May 20, 2026 • 22 mins
I spoke with Nik Reed, the chief executive officer of Knowable and VP of AI Product at LexisNexis, and Roland Vogl, the executive director and co-founder of CodeX at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, about their participation in the 2026 LexisNexis AI Symposium at the Harvard Club. The event was titled The Legal AI Inflection Point: Designing the Future of Legal Practice. Reed moderated the panel Lawyering in the Age of AI: Preparing the Next Generation for Practice, and Vogl moderated Redesigning Legal Practice for the Client-Centric Agentic AI Era.
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(00:00):
This is Ari Kaplan, and I am privilegedtoday to be speaking with Nik Reed,
the chief executive officer of Knowableand VP of AI product at LexisNexis, who
moderated a panel today called Lawyeringin the Age of AI: Preparing the Next
Generation for Practice at the LexisNexisAI Symposium today at the Harvard Club.
(00:20):
Hi, Nik.
Nice to see you.
Hey, Ari.
Good to see you.
And of course, Roland Vogl, who isthe executive director and co-founder
of CodeX at the Stanford Center forLegal Informatics, who moderated
Redesigning Legal Practice forthe Client-Centric Agentic AI Era.
Hi, Roland.
That's right.
Hi.
And more importantly, was my TA whenI was in law school once upon a time.
(00:43):
Nik, tell us about your backgroundand your biggest takeaway from the
panel you moderated, particularlybecause the theme of today's event
was the legal AI inflection point,designing the future of legal practice.
By way of background, I came intolegal tech completely by accident.
(01:03):
I was in law school in 2009, 2010,and a classmate of mine, Daniel, poked
me on the shoulder one day and said"Hey, Nik doesn't it seem weird that
the technology that we're being taughtto use as lawyers feels like it's 10
or 15 years old, and there's all thiscool stuff happening in tech today?
And so that got us thinking aboutwhat we could do if we were to use the
(01:27):
latest and greatest and build something.
Nights and weekends, and two yearslater, we started a company called
Ravel Law out of Stanford Law School.
It was born of the big data era,using things like data visualization,
early AI, machine learning, naturallanguage processing, and fast-forward
15 years we've got GPT, Claude,Protégé, CoCounsel, Harvey, Legora.
(01:50):
The world is abound in amazingAI technology for attorneys,
and what our panel was reallyabout is how do you prepare this
generation to use these tools?
Is it exciting?
Is it scary?
What are law schools doing?
What are law firms doing?
And what are third-party companieslike Factor that have training programs
where they're going into companies andlaw firms to help people learn how to
(02:14):
use this really awesome technology.
We had a mix of people representingthe spectrum of those who are teaching
young associates, soon to be attorneys,and in-house lawyers how to use AI.
It was fascinating.
It was very cool.
Roland, tell us about yourbackground and your biggest
(02:36):
takeaway from today's discussion.
I'm originally from Austria.
I came as a student to Stanford overtwenty years ago, then had a short stint
in private practice as an IP lawyer doingtrademark and copyright law for a tech law
firm in Silicon Valley, and then had thisopportunity to go back to the law school
as a teaching fellow in law, science, andtechnology, and then connected with some
(02:58):
folks in the computer science department,and we started to vibe around the idea
of taking the computer scientist lensinto the legal system and all these
information and transaction cost problems.
And we said, we should start acenter around this, and I get credit
for having come up with the nameCodeX as the intersection of legal
code and computer science code.
(03:18):
At the time, there was a bunch ofthings started at Stanford and around
Stanford with an X in it like, BioX,MediaX, SpaceX, and so CodeX seemed
like the logical choice for a name.
We still are a relatively smallresearch center between the computer
science department and the lawschool with the mission of bringing
information technology to the legalsystem to make it more efficient for
(03:39):
all stakeholders in the legal system.
Although it was never part of ourplan, we were fortunate to have people
like Nik coming through the center andothers with some really amazing ideas,
and they started using CodeX as asounding board and place of like-minded
people to hang out and exchange ideas.
So we started building this communityaround the center and it's in addition
(04:03):
to the research and the teaching,bringing together the thought leaders
and innovators is something we're reallyexcited about and we really value because
we're learning a lot from everythingfolks are trying to do in the marketplace
and that's enriching what we do.
Lexis kindly invited me to moderateRedesigning Legal Practice in this
(04:23):
Era of Agentic AI, where AI can handlecomplex tasks and chain them together
and do some amazing things that gobeyond just giving answers to questions.
And this was one of several panels.
We had an amazing keynote by JeffBleich, GC of Anthropic and panels
focused on legal practice, everythingthat's going on with AI, agentic
(04:46):
AI and legal practice, the businessof law and the needs of clients.
And then the panel that Nik ran onthe future of legal education, one
of the most pressing issues too.
I always feel as a moderator, Iget to introduce people and then
get out of the way of the talent.
We had some amazing thoughtleaders who are doing interesting
things in the marketplace.
(05:06):
Danielle, who's the head of appliedAI at Baker McKenzie, and Ilona,
who's the chief AI officer atHerbert Smith, and then Kurt, who's
a senior director at Blackstone.
They just gave us so many differentexciting dimensions of what they're
trying to do and it was very insightful.
One of the points that came out is a lotof the work and thinking needs to go in
(05:29):
how to restructure the processes aroundAI, so the question the panel posed was,
are we retrofitting, are we just changinglittle things around the edges, but the
basic structures of the firm stay inplace, like the pyramid structure, the
billable hour, and we sprinkle AI over itto just streamline the old ways of doing
(05:50):
things versus a rebuild where we thinkhow legal services can be made available
in a AI-centric, client-centric way?
But that's really hard to do when youcome from a traditional law firm, so a lot
of them are still in a retrofitting era.
The folks on the panel gaveus a really good sense of some
(06:11):
examples of what rebuilding means.
That's been going on for a longtime, we're just doing better and
more efficient, and maybe at lowercost and can make this available
to more clients now because we canscale our talent in different ways.
But panelists also hinted at new legalproducts that legal professionals
(06:31):
can now make available that weren'taccessible to us in the past.
Nik, what should law schools, lawdepartments, law firms do in terms
of training programs, and how shouldthey change them to prepare lawyers
for an emerging AI native practice?
Our panel had
Stefanie Lindquist, who's
dean at WashU School of Law.
(06:52):
She's been incredibly transformative inthe last two years, thinking about how we
bring AI into the curriculum and not justmaking tools available to law students,
but making them part of the teaching.
Similarly, Hugh Carlson, who's theCEO, was managing partner at Three
Crowns, one of the giant internationalarbitration law firms in the world.
(07:16):
He has been thinking about how weuse AI to teach our young attorneys
and gave us some really coolexamples of practicing with AI for
cross-examination of witnesses.
In their firm they developed an AI bot.
The young attorneys, before they gointo court, are practicing with AI,
which I thought was really cool.
And then Alex, the third panelist, isthe Head of AI Innovation for Factor,
(07:39):
which is a managed services company.
They've created Sensemaker Academy, andbrought in to law firms and companies
to teach attorneys what to do with AI.
He was remarking on everyone'saccepting that this is part of
what you're gonna be doing, butpeople don't know what that means.
Beyond spell-checking your email orreformatting a document, we're at this
(07:59):
fascinating moment 'cause everyone knowsIt's about to do a lot more and it's
going to happen really quickly, andthey're puzzling together what that is.
The common thing that we heard, whetherit was at law school, at the firm, or
in-house, is we're at the tipping point.
People are like, "Okay, we'vebeen dabbling, and now we're going
all in. Let's launch experiments,and see what works 'cause no one
(08:23):
quite knows what the thing that'sgoing to hold is going to be."
In my panel discussion, I was
lucky to speak with Lorie Almon, who is
chairman and
managing partner of Seyfarth Shaw,
Lacey Bundy, executive vice presidentand general counsel at PetSmart, and
Anton Levchik, chief financial officer
at Seward & Kissel, and theyall talked about this idea
of trying to find the answer.
(08:45):
Whether we're talking about pricingor the billable hour or law firm
economics in general, corporationswant the same thing that law firms
want, and they're trying to figureout how to get there collaboratively.
From an educational and a futurepractice standpoint, there was a lot
of similarities in terms of that theme.
Lorie was saying, we need to beradically transparent with our clients
to collaboratively figure out the valuethat firms bring to the legal department.
(09:09):
How do we charge for this value we'recreating since the billable hour doesn't
seem to be the right currency anymore?
But it's all pretty fluid.
There's no specificbest practices just yet.
There's some ideation and somepotential paths forming, but
nothing's been settled yet.
We're in this phase of experimentation.
At one point, I'm not sure if I cancompletely repeat it the way he said
(09:33):
it because he was so eloquent, JeffBleich, and you moderated this amazing
fireside chat with him, where he saidthat he tells his junior lawyers you
never get dinged for making a mistake.
You get dinged when you're not takingon complex enough problems that
will allow you to make a mistake.
There are challenges that cameout of my panel too around how we
(09:55):
integrate human expertise with the AI.
His discussion was so inspiringbecause he talked about the humanity
of the profession and how importantit is to preserve the humanity
and supplement it with technology,but not let technology lead.
Nik, what skills stood out as essential aswe approach this next generation of legal?
Part of the conversation was thisgraduating class from college is
(10:19):
the first GPT era of graduates.
So, we're going to have AI nativegraduates coming into law schools
and then eventually filteringout into law firms and in-house.
There was a lot of conversation likewhat does it take as a lawyer, as a user
to use these tools and understand it?
Jeff said creativity and a littlebit of an appetite for risk because
(10:42):
we don't know exactly all theways this is going to help you.
We're at the point where theinevitability of all of us using
AI in our day-to-day has come.
It's accepted.
I remember in 2014 when Daniel and Ifirst presented Ravel in a law firm and
we explained what we were doing, therewas a partner in the back of the room
that laughed and he said, guys, there's noroom for the letters A and I in the law.
(11:05):
That was 2014.
10 years later, that'sall there is room for.
We've come a long wayand it's pretty exciting.
Roland, your mission for your discussionwas to figure out where does agentic AI
fit in, and so what did you take awayas the most likely practical use case
for agentic AI in the next 12 months?
(11:28):
Some of the conversation was aroundthis tension between traditional
firms and AI native law firms.
It sounded like some of the clients ofthese AI native firms have initially
focused on lower level contract review.
NDAs came up several times.
But it's pretty clear that this isonly trending upwards in terms of
(11:48):
the complexity that these playerswill take on of legal tasks.
We also talked about how some of thoseAI-native firms, they're hiring people
who worked for very high-profile law firmsbefore, even managing partners of some of
those firms, to signal to the market thatthey can take on very complex legal tasks.
We got some examples for how agenticAI can help create a global compliance
(12:14):
roadmap, where the agentic AI canpull data from different countries
and allow a client to navigate workthat may have been extremely expensive
having human lawyers manage before.
We got examples for cyberbreach compliance tools where
agentic AI plays a role.
(12:34):
The sky is the limit in terms ofwhat specific workflows and legal
skills will be handled by agentic AI.
Greg, who's the CTO at Lexis,gave an overview of some of these
concepts that are still pretty new.
Legal skills that AI can handlenow and that's part of offerings
(12:55):
of legal AI platforms like LexisProtégé and Antropic's legal skills.
And then, how does thatrelate to workflows?
How does it relate to harnesses?
That was very interesting to learnhow leading legal AI platform
providers thinking about puttingout these new skills and then
making them available to the market.
And it's not only the skills they makeavailable, but they also provide the
(13:16):
technology that will allow law firmcustomers to create their own skills.
That's part of the transformation thatwe'll see or learning that we'll have to
see in firms as to understanding what isit we're doing here, and then thinking
about how to leverage AI and agentic AIto replicate some of those workflows.
(13:39):
Think about the human oversightlayer coming in, and to understand
how to evaluate the outputs.
That's a big role that humanlawyers will have to figure out.
One of the takeaways from mypanel was also, AI is amazing in
all its capabilities and all theoutputs it can generate, but the
bottleneck is human cognition.
It will become clearer in the verynear future how to integrate humans,
(14:02):
how to get a level of comfort thathumans can have with AI outputs and
the frameworks and environments where,as a human lawyer, you can rely on
this output that agentic AI generates.
One of my favorite aspects ofyour panel was that the panelists
started asking each other questions.
They're such gifted membersof the community, they were
curious what each other thought,so they could bring that back.
(14:24):
Nik, how do you suggest that law firmleaders and law department leaders
balance the promise and pitfallsof implementing AI at this stage?
There was a point in our conversationwhere responsibility came up.
Hugh Carlson has been a litigator for along time and managing partner running a
law firm spoke about the responsibilitywe have as lawyers to understand AI
(14:50):
and what it can and can't do and asRoland said, when we verify the output.
Obviously, the news recently has hadlots of examples of where apparently
attorneys have not verified the output,so there's two sides of the equation.
On the one hand, it's understandingthe products you're using, and if
you're generating a motion or a briefand you're citing case law, much as
(15:10):
we used LexisNexis to do it in lawschool, use Protégé to do it today
because the citator is built into theproduct, and I think it's incumbent
on us to understand what each productdoes, where it can benefit us.
When can you use Claude?
When can you use Protégé?
How can they complement each other?
What are the trade-offs?
And to take that idea of responsibilityas serious with use of AI as we have with
(15:36):
every other part of being a good lawyer.
That was really interesting to me.
That was the cautionary side, but Ithink the positive side was overarching,
which is, we are going to be able todo so many things that have been either
time-consuming, stressful that make thepractice of law not the most attractive
(15:57):
industry for everyone, a lot faster andis this the moment that a lot of attorneys
get to spend more of their time doingthe things higher up the value chain?
It's been a recurring theme sinceI've been involved in legal tech
for 15 years, but the sentimenttoday is maybe we're there again.
Less rote activity, less painfuldiscovery, document review, more time
(16:19):
thinking, negotiating, doing the highervalue activities that is why you went
to law school in the first place.
And in the fireside chat, Jeff Bleichtalked about the importance of having
the tools work in concert so that youcan trust and verify simultaneously.
I thought it was fascinating the wayhe wove his experience as a very young
(16:41):
attorney Shepardizing for the first timeand the attorneys in the law firm thinking
he was a magician because they had noidea LexisNexis existed on a computer yet.
They were still writing with pens.
Fast-forward, it's thesame paradigm again.
It's let's wow partners with how fastwe can turn things around, but with
that same rigor that a good Shepardizingsession would've brought back in the day.
(17:05):
Roland, what was the sense onyour panel about what it really
means from a practical standpointto redesign legal practice?
Redesign means doing everything that'salready going on faster, radically
cheaper that came out of your panel.
It seems like some of those outsideplayers are promising, really
reduced rates on some of the tasks.
(17:28):
But also excitement around law firmand legal professionals can now take on
tasks that were previously not consideredpart of what a law firm does like being
predictive about certain risks andalerting clients to specific risks and
not just being reactive when a lawsuithas been filed and gearing up around that.
(17:49):
But I want to go back to Nik's point.
Throughout the whole event, there'sexcitement around what it means
to be a lawyer and a lot of peoplesaid this is one of the most
exciting times to be a lawyer.
People go to a lawyer when they facesome really complex questions and being
able to help clients with those and thenhaving the drudgery handled by the AI
or the AI helping support us, but how dowe train the next generation of lawyers?
(18:14):
And, we talked about simulation tools.
Some of my colleagues at Stanfordare doing exciting work on that.
We talked about digital twins,trying to capture human expertise
and an organization's entireinstitutional knowledge.
There's all this excitement and newopportunities that agentic AI brings.
But Hugh threw in this little wrinklewhich was something might be lost.
(18:37):
Nobody enjoyed being in a warehouseand going through due diligence
and doing work that is part of theapprenticeship model of becoming a lawyer.
We could have spent that time betterbut there's something that we are losing
while we don't have to do this anymore.
There are questions about how we trainthe next generation and maybe it's
a better way that we're training,and that came out from what we
learned from the the law school dean.
(18:59):
Personally, I don't espouse the viewjust because we had to do it, you have
to do it next generation, and I thoughtStefanie had a great point where she
said they're not teaching people to writein cursive anymore and it doesn't mean
you're not going to be a good lawyer.
In fact, I thought the message wasvery clear about this being a wonderful
time to be in the legal profession.
I asked Jeff Bleich, Is 2026 agood year to become a lawyer?
(19:20):
And he said yes, and he wasvery encouraging about it.
And then someone on your panel saidThis is the best time in legal.
it's just a wonderfully exciting time.
I loved how all of thesessions built on each other.
Jeff really set the tone.
It was inspiring, it was informative,and then your panel started us off with
this great discussion of innovationand transforming the profession.
(19:41):
I was lucky to interview a groupof people who talked about,
what does the model look like?
How are we going to finance it?
What does pricing look like?
What does outcome-based andvalue-driven pricing look like?
And then you really capped it offwith how do we shape the generation?
What does that look like?
So, to close out, what advice wouldyou give a new associate, a law firm
(20:05):
leader, a corporate department leader?
Be curious, but do so carefully.
Take risks, but responsibly,and do so responsibly.
10 years from now, when we look back, itwill have changed the practice of law.
I don't know that I believethe billable hour's going away.
I don't know that AI robotlawyers are going to be serving
(20:26):
people tomorrow or anytime soon.
But what a lawyer looks like 10 yearsfrom now is going to be very different.
Much as it has changed, it'sgoing to change a lot faster,
and that's really exciting.
So, for this new generation for youngattorneys right now, you're there in
that moment and you're defining it,and that is super exciting to be at
that moment where it's going to change.
(20:49):
Number one takeaway isyou should be excited.
It's cool, and you're part ofwhat it means to make that change.
What can I add to that?
Just ditto, okay?
Plus one.
One other anecdote was an earlySam Altman podcast interview and he
(21:10):
mentioned when Garry Kasparov lost toAI in chess, everyone said it was the
death of chess, and it turns out 10years later, chess has never been so
popular because no one wants to seean AI robot play an AI robot in chess.
We want to see people playing chess.
There's an analogy for the law there.
I haven't quite put my fingers on it, butwe want people to represent us in court.
(21:34):
We don't want AI to represent us in court.
We want what Jeff spoke about.
That human side of the law isquintessentially part of the law, and
I don't think it's going anywhere.
It's going to be enhanced,modified, changed.
But it's there.
One of my favorite takeawaysfrom your discussion was that we
don't know what we don't know.
We may not even be able to anticipate,plan for, or even imagine what's possible.
(21:57):
At the end of my panel Lacey Bundy,who's the general counsel at PetSmart,
talked about this dream of how thiswill be a even more collaborative
and more empowering profession, andI feel like that's the goal, and
was a real theme from our session.
Roland Vogl, Nik Reed, it'sreally been a privilege.
Thank you both so much.
Yeah.
Thank you.
(22:17):
Thanks for having us.
All right.
Take care.
Thank you.
Bye, everyone.
This is Ari Kaplan, and I am privilegedtoday to be speaking with Nik Reed,
the chief executive officer of Knowableand VP of AI product at LexisNexis, who
moderated a panel today called Lawyeringin the Age of AI: Preparing the Next
Generation for Practice at the LexisNexisAI Symposium today at the Harvard Club.
(00:20):
Hi, Nik.
Nice to see you.
Hey, Ari.
Good to see you.
And of course, Roland Vogl, who isthe executive director and co-founder
of CodeX at the Stanford Center forLegal Informatics, who moderated
Redesigning Legal Practice forthe Client-Centric Agentic AI Era.
Hi, Roland.
That's right.
Hi.
And more importantly, was my TA whenI was in law school once upon a time.
(00:43):
Nik, tell us about your backgroundand your biggest takeaway from the
panel you moderated, particularlybecause the theme of today's event
was the legal AI inflection point,designing the future of legal practice.
By way of background, I came intolegal tech completely by accident.
(01:03):
I was in law school in 2009, 2010,and a classmate of mine, Daniel, poked
me on the shoulder one day and said"Hey, Nik doesn't it seem weird that
the technology that we're being taughtto use as lawyers feels like it's 10
or 15 years old, and there's all thiscool stuff happening in tech today?
And so that got us thinking aboutwhat we could do if we were to use the
(01:27):
latest and greatest and build something.
Nights and weekends, and two yearslater, we started a company called
Ravel Law out of Stanford Law School.
It was born of the big data era,using things like data visualization,
early AI, machine learning, naturallanguage processing, and fast-forward
15 years we've got GPT, Claude,Protégé, CoCounsel, Harvey, Legora.
(01:50):
The world is abound in amazingAI technology for attorneys,
and what our panel was reallyabout is how do you prepare this
generation to use these tools?
Is it exciting?
Is it scary?
What are law schools doing?
What are law firms doing?
And what are third-party companieslike Factor that have training programs
where they're going into companies andlaw firms to help people learn how to
(02:14):
use this really awesome technology.
We had a mix of people representingthe spectrum of those who are teaching
young associates, soon to be attorneys,and in-house lawyers how to use AI.
It was fascinating.
It was very cool.
Roland, tell us about yourbackground and your biggest
(02:36):
takeaway from today's discussion.
I'm originally from Austria.
I came as a student to Stanford overtwenty years ago, then had a short stint
in private practice as an IP lawyer doingtrademark and copyright law for a tech law
firm in Silicon Valley, and then had thisopportunity to go back to the law school
as a teaching fellow in law, science, andtechnology, and then connected with some
(02:58):
folks in the computer science department,and we started to vibe around the idea
of taking the computer scientist lensinto the legal system and all these
information and transaction cost problems.
And we said, we should start acenter around this, and I get credit
for having come up with the nameCodeX as the intersection of legal
code and computer science code.
(03:18):
At the time, there was a bunch ofthings started at Stanford and around
Stanford with an X in it like, BioX,MediaX, SpaceX, and so CodeX seemed
like the logical choice for a name.
We still are a relatively smallresearch center between the computer
science department and the lawschool with the mission of bringing
information technology to the legalsystem to make it more efficient for
(03:39):
all stakeholders in the legal system.
Although it was never part of ourplan, we were fortunate to have people
like Nik coming through the center andothers with some really amazing ideas,
and they started using CodeX as asounding board and place of like-minded
people to hang out and exchange ideas.
So we started building this communityaround the center and it's in addition
(04:03):
to the research and the teaching,bringing together the thought leaders
and innovators is something we're reallyexcited about and we really value because
we're learning a lot from everythingfolks are trying to do in the marketplace
and that's enriching what we do.
Lexis kindly invited me to moderateRedesigning Legal Practice in this
(04:23):
Era of Agentic AI, where AI can handlecomplex tasks and chain them together
and do some amazing things that gobeyond just giving answers to questions.
And this was one of several panels.
We had an amazing keynote by JeffBleich, GC of Anthropic and panels
focused on legal practice, everythingthat's going on with AI, agentic
(04:46):
AI and legal practice, the businessof law and the needs of clients.
And then the panel that Nik ran onthe future of legal education, one
of the most pressing issues too.
I always feel as a moderator, Iget to introduce people and then
get out of the way of the talent.
We had some amazing thoughtleaders who are doing interesting
things in the marketplace.
(05:06):
Danielle, who's the head of appliedAI at Baker McKenzie, and Ilona,
who's the chief AI officer atHerbert Smith, and then Kurt, who's
a senior director at Blackstone.
They just gave us so many differentexciting dimensions of what they're
trying to do and it was very insightful.
One of the points that came out is a lotof the work and thinking needs to go in
(05:29):
how to restructure the processes aroundAI, so the question the panel posed was,
are we retrofitting, are we just changinglittle things around the edges, but the
basic structures of the firm stay inplace, like the pyramid structure, the
billable hour, and we sprinkle AI over itto just streamline the old ways of doing
(05:50):
things versus a rebuild where we thinkhow legal services can be made available
in a AI-centric, client-centric way?
But that's really hard to do when youcome from a traditional law firm, so a lot
of them are still in a retrofitting era.
The folks on the panel gaveus a really good sense of some
(06:11):
examples of what rebuilding means.
That's been going on for a longtime, we're just doing better and
more efficient, and maybe at lowercost and can make this available
to more clients now because we canscale our talent in different ways.
But panelists also hinted at new legalproducts that legal professionals
(06:31):
can now make available that weren'taccessible to us in the past.
Nik, what should law schools, lawdepartments, law firms do in terms
of training programs, and how shouldthey change them to prepare lawyers
for an emerging AI native practice?
Our panel had
Stefanie Lindquist, who's
dean at WashU School of Law.
(06:52):
She's been incredibly transformative inthe last two years, thinking about how we
bring AI into the curriculum and not justmaking tools available to law students,
but making them part of the teaching.
Similarly, Hugh Carlson, who's theCEO, was managing partner at Three
Crowns, one of the giant internationalarbitration law firms in the world.
(07:16):
He has been thinking about how weuse AI to teach our young attorneys
and gave us some really coolexamples of practicing with AI for
cross-examination of witnesses.
In their firm they developed an AI bot.
The young attorneys, before they gointo court, are practicing with AI,
which I thought was really cool.
And then Alex, the third panelist, isthe Head of AI Innovation for Factor,
(07:39):
which is a managed services company.
They've created Sensemaker Academy, andbrought in to law firms and companies
to teach attorneys what to do with AI.
He was remarking on everyone'saccepting that this is part of
what you're gonna be doing, butpeople don't know what that means.
Beyond spell-checking your email orreformatting a document, we're at this
(07:59):
fascinating moment 'cause everyone knowsIt's about to do a lot more and it's
going to happen really quickly, andthey're puzzling together what that is.
The common thing that we heard, whetherit was at law school, at the firm, or
in-house, is we're at the tipping point.
People are like, "Okay, we'vebeen dabbling, and now we're going
all in. Let's launch experiments,and see what works 'cause no one
(08:23):
quite knows what the thing that'sgoing to hold is going to be."
In my panel discussion, I was
lucky to speak with Lorie Almon, who is
chairman and
managing partner of Seyfarth Shaw,
Lacey Bundy, executive vice presidentand general counsel at PetSmart, and
Anton Levchik, chief financial officer
at Seward & Kissel, and theyall talked about this idea
of trying to find the answer.
(08:45):
Whether we're talking about pricingor the billable hour or law firm
economics in general, corporationswant the same thing that law firms
want, and they're trying to figureout how to get there collaboratively.
From an educational and a futurepractice standpoint, there was a lot
of similarities in terms of that theme.
Lorie was saying, we need to beradically transparent with our clients
to collaboratively figure out the valuethat firms bring to the legal department.
(09:09):
How do we charge for this value we'recreating since the billable hour doesn't
seem to be the right currency anymore?
But it's all pretty fluid.
There's no specificbest practices just yet.
There's some ideation and somepotential paths forming, but
nothing's been settled yet.
We're in this phase of experimentation.
At one point, I'm not sure if I cancompletely repeat it the way he said
(09:33):
it because he was so eloquent, JeffBleich, and you moderated this amazing
fireside chat with him, where he saidthat he tells his junior lawyers you
never get dinged for making a mistake.
You get dinged when you're not takingon complex enough problems that
will allow you to make a mistake.
There are challenges that cameout of my panel too around how we
(09:55):
integrate human expertise with the AI.
His discussion was so inspiringbecause he talked about the humanity
of the profession and how importantit is to preserve the humanity
and supplement it with technology,but not let technology lead.
Nik, what skills stood out as essential aswe approach this next generation of legal?
Part of the conversation was thisgraduating class from college is
(10:19):
the first GPT era of graduates.
So, we're going to have AI nativegraduates coming into law schools
and then eventually filteringout into law firms and in-house.
There was a lot of conversation likewhat does it take as a lawyer, as a user
to use these tools and understand it?
Jeff said creativity and a littlebit of an appetite for risk because
(10:42):
we don't know exactly all theways this is going to help you.
We're at the point where theinevitability of all of us using
AI in our day-to-day has come.
It's accepted.
I remember in 2014 when Daniel and Ifirst presented Ravel in a law firm and
we explained what we were doing, therewas a partner in the back of the room
that laughed and he said, guys, there's noroom for the letters A and I in the law.
(11:05):
That was 2014.
10 years later, that'sall there is room for.
We've come a long wayand it's pretty exciting.
Roland, your mission for your discussionwas to figure out where does agentic AI
fit in, and so what did you take awayas the most likely practical use case
for agentic AI in the next 12 months?
(11:28):
Some of the conversation was aroundthis tension between traditional
firms and AI native law firms.
It sounded like some of the clients ofthese AI native firms have initially
focused on lower level contract review.
NDAs came up several times.
But it's pretty clear that this isonly trending upwards in terms of
(11:48):
the complexity that these playerswill take on of legal tasks.
We also talked about how some of thoseAI-native firms, they're hiring people
who worked for very high-profile law firmsbefore, even managing partners of some of
those firms, to signal to the market thatthey can take on very complex legal tasks.
We got some examples for how agenticAI can help create a global compliance
(12:14):
roadmap, where the agentic AI canpull data from different countries
and allow a client to navigate workthat may have been extremely expensive
having human lawyers manage before.
We got examples for cyberbreach compliance tools where
agentic AI plays a role.
(12:34):
The sky is the limit in terms ofwhat specific workflows and legal
skills will be handled by agentic AI.
Greg, who's the CTO at Lexis,gave an overview of some of these
concepts that are still pretty new.
Legal skills that AI can handlenow and that's part of offerings
(12:55):
of legal AI platforms like LexisProtégé and Antropic's legal skills.
And then, how does thatrelate to workflows?
How does it relate to harnesses?
That was very interesting to learnhow leading legal AI platform
providers thinking about puttingout these new skills and then
making them available to the market.
And it's not only the skills they makeavailable, but they also provide the
(13:16):
technology that will allow law firmcustomers to create their own skills.
That's part of the transformation thatwe'll see or learning that we'll have to
see in firms as to understanding what isit we're doing here, and then thinking
about how to leverage AI and agentic AIto replicate some of those workflows.
(13:39):
Think about the human oversightlayer coming in, and to understand
how to evaluate the outputs.
That's a big role that humanlawyers will have to figure out.
One of the takeaways from mypanel was also, AI is amazing in
all its capabilities and all theoutputs it can generate, but the
bottleneck is human cognition.
It will become clearer in the verynear future how to integrate humans,
(14:02):
how to get a level of comfort thathumans can have with AI outputs and
the frameworks and environments where,as a human lawyer, you can rely on
this output that agentic AI generates.
One of my favorite aspects ofyour panel was that the panelists
started asking each other questions.
They're such gifted membersof the community, they were
curious what each other thought,so they could bring that back.
(14:24):
Nik, how do you suggest that law firmleaders and law department leaders
balance the promise and pitfallsof implementing AI at this stage?
There was a point in our conversationwhere responsibility came up.
Hugh Carlson has been a litigator for along time and managing partner running a
law firm spoke about the responsibilitywe have as lawyers to understand AI
(14:50):
and what it can and can't do and asRoland said, when we verify the output.
Obviously, the news recently has hadlots of examples of where apparently
attorneys have not verified the output,so there's two sides of the equation.
On the one hand, it's understandingthe products you're using, and if
you're generating a motion or a briefand you're citing case law, much as
(15:10):
we used LexisNexis to do it in lawschool, use Protégé to do it today
because the citator is built into theproduct, and I think it's incumbent
on us to understand what each productdoes, where it can benefit us.
When can you use Claude?
When can you use Protégé?
How can they complement each other?
What are the trade-offs?
And to take that idea of responsibilityas serious with use of AI as we have with
(15:36):
every other part of being a good lawyer.
That was really interesting to me.
That was the cautionary side, but Ithink the positive side was overarching,
which is, we are going to be able todo so many things that have been either
time-consuming, stressful that make thepractice of law not the most attractive
(15:57):
industry for everyone, a lot faster andis this the moment that a lot of attorneys
get to spend more of their time doingthe things higher up the value chain?
It's been a recurring theme sinceI've been involved in legal tech
for 15 years, but the sentimenttoday is maybe we're there again.
Less rote activity, less painfuldiscovery, document review, more time
(16:19):
thinking, negotiating, doing the highervalue activities that is why you went
to law school in the first place.
And in the fireside chat, Jeff Bleichtalked about the importance of having
the tools work in concert so that youcan trust and verify simultaneously.
I thought it was fascinating the wayhe wove his experience as a very young
(16:41):
attorney Shepardizing for the first timeand the attorneys in the law firm thinking
he was a magician because they had noidea LexisNexis existed on a computer yet.
They were still writing with pens.
Fast-forward, it's thesame paradigm again.
It's let's wow partners with how fastwe can turn things around, but with
that same rigor that a good Shepardizingsession would've brought back in the day.
(17:05):
Roland, what was the sense onyour panel about what it really
means from a practical standpointto redesign legal practice?
Redesign means doing everything that'salready going on faster, radically
cheaper that came out of your panel.
It seems like some of those outsideplayers are promising, really
reduced rates on some of the tasks.
(17:28):
But also excitement around law firmand legal professionals can now take on
tasks that were previously not consideredpart of what a law firm does like being
predictive about certain risks andalerting clients to specific risks and
not just being reactive when a lawsuithas been filed and gearing up around that.
(17:49):
But I want to go back to Nik's point.
Throughout the whole event, there'sexcitement around what it means
to be a lawyer and a lot of peoplesaid this is one of the most
exciting times to be a lawyer.
People go to a lawyer when they facesome really complex questions and being
able to help clients with those and thenhaving the drudgery handled by the AI
or the AI helping support us, but how dowe train the next generation of lawyers?
(18:14):
And, we talked about simulation tools.
Some of my colleagues at Stanfordare doing exciting work on that.
We talked about digital twins,trying to capture human expertise
and an organization's entireinstitutional knowledge.
There's all this excitement and newopportunities that agentic AI brings.
But Hugh threw in this little wrinklewhich was something might be lost.
(18:37):
Nobody enjoyed being in a warehouseand going through due diligence
and doing work that is part of theapprenticeship model of becoming a lawyer.
We could have spent that time betterbut there's something that we are losing
while we don't have to do this anymore.
There are questions about how we trainthe next generation and maybe it's
a better way that we're training,and that came out from what we
learned from the the law school dean.
(18:59):
Personally, I don't espouse the viewjust because we had to do it, you have
to do it next generation, and I thoughtStefanie had a great point where she
said they're not teaching people to writein cursive anymore and it doesn't mean
you're not going to be a good lawyer.
In fact, I thought the message wasvery clear about this being a wonderful
time to be in the legal profession.
I asked Jeff Bleich, Is 2026 agood year to become a lawyer?
(19:20):
And he said yes, and he wasvery encouraging about it.
And then someone on your panel saidThis is the best time in legal.
it's just a wonderfully exciting time.
I loved how all of thesessions built on each other.
Jeff really set the tone.
It was inspiring, it was informative,and then your panel started us off with
this great discussion of innovationand transforming the profession.
(19:41):
I was lucky to interview a groupof people who talked about,
what does the model look like?
How are we going to finance it?
What does pricing look like?
What does outcome-based andvalue-driven pricing look like?
And then you really capped it offwith how do we shape the generation?
What does that look like?
So, to close out, what advice wouldyou give a new associate, a law firm
(20:05):
leader, a corporate department leader?
Be curious, but do so carefully.
Take risks, but responsibly,and do so responsibly.
10 years from now, when we look back, itwill have changed the practice of law.
I don't know that I believethe billable hour's going away.
I don't know that AI robotlawyers are going to be serving
(20:26):
people tomorrow or anytime soon.
But what a lawyer looks like 10 yearsfrom now is going to be very different.
Much as it has changed, it'sgoing to change a lot faster,
and that's really exciting.
So, for this new generation for youngattorneys right now, you're there in
that moment and you're defining it,and that is super exciting to be at
that moment where it's going to change.
(20:49):
Number one takeaway isyou should be excited.
It's cool, and you're part ofwhat it means to make that change.
What can I add to that?
Just ditto, okay?
Plus one.
One other anecdote was an earlySam Altman podcast interview and he
(21:10):
mentioned when Garry Kasparov lost toAI in chess, everyone said it was the
death of chess, and it turns out 10years later, chess has never been so
popular because no one wants to seean AI robot play an AI robot in chess.
We want to see people playing chess.
There's an analogy for the law there.
I haven't quite put my fingers on it, butwe want people to represent us in court.
(21:34):
We don't want AI to represent us in court.
We want what Jeff spoke about.
That human side of the law isquintessentially part of the law, and
I don't think it's going anywhere.
It's going to be enhanced,modified, changed.
But it's there.
One of my favorite takeawaysfrom your discussion was that we
don't know what we don't know.
We may not even be able to anticipate,plan for, or even imagine what's possible.
(21:57):
At the end of my panel Lacey Bundy,who's the general counsel at PetSmart,
talked about this dream of how thiswill be a even more collaborative
and more empowering profession, andI feel like that's the goal, and
was a real theme from our session.
Roland Vogl, Nik Reed, it'sreally been a privilege.
Thank you both so much.
Yeah.
Thank you.
(22:17):
Thanks for having us.
All right.
Take care.
Thank you.
Bye, everyone.
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