April 16, 2026 • 16 mins
I spoke with David Solomon and Joe Tiano, the CEO and Co-Founder, respectively, at Legal Decoder, a legal spend analytics platform. We discussed how Legal Decoder’s analytics approach differs from traditional e-billing review or timekeeper compliance tools, the company’s investment from Trajectory Capital, and how AI is changing the way legal work is structured, priced, and delivered.
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(00:01):
Welcome to Reinventing Professionals,a podcast hosted by industry analyst
Ari Kaplan, which shares ideas,guidance, and perspectives from market
leaders shaping the next generationof legal and professional services.
This is Ari Kaplan and I'm speaking todaywith David Solomon and Joe Tiano, the
(00:25):
CEO and co-founder, respectively at LegalDecoder, a legal spend analytics platform.
David, Joe, great to see you.
Thanks for having us, Ari.
Good.
Yeah, great to see Ari.
So I'm looking forwardto this conversation.
Joe, tell us about your backgroundand the genesis of legal decoder.
I'm a lawyer by trade.
(00:45):
I practiced law for about 17 years.
Used to be a partner atPillsbury Winthrop shop Pittman
before starting legal decoder.
I just got tired of practicing lawand one day I came to my wife, I
said I'm tired of practicing law.
I'd like to quit.
And she said, what are you doing next?
I'm like I'm not sure.
And you can imagine how that went over.
But I had an idea , , inthe back of my head.
I'm a big believer in listening towhat the market this says and was
(01:07):
hearing legal spends a big black hole.
I'll negotiate a 10% rate discountat the front end, and it's not
translating to, a 10% overall reductionto cost my outside counsel or I'll
try to put in place a fixed feearrangement and they put one in place.
And then, the clients are constantlyconfronted with scope creep
and change orders . All of thepredictability and transparency and
(01:27):
efficiencies that the clients werelooking for, they weren't getting.
Then on the law firm partner side ofthe world, I was an m and a partner.
I'd have a client come to meand say, Hey, do you want to
handle my m and a transaction?
My responses, yeah.
The best in the world.
I'd love to do it.
And then they asked me that nextkind of vexing question, which is
great how much is it gonna cost me?
I'd have that sinking feeling inmy stomach and I'd, put my finger
(01:49):
up in the air and be like somewherebetween $350,000 and $850,000.
Which incidentally, I learned justearlier this week on another podcast.
That's still the going rate, oddly enoughthe client will come back to me and say
dude, you're like one of the best in theworld at it, but you can't do better than
a half million dollar swing , in costing.
And the truth of the matter waswe couldn't, we were sitting on
billions and billions of dollarsworth of data in our billing systems.
(02:11):
And clients are doing the samething in their e-billing systems.
They didn't have any tools that they coulduse at the time to take that data and
analyze it in a way that kind of on theclient side of the world drove better,
efficiency, transparency, and value.
And then on the law firm partnerside of the world drove better, more
predictable, more data-driven pricing.
(02:32):
That was the origin of legaldecoders for both law firms.
And our clients we're trying to fixthose things and create a level playing
field where they use the data sort tospeak the same language and to strengthen
sort of the collaboration between bebetween the sort of two constituencies.
David, tell us about your backgroundand a little bit more about the
(02:53):
problem that legal decoder solves.
Ari, once again thanks for having us.
Not dissimilar from Joe Istarted also out as a lawyer.
I was a commercial litigator in New York.
Was with Anderson Kili whichwas Anderson Kilic at that time.
And , the better part of a decade into mycareer similar to Joe had landed on that.
(03:14):
I love the legal industry.
I love the intellectual challengesthat get brought to you.
But the actual way ofmaking a living in the law.
It's not for everybody.
And, everybody tells you that inlaw school and all the way through.
And it occurred to me that Iwas one of those people that
it was really not for me.
But I did wanna stay close to theindustry because I really did like it.
(03:35):
I had invested a lot of time init and to Joe's point as I was
looking around and seeing it.
There are a lot of problems to be solved.
This is around 2008, 2009.
So I pivoted over.
I was lucky enough to to joinBloomberg when Bloomberg was
launching its Bloomberg law product.
It was one of the firstfolks in the door there.
(03:55):
Learned a lot from that experience.
Was there for about five years.
Moved over to Axiom at a timewhen they were really taking off.
Ended up leading the financialservices practice out of the New York
office, which is the largest singlerevenue driver for the company.
Was there for also about five years.
And then a company called GLG, which wasthe pioneer in the expert network space?
(04:15):
They had a small legal offeringthat they really were considering.
Investing more in and reallyblowing out came and said, Hey,
would you like to lead this?
We're happy to support it.
We're happy to allow you tobuild it however you see fit.
And we're gonna give you thereins and let you go with it.
We had a great run there.
I was there for aboutseven and a half years.
It was the fastestgrowing business at GLG.
(04:37):
And then, I got hooked up withTrajectory Capital Management.
Michael Frankel, who's the one ofthe principals there said, before you
take anything we're looking at thisinvestment and it's really unique.
It's in the legal billing space.
I'd really like you to help us withthe diligence and, potentially come
in and help to build it out and scaleit out over the next couple of years.
(04:58):
What we found was the clientsabsolutely loved legal decoder.
And these are substantial clients.
Legal decoder earlier in 2025had won the a CC Value Champion
Award for its work with UBS.
In incorporating Credit Suissehad analyzed about $200 million
worth of spend data there.
Had identified approximately$50 million worth.
(05:21):
Of duplicative or wasteful billing.
And that ended up being a reallylarge and successful project for
both legal decoder and for UBS.
Legal decoders is an honest broker.
It works with law firms, itworks with in-house teams.
It works with fee examiners andcredit counsel in bankruptcy.
It's the only legal.
Billing tool that has been courtvetted and has analysis that
(05:43):
has been accepted in some of thelargest bankruptcies in the country.
Toys are us pg and e just name a few.
And the clients that we spoke tosaid we're really happy for Joe
and his team that they are getting.
This capital infusion and they're gonnareally be able to scale the business.
We're a little sad because it'sactually been our little secret weapon
(06:04):
that nobody has really known about.
And these tools want to beeverything to everybody.
Legal decoder does not.
Legal decoder goes an inch wideand 10 miles deep on what exactly
is going on in your legal billing.
What happened?
Why did it happen andwhat should have happened?
And there are a lot of tools thatwill tell you that they can do this.
(06:25):
They'll tell you, they candisaggregate block billing.
They can go down to the literalnarrative level of, parsing the
action verb of what the attorney did.
Legal decoder is really the onlytechnology in the market that can
actually do that and can do that at scale.
Running billions ofdollars through its system.
So it really was a hidden gem and the morewe went through the diligence process,
(06:48):
the more excited I was to join it.
Joe, how has the challenge ofspend analytics changed with the
proliferation of so many sophisticatedbilling software platforms?
If you take a look at the toolsthat are out on the market first you
need to understand what these tools.
Can do and what they can't do.
A lot of the legacy tool tools anda lot of the e-billing tools , that
(07:11):
David was speaking about, they'revery binary, they look at data and
they say it's a block bill, or it'snot, or it's a vague entry, or it's
not, or it violates, outside counselguidelines or they don't and they're
looking at things in a very algorithmicprogrammatic way, but they're hard coded
to only look at things , in one way.
(07:31):
And at the end of the day, they'vebeen touted and sold based on savings.
The reality is, it's like when you lookat block bills and big entries and a
lot of the things that they do well,the law of diminishing returns kicks in.
Because you could only.
Capture , so much savings until all ofa sudden the lawyers who are in private
practice get smart and they learn what todo and they basically have the ability,
(07:53):
it's a cat and mouse game where they couldactually address those binary things.
Block bill or not.
What we do is vastly different wherewe're looking at efficiency levels.
Things like staffing efficiency,figuring out whether a partner is
doing associate level work or whetheran eighth year is doing second year
work, and whether that's appropriate.
We're looking at workflowefficiencies, where we're able to
(08:15):
identify waste and redundancy andfriction and workflow processes.
We go multidi dimensionally andmultifaceted beyond what these
binary tools can do and that's where.
The inefficiencies persist.
You have those things that havebeen corrected for already, but the
remaining stuff that hasn't beencorrected for, we're able to highlight
and identify, unlike everybody else.
(08:37):
And what's really interesting nowis with the emergence of artificial
intelligence, we're no longer lookingdimensionally at things that could
be done by a human, should it be aneighth year versus a second year.
We're now looking multi-dimensionalas to whether well should it be
human or should it be artificialintelligence doing this particular work.
And none of these other tools areable to do the first piece of it.
(08:57):
They certainly can't dothe second piece of it.
So that's where we'vealways been driving at.
It's looking at the more complicatedstuff rather than everyone's got the
simple stuff worked out, so we want to, move the meter to what's the next era?
What's the next generation of thesetools and what do they have to do?
And if we didn't start this 10 years ago,we would've never seen the evolution.
Because we did.
We're actually able to move beyondwhere the evolution is right now.
(09:22):
David, you mentioned joining, followingan investment from Trajectory Capital.
How is Legal Dakota planningto use that funding?
We are now able to scale it bring in morego to market, bring in more marketing
apply some additional technologyresources, for us the funding is great.
It's gonna allow us to open the apertureand show the marketplace what legal
(09:44):
decoder has been doing and accelerate someof the technology and improvements that
Joe and his team have been working on.
This is a technologythat already was doing.
Everything it needed to do to beincredibly successful in the marketplace,
it just needed a little bit of rocket fuelfor the industry to see what it's doing.
And that's where we're applying it.
(10:05):
A lot of it is gonna be applied on.
Visibility for the product, because itdoesn't have any natural competitors
because it can sit alongsideany of the technologies that are
out there and be complimentary.
The money's great.
, But the leadership that David hasbrought the legal decoder just in a short
period of time has been sensational.
(10:26):
The way he's been able tooperationalize things that had
historically been somewhat scattershot.
David's view of the universe and hisexpertise really allows us to scale.
One of the things he's beenable to do is recruit talent,
immediately, which is great.
He mentioned our newchief commercial officer.
We brought on a couple people inmarketing, it might have happened
with the money, but it wouldn'thave happened without David.
(10:48):
His humility won't allow him probablyto take enough credit here, but he
deserves an immense amount of credit.
The changes it's made in the few monthshe's been here has been nothing short
of, from my perspective, a masterclass,Harvard Business School and leadership.
Exercise.
All right just so you know, Ari,this is me, ven, mowing Joe for
all those nice things that he saidthat's what knows he's doing there.
David, how is AI changing the waylegal work is structured, priced,
(11:12):
and delivered, and what shouldcorporate legal departments and law
firms do to prepare for this new eraof AI enabled billing and pricing?
Joe's humility will not allow himto let you know that, where it
comes to this topic, there is.
Quite literally nobody in the countrywho is speaking on this, writing on
(11:32):
this and has done as much scholarlywork on this precise topic as Joe has.
That has also been one of the thingsthat has been immensely rewarding
about this is Joe and his team are sopassionate about this and they have
fallen so in love with the problem.
Of legal billing and now theevolution of what is the next
step of this gonna look like?
(11:53):
There is a huge disconnect rightnow between the promise of ai.
What we're hearing is it's gonnatransform the industry, and everybody
agrees that it's gonna have atransformative effect, but there is
still massive disagreement as to whatexactly that is going to look like.
What is that going to be?
How is it going to play out?
When are you gonna start seeingline items on your bill that say,
(12:15):
this was done via our internalagentic, AI that we've rolled out.
Thus, it used to cost you $500 an hour,but now because it's a mix of human
and machine, it's gonna cost you $250an hour or your hour expectations for
this tranche of work should change.
That's one of the things thatwe are heavily focused on right
now, organizationally, is.
(12:37):
What should those expectations be?
What should that look like?
, We can benchmark what the old worldwas in terms of how long it would've
taken you to write a proc, viche motion.
What's the new world look like andwhat should those expectations be?
And how should we be?
How should in-house teams and lawfirms be speaking the same language and
having realistic expectations of eachother where it comes to that world?
(12:59):
And right now it is completely fragmented.
There is a massive disconnect betweenthe amount of chatter and conversation
going on around it and the actualamount of transformative change
that we are actually seeing happen.
I feel like law firms in particular arefreaking out because they're looking
at this and they're saying AI is gonnadisplace a lot of the hours that are
(13:22):
junior associates are working on.
The reality is when you take a lookat what AI can do, what AI can't do.
What our junior colleagues are gonnabe doing on a going forward basis.
There's more opportunity here than thereis threat for the legal departments
(13:43):
and for the law firms that are forwardthinking and adopt AI in the right way.
Because it's gonna give them theability to reclaim hours that
are currently somewhat wasted.
Redeploy resources that aredoing low level work to doing
high level, high value work.
So for the law firms, there's actually anopportunity not to shrink their business,
(14:06):
but to actually expand their business.
And the way they're gonna expand theirbusiness is for the forward thinking ai.
Strategic law firms, they're gonna beexpanding their business because they're
gonna be taking business away from the AILuddites who are either fearful of it and
don't want to take advantage of it, ordon't know how to take advantage of it.
There's gonna be winnersand losers here for sure.
(14:27):
But the winners are gonna be theones that are adopting AI to their
advantage from a law firm perspective.
And then from the client perspective,speed and accuracy is massive,
it's the ability to, from acorporate legal department to.
To be able to no longer have the legaldepartment be a bottleneck because
you're only gonna have the ability todo, 10 product releases a year with all
(14:51):
the legal stuff that goes on with it,whether it's IP or regulatory or whatever.
What happens when the legal department'sno longer bottleneck and now we could
have, a hundred new products go to market.
Rather than just six, because allof that legal work that's associated
with the hundred, products goingto market could be AI enabled.
These are massive opportunitiesfor the legal industry.
(15:12):
I teach an AI and ethics course at a SUlaw school, and I asked my students very
first class last semester, how many ofyou are worried about AI taking your job?
Every single hand went up.
We did this mid-semesterproject where I made them.
Use some of the tools that are out thereand writeup do a writeup on those tools.
After that mid-semester project,I said, how many of you are
(15:34):
worried about AI taking your job?
Not a single hand, one up.
It's because what they've done isthey've been exposed to these tools.
They understand now how to use them,what their limitations are, what their
benefits are, but how there's goingto be important roles for lawyers on a
going forward basis using these tools.
So I'm bullish on the use ofAI and the legal industry.
(15:54):
This is Ari Kaplan, speaking withDavid Solomon and Joe Tiano, the CEO
and co-founder, respectively at LegalDecoder, a legal spend analytics platform.
David, Joe, it was a privilege.
Thanks so much.
Thank you, Ari.
Really appreciate it
Your time.
Thank you for listening to theReinventing Professionals Podcast.
(16:16):
Visit reinventing professionals.com orari kaplan advisors.com to learn more.
Welcome to Reinventing Professionals,a podcast hosted by industry analyst
Ari Kaplan, which shares ideas,guidance, and perspectives from market
leaders shaping the next generationof legal and professional services.
This is Ari Kaplan and I'm speaking todaywith David Solomon and Joe Tiano, the
(00:25):
CEO and co-founder, respectively at LegalDecoder, a legal spend analytics platform.
David, Joe, great to see you.
Thanks for having us, Ari.
Good.
Yeah, great to see Ari.
So I'm looking forwardto this conversation.
Joe, tell us about your backgroundand the genesis of legal decoder.
I'm a lawyer by trade.
(00:45):
I practiced law for about 17 years.
Used to be a partner atPillsbury Winthrop shop Pittman
before starting legal decoder.
I just got tired of practicing lawand one day I came to my wife, I
said I'm tired of practicing law.
I'd like to quit.
And she said, what are you doing next?
I'm like I'm not sure.
And you can imagine how that went over.
But I had an idea , , inthe back of my head.
I'm a big believer in listening towhat the market this says and was
(01:07):
hearing legal spends a big black hole.
I'll negotiate a 10% rate discountat the front end, and it's not
translating to, a 10% overall reductionto cost my outside counsel or I'll
try to put in place a fixed feearrangement and they put one in place.
And then, the clients are constantlyconfronted with scope creep
and change orders . All of thepredictability and transparency and
(01:27):
efficiencies that the clients werelooking for, they weren't getting.
Then on the law firm partner side ofthe world, I was an m and a partner.
I'd have a client come to meand say, Hey, do you want to
handle my m and a transaction?
My responses, yeah.
The best in the world.
I'd love to do it.
And then they asked me that nextkind of vexing question, which is
great how much is it gonna cost me?
I'd have that sinking feeling inmy stomach and I'd, put my finger
(01:49):
up in the air and be like somewherebetween $350,000 and $850,000.
Which incidentally, I learned justearlier this week on another podcast.
That's still the going rate, oddly enoughthe client will come back to me and say
dude, you're like one of the best in theworld at it, but you can't do better than
a half million dollar swing , in costing.
And the truth of the matter waswe couldn't, we were sitting on
billions and billions of dollarsworth of data in our billing systems.
(02:11):
And clients are doing the samething in their e-billing systems.
They didn't have any tools that they coulduse at the time to take that data and
analyze it in a way that kind of on theclient side of the world drove better,
efficiency, transparency, and value.
And then on the law firm partnerside of the world drove better, more
predictable, more data-driven pricing.
(02:32):
That was the origin of legaldecoders for both law firms.
And our clients we're trying to fixthose things and create a level playing
field where they use the data sort tospeak the same language and to strengthen
sort of the collaboration between bebetween the sort of two constituencies.
David, tell us about your backgroundand a little bit more about the
(02:53):
problem that legal decoder solves.
Ari, once again thanks for having us.
Not dissimilar from Joe Istarted also out as a lawyer.
I was a commercial litigator in New York.
Was with Anderson Kili whichwas Anderson Kilic at that time.
And , the better part of a decade into mycareer similar to Joe had landed on that.
(03:14):
I love the legal industry.
I love the intellectual challengesthat get brought to you.
But the actual way ofmaking a living in the law.
It's not for everybody.
And, everybody tells you that inlaw school and all the way through.
And it occurred to me that Iwas one of those people that
it was really not for me.
But I did wanna stay close to theindustry because I really did like it.
(03:35):
I had invested a lot of time init and to Joe's point as I was
looking around and seeing it.
There are a lot of problems to be solved.
This is around 2008, 2009.
So I pivoted over.
I was lucky enough to to joinBloomberg when Bloomberg was
launching its Bloomberg law product.
It was one of the firstfolks in the door there.
(03:55):
Learned a lot from that experience.
Was there for about five years.
Moved over to Axiom at a timewhen they were really taking off.
Ended up leading the financialservices practice out of the New York
office, which is the largest singlerevenue driver for the company.
Was there for also about five years.
And then a company called GLG, which wasthe pioneer in the expert network space?
(04:15):
They had a small legal offeringthat they really were considering.
Investing more in and reallyblowing out came and said, Hey,
would you like to lead this?
We're happy to support it.
We're happy to allow you tobuild it however you see fit.
And we're gonna give you thereins and let you go with it.
We had a great run there.
I was there for aboutseven and a half years.
It was the fastestgrowing business at GLG.
(04:37):
And then, I got hooked up withTrajectory Capital Management.
Michael Frankel, who's the one ofthe principals there said, before you
take anything we're looking at thisinvestment and it's really unique.
It's in the legal billing space.
I'd really like you to help us withthe diligence and, potentially come
in and help to build it out and scaleit out over the next couple of years.
(04:58):
What we found was the clientsabsolutely loved legal decoder.
And these are substantial clients.
Legal decoder earlier in 2025had won the a CC Value Champion
Award for its work with UBS.
In incorporating Credit Suissehad analyzed about $200 million
worth of spend data there.
Had identified approximately$50 million worth.
(05:21):
Of duplicative or wasteful billing.
And that ended up being a reallylarge and successful project for
both legal decoder and for UBS.
Legal decoders is an honest broker.
It works with law firms, itworks with in-house teams.
It works with fee examiners andcredit counsel in bankruptcy.
It's the only legal.
Billing tool that has been courtvetted and has analysis that
(05:43):
has been accepted in some of thelargest bankruptcies in the country.
Toys are us pg and e just name a few.
And the clients that we spoke tosaid we're really happy for Joe
and his team that they are getting.
This capital infusion and they're gonnareally be able to scale the business.
We're a little sad because it'sactually been our little secret weapon
(06:04):
that nobody has really known about.
And these tools want to beeverything to everybody.
Legal decoder does not.
Legal decoder goes an inch wideand 10 miles deep on what exactly
is going on in your legal billing.
What happened?
Why did it happen andwhat should have happened?
And there are a lot of tools thatwill tell you that they can do this.
(06:25):
They'll tell you, they candisaggregate block billing.
They can go down to the literalnarrative level of, parsing the
action verb of what the attorney did.
Legal decoder is really the onlytechnology in the market that can
actually do that and can do that at scale.
Running billions ofdollars through its system.
So it really was a hidden gem and the morewe went through the diligence process,
(06:48):
the more excited I was to join it.
Joe, how has the challenge ofspend analytics changed with the
proliferation of so many sophisticatedbilling software platforms?
If you take a look at the toolsthat are out on the market first you
need to understand what these tools.
Can do and what they can't do.
A lot of the legacy tool tools anda lot of the e-billing tools , that
(07:11):
David was speaking about, they'revery binary, they look at data and
they say it's a block bill, or it'snot, or it's a vague entry, or it's
not, or it violates, outside counselguidelines or they don't and they're
looking at things in a very algorithmicprogrammatic way, but they're hard coded
to only look at things , in one way.
(07:31):
And at the end of the day, they'vebeen touted and sold based on savings.
The reality is, it's like when you lookat block bills and big entries and a
lot of the things that they do well,the law of diminishing returns kicks in.
Because you could only.
Capture , so much savings until all ofa sudden the lawyers who are in private
practice get smart and they learn what todo and they basically have the ability,
(07:53):
it's a cat and mouse game where they couldactually address those binary things.
Block bill or not.
What we do is vastly different wherewe're looking at efficiency levels.
Things like staffing efficiency,figuring out whether a partner is
doing associate level work or whetheran eighth year is doing second year
work, and whether that's appropriate.
We're looking at workflowefficiencies, where we're able to
(08:15):
identify waste and redundancy andfriction and workflow processes.
We go multidi dimensionally andmultifaceted beyond what these
binary tools can do and that's where.
The inefficiencies persist.
You have those things that havebeen corrected for already, but the
remaining stuff that hasn't beencorrected for, we're able to highlight
and identify, unlike everybody else.
(08:37):
And what's really interesting nowis with the emergence of artificial
intelligence, we're no longer lookingdimensionally at things that could
be done by a human, should it be aneighth year versus a second year.
We're now looking multi-dimensionalas to whether well should it be
human or should it be artificialintelligence doing this particular work.
And none of these other tools areable to do the first piece of it.
(08:57):
They certainly can't dothe second piece of it.
So that's where we'vealways been driving at.
It's looking at the more complicatedstuff rather than everyone's got the
simple stuff worked out, so we want to, move the meter to what's the next era?
What's the next generation of thesetools and what do they have to do?
And if we didn't start this 10 years ago,we would've never seen the evolution.
Because we did.
We're actually able to move beyondwhere the evolution is right now.
(09:22):
David, you mentioned joining, followingan investment from Trajectory Capital.
How is Legal Dakota planningto use that funding?
We are now able to scale it bring in morego to market, bring in more marketing
apply some additional technologyresources, for us the funding is great.
It's gonna allow us to open the apertureand show the marketplace what legal
(09:44):
decoder has been doing and accelerate someof the technology and improvements that
Joe and his team have been working on.
This is a technologythat already was doing.
Everything it needed to do to beincredibly successful in the marketplace,
it just needed a little bit of rocket fuelfor the industry to see what it's doing.
And that's where we're applying it.
(10:05):
A lot of it is gonna be applied on.
Visibility for the product, because itdoesn't have any natural competitors
because it can sit alongsideany of the technologies that are
out there and be complimentary.
The money's great.
, But the leadership that David hasbrought the legal decoder just in a short
period of time has been sensational.
(10:26):
The way he's been able tooperationalize things that had
historically been somewhat scattershot.
David's view of the universe and hisexpertise really allows us to scale.
One of the things he's beenable to do is recruit talent,
immediately, which is great.
He mentioned our newchief commercial officer.
We brought on a couple people inmarketing, it might have happened
with the money, but it wouldn'thave happened without David.
(10:48):
His humility won't allow him probablyto take enough credit here, but he
deserves an immense amount of credit.
The changes it's made in the few monthshe's been here has been nothing short
of, from my perspective, a masterclass,Harvard Business School and leadership.
Exercise.
All right just so you know, Ari,this is me, ven, mowing Joe for
all those nice things that he saidthat's what knows he's doing there.
David, how is AI changing the waylegal work is structured, priced,
(11:12):
and delivered, and what shouldcorporate legal departments and law
firms do to prepare for this new eraof AI enabled billing and pricing?
Joe's humility will not allow himto let you know that, where it
comes to this topic, there is.
Quite literally nobody in the countrywho is speaking on this, writing on
(11:32):
this and has done as much scholarlywork on this precise topic as Joe has.
That has also been one of the thingsthat has been immensely rewarding
about this is Joe and his team are sopassionate about this and they have
fallen so in love with the problem.
Of legal billing and now theevolution of what is the next
step of this gonna look like?
(11:53):
There is a huge disconnect rightnow between the promise of ai.
What we're hearing is it's gonnatransform the industry, and everybody
agrees that it's gonna have atransformative effect, but there is
still massive disagreement as to whatexactly that is going to look like.
What is that going to be?
How is it going to play out?
When are you gonna start seeingline items on your bill that say,
(12:15):
this was done via our internalagentic, AI that we've rolled out.
Thus, it used to cost you $500 an hour,but now because it's a mix of human
and machine, it's gonna cost you $250an hour or your hour expectations for
this tranche of work should change.
That's one of the things thatwe are heavily focused on right
now, organizationally, is.
(12:37):
What should those expectations be?
What should that look like?
, We can benchmark what the old worldwas in terms of how long it would've
taken you to write a proc, viche motion.
What's the new world look like andwhat should those expectations be?
And how should we be?
How should in-house teams and lawfirms be speaking the same language and
having realistic expectations of eachother where it comes to that world?
(12:59):
And right now it is completely fragmented.
There is a massive disconnect betweenthe amount of chatter and conversation
going on around it and the actualamount of transformative change
that we are actually seeing happen.
I feel like law firms in particular arefreaking out because they're looking
at this and they're saying AI is gonnadisplace a lot of the hours that are
(13:22):
junior associates are working on.
The reality is when you take a lookat what AI can do, what AI can't do.
What our junior colleagues are gonnabe doing on a going forward basis.
There's more opportunity here than thereis threat for the legal departments
(13:43):
and for the law firms that are forwardthinking and adopt AI in the right way.
Because it's gonna give them theability to reclaim hours that
are currently somewhat wasted.
Redeploy resources that aredoing low level work to doing
high level, high value work.
So for the law firms, there's actually anopportunity not to shrink their business,
(14:06):
but to actually expand their business.
And the way they're gonna expand theirbusiness is for the forward thinking ai.
Strategic law firms, they're gonna beexpanding their business because they're
gonna be taking business away from the AILuddites who are either fearful of it and
don't want to take advantage of it, ordon't know how to take advantage of it.
There's gonna be winnersand losers here for sure.
(14:27):
But the winners are gonna be theones that are adopting AI to their
advantage from a law firm perspective.
And then from the client perspective,speed and accuracy is massive,
it's the ability to, from acorporate legal department to.
To be able to no longer have the legaldepartment be a bottleneck because
you're only gonna have the ability todo, 10 product releases a year with all
(14:51):
the legal stuff that goes on with it,whether it's IP or regulatory or whatever.
What happens when the legal department'sno longer bottleneck and now we could
have, a hundred new products go to market.
Rather than just six, because allof that legal work that's associated
with the hundred, products goingto market could be AI enabled.
These are massive opportunitiesfor the legal industry.
(15:12):
I teach an AI and ethics course at a SUlaw school, and I asked my students very
first class last semester, how many ofyou are worried about AI taking your job?
Every single hand went up.
We did this mid-semesterproject where I made them.
Use some of the tools that are out thereand writeup do a writeup on those tools.
After that mid-semester project,I said, how many of you are
(15:34):
worried about AI taking your job?
Not a single hand, one up.
It's because what they've done isthey've been exposed to these tools.
They understand now how to use them,what their limitations are, what their
benefits are, but how there's goingto be important roles for lawyers on a
going forward basis using these tools.
So I'm bullish on the use ofAI and the legal industry.
(15:54):
This is Ari Kaplan, speaking withDavid Solomon and Joe Tiano, the CEO
and co-founder, respectively at LegalDecoder, a legal spend analytics platform.
David, Joe, it was a privilege.
Thanks so much.
Thank you, Ari.
Really appreciate it
Your time.
Thank you for listening to theReinventing Professionals Podcast.
(16:16):
Visit reinventing professionals.com orari kaplan advisors.com to learn more.
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