value work, and the dawning reality that this would soon become the norm, many firms became early adopters.
• Then it spread and law firms really did find value in legal AI at scale.
• But, as noted, they’ve come about as far as they want with this game.
• And yet, they are still clutching the legal AI pistol, and it’s pressed to their temple. (Because they can’t put it down now, they’re committed.)
• Yet, as the models and other capabilities improve (e.g. Cowork, etc) it feels like each step forward for AI in general is another click of the revolver. For now, the trigger is finding an empty chamber.  
• The question is: how many more clicks are there before the trigger finds the bullet that kills the Big Law business model?

Several people were very bullish and believe it’s only about 3 years away, others 5, and AL takes a more guarded view that it’s probably at least 10, given the fact that most major firms – at least in the US – have never had it so good.

But, then it depends if you believe there will be a truly sudden collapse, or whether it will be gradual. Does the ship list and slowly sinks, or does it zip around freely for another decade and then suddenly hits the AI efficiency iceberg head on and goes down in minutes?

We really shall see. And that’s quite a prospect, legal tech watchers….

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The Real Action is On The Client Side

If AL thinks of the most engaging conversations during last week, all of them were focused on the clients. They were with:

• An ALSP that has now deeply adopted legal AI tools and is going to market with an approach where AI really is the engine of the business.
• A legal AI company that is building a legal ‘brain’ for its clients, and which is very much AI-first, but also includes both junior and very experienced lawyers, doing both simple and more complex work.
• A legal AI company seeking to become the ‘Control Tower’ for inhouse teams, to allow GCs to automate legal work deeply and at scale, tapping high quality data from within the business.
• And a NewMod, AI-native law firm that is starting with helping startups get all their legal documents in order, but where that is just the entry point. ‘It’s like Amazon, they began with books, then expanded. For us, it’s early-stage startups, then we will expand.’ Again, the focus is all on the clients and importantly building for the client exactly what they need, with an AI-first approach.

I can’t think of any major law firm thinking like this.

Why would they? Under their current model this approach is heresy in the eyes of the Big Law religion. The goal of the above is to give the clients, as quickly as possible, and at a very affordable price, exactly what they want – and helping in many cases the clients to leverage their own data to maximum effect. In short, it’s killing the Big Law commandment that you need to depend upon an outside ‘adviser’ to function as a business.

Adviser is the key word here. The four companies above, even the NewMod law firm, are not there primarily as advisers, but as empowerers. A subtle difference perhaps, but also an important one.

Will we still need advisers? 100%.

Will we still need giant pyramids to provide for the core needs of clients that enable them to function? Nope. Not at all.

People Still Don’t Understand Harvey and Legora

Last thought: people still don’t understand what Harvey and Legora are all about, or Hargora, if you want the shorthand version.

What do I mean here? Well, plenty of people noted Legora’s new $550m raise, although it has to be said with surprisingly far less excitement than would have happened two years ago. Most people AL spoke to just dropped it into the conversation then asked: ‘But what will they use that money for?’

The question underlines the difference here between Hargora and everyone else. Hargora is not seeking to compete with X or Y legal tech startup, or even a giant incumbent, they have come to take ownership of the legal tech vertical. Or at least as much as humanly and technologically and financially possible.

That is how big Hargora is as a phenomenon.

These two companies are not going ‘to settle’, they’re not going to hit X revenue and calm down, they’re looking to have offices in every major legal centre on the planet, to have operations many times larger than a whole segment of legal tech companies stuck together, and more. And remember, they’re a few years old. Hargora is just getting started.

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Thanks to everyone for your time at Legal Week, for the dinners, the breakfasts, and lunches too. Man, I need to get back on with the diet now.

Richard Tromans, Founder, Artificial Lawyer

And, if the above was interesting, wait until you see these events:

A Legal Tech Conference For All of Europe

Legal Innovators Europe – Paris – June 24 and 25.

There will be more news about the conference and key speakers as we get closer to June.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Richard Tromans, Founder, Artificial Lawyer and Legal Innovators conference Chair.

Note: the conferences are organised by Cosmonauts – please contact them with any queries. 

If you would like to be a speaker at Legal Innovators Europe, especially if you are at a law firm or inhouse legal team in Europe – whether based in France, Belgium, Spain or Germany, or beyond…..then please contact Phoebe at Cosmonauts:  phoebe@cosmonauts.biz

Note: if you are a legal tech company, please contact Robins: robins@cosmonauts.biz or Anjana anjana@cosmonauts.biz

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And if you’re in the US and looking for the next major event to join after Legal Week, then see you in California this June!

Legal Innovators California, the landmark West Coast legal tech event, will take place on June 10 and 11, in the heart of the Bay Area, the home to many of the world’s leading AI businesses – and plenty of legal tech pioneers as well! More information and tickets here.