December 23, 2025 • 23 mins
I was honored to interview these remarkable leaders for the inaugural Ari Kaplan Advisors Legal Tech GC/CLO Roundtable, focusing on the key challenges, trends, and opportunities that are likely to affect strategic priorities in 2026:
Jason Barnwell, Agiloft Marla Crawford, Cimplifi Clint Crosier, iManage Dennis Garcia, Litera Jenny Hamilton, Exterro Beth Kallet-Neuman, Relativity Colin Levy, Malbek John Patzakis, X1 JP Son, Verbit
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(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.
Welcome to the inaugural Legal TechGeneral Counsel Round Table discussion.
(00:22):
I'm Ari Kaplan.
I am an analyst whocovers the legal industry.
I have been focusing onlegal tech for a long time.
I do an annual general counsel reportthat I've been fortunate to do with
Relativity and FTI for many years now,speaking to general counsel around
the world, and just seem like there'sa connection here in terms of what we
could learn from each other about legaltech and about serving as the leader of
(00:45):
legal for a legal technology company.
So I would ask each of youto do a quick introduction.
Hi I am Beth Kallet-Neuman from Relativity.
Hi, I'm Marla Crawford from Cimplifi.
My name is Dennis Garcia.
I'm a vice president and generalcounsel for Litera, based in Chicago.
My name is Clint Crosier, theGeneral Counsel of iManage.
(01:08):
Hi JP Son, I'm atVerbit based in New York.
John Patzakis, CLO at X1.
Hi everyone.
Colin Levy, General Counsel of Malbek.
Hi.
Jason Barnwell CLO at Agiloft.
Hi I'm Jenny Hamilton.
I'm the GC at Exterro.
Is there something unique aboutbeing the general counsel of
a legal technology company?
(01:31):
I think there is because when you're theGC of a legal tech company, legal becomes
intertwined with so many other facets ofthe company from development, product,
governance, data privacy regulation.
It just a lot of differentareas that kind of converge.
And while I think that this is notnecessarily isolated to legal tech,
(01:55):
I do think that legal tech is in someways uniquely positioned to encounter
these types of issues, particularlygiven how fast legal tech tends to move
and how much faster it can move whenthings like AI become ever-present.
Being part of a legal tech company, yourkey customers are lawyers, law firms,
(02:17):
corporate, in-house legal departments,so I find that my business clients have
a deep appreciation as to what lawyersdo and the value that we provide.
I've also seen instances beingpart of a legal tech company where
our clients are actual lawyers.
They may not be practicing lawyers,and so that could be a good thing
because they hopefully have ahealthy respect for what lawyers do.
(02:40):
But by the same token, sometimes,lawyers may not be the easiest clients
so that's an interesting dynamic.
And being a GC of a legal tech companyprovides all of us with a real opportunity
to serve as ambassadors to our companies.
Our team has been using Litera's products.
We're becoming power users of oursolutions and I want to evangelize to
(03:01):
other corporate, in-house legal teams,how we're using it and hopefully engage
in business development on behalf of Lara.
It is important for us to showcasewhat we make and be ambassadors, but
really show the highest expression ofthe value that can be created by the
products that we make to our customers.
(03:21):
Like Dennis, I'm going to figureout how to run Agiloft legal on
Agiloft, and I'm going to tellstories and show the recipes.
I'm going to give away as much as I can,and in that process of hopefully earning
a little attention from the market, I canthen also influence the product roadmap
to bend that closer to the highest valuecustomer scenarios that are out there,
(03:42):
so that we can keep delivering morevalue to our customers, and ultimately
turn that into a very virtuous cyclewhere we're learning faster the kinds of
problems that we can go after with whatwe make, and turn that into solutions
that are valuable for customers, and sothey feel good about being our customers.
Being a general counsel of a legaltechnology company is a unique experience
(04:07):
because how many general counselsare as familiar as users with the
product that their company is selling.
I was one of the first eDiscovery lawyers.
My career has been in legal technologyand it was just such a natural
progression to then become theGC of a legal technology company.
(04:31):
It allowed me to get started a lot faster.
What's interesting is having that uniqueinsight into your customer persona.
You really understand howthey think and what they want.
And so when it comes to productdevelopment, I can instantly
see where there's a gap, andyou could also instantly see
(04:53):
potential of other use cases.
You really get into themind of your customer.
At other tech companies, I wouldn'tsay I feel as comfortable being in
the mind of the customer becauseit's different understanding that
legal persona and how we think.
(05:13):
The great thing about being a CLOat a legal tech company is that
you also wear an operating hat.
On the product side, I get draggedinto key product development meetings.
The sales team, especiallyon the high end.
Big opportunities wanna bring me into talk to the lawyers on the other
side that are looking to procure asolution, so I feel like I'm really
a dual executive, which is great.
(05:34):
The one thing on a more of astress-related side is that I
have seen courts hold legal techcompanies to a higher standard
when it comes to discovery.
So it's something be aware ofif you get involved litigation.
As a general counsel or chief legalofficer at any company, you're going to
have a very wide view on what's going on.
You're there to connect the dots for yourcolleagues and management in general.
(05:55):
That's heightened even moreat a legal tech company.
You end up being not the issuespotter for the legal compliance
issues, but from the operator'shat as well from your connections
in the business and the industry.
Even just using the legal tech tools andunderstanding where they are, you can
give a guidance that's unique to yourproduct, your R&D, your sales marketing
(06:16):
teams that they may not have, by virtueof you being that subject matter expert.
In this role, it's very important foryou to know the market and know what
your competitors and peers are doingfrom a product standpoint because
you probably see what they're puttingout quicker than most of the people
at your company because you see it.
(06:36):
Jokingly, one of the downsidesis all your friends like to call
you about fixing the product.
Where did you discover anopportunity that stood out that
you're going to carry into 2026?
Or, is there something in particular thatyou felt was transformative in legal?
2025 was definitely the year thatpeople stopped questioning AI.
It's happening.
There's nothing you can do aboutit at this point, and we need to be
(06:58):
prepared on all sides to ensure thatit's done in accordance with the
frameworks and policies that we putout that are nimble enough to change.
Over the last month, I've beenfaced with a fairly large number of
negotiations specifically around,AI, but not necessarily in terms of
(07:21):
capability, although that still ispresent, but more around reliability,
accuracy which does reflect that there'sthis growing acceptance of generative
AI, but now, how do we deal with it?
How do we make use of itin a way that's productive?
There's also a growing realizationof it's here, but we shouldn't
(07:42):
be using it for everything.
But if we can use it, howshould we be using it?
So there's a fair amount of educationon the part of legal tech companies that
has to take place about educating ourcustomers and potential customers about
what we can do and how we can help themthat starts with listening, just having a
conversation with them, and understandingwhat they would like to see on the
(08:03):
basis of what they know and what theywould like to be doing in the future.
2025 is the pivot moment of thechange of our entire legal ecosystem
in terms of who is doing what.
We're seeing different employeecategories taking on new tasks.
(08:28):
We're seeing a shift in the human aspectof who is working on what projects and
that's going to continue to change.
I've been fascinated with alot of developments in AI.
One thing that I've noticed in the pastsix months was a lot of enterprises
not adopting AI, were slow to adopt AI.
(08:50):
AI gets adopted where thedata is already centralized.
A great example is e-discovery.
You gotta collect data.
Put it up stream.
Once it already gets into the reviewplatforms, then of course it makes sense
on that data set to apply AI becauseit's already there, but companies
were reluctant to shift large swathsof their data, for compliance reasons
(09:11):
or for other reasons, because ithas to go offsite, and just too many
security risks, and you don't know howthe models are being trained, and if
there's intermingling, just all thesecurity risks associated with that.
We're seeing a way to address that is tokeep the AI on-prem as much as possible.
For legal tech, I think your solutionat least has to be on-prem capable.
(09:33):
I think on-prem solutions are goingto be a little bit dated because
they will not be able to keep up withcloud, and the progress that's made
in cloud and the security elementsare obviously critical for lawyers.
If you find a solution that is secure,protects privacy, keeps the data where it
should be, no questions about privilege,that's gonna move very quickly in terms
(09:56):
of progress, in terms of getting thekind of technology that's going to keep
things on their edge and moving quickly.
There's two flavors of cloud.
There's the multi-tenancy, whichto simplify it is bolted onto your
Amazon and your clients have toput the data into your environment.
(10:17):
It's hard coded there.
Then there is what's called singleTenancy Cloud, which is more flexible.
You can host it, it can bein your client's private
cloud, or it can be on-prem.
To me it's about the singletenancy, portable cloud, call
it versus the multi-tenancy.
From a practical standpoint, ifwe think that there is going to be
(10:39):
machine intelligence powered workloads,I don't see how those happen in a
conventional on-premises environmentbecause you're just not going to
have the compute infrastructureor capacity that lives there.
I also don't see how any subscaleoperator is going to be able to run
their own, dedicated machine intelligencefocused compute cause supply is limited.
(11:00):
The ability to run the infrastructureat scale is very challenging.
So it is hard for me to see a futurewhere you'll have more machine
intelligence applied to workloadsand it does not trend toward the
future that Beth was talking about.
We've heard from clients and prospectsthat they would value having an on-prem
(11:20):
or an on-device solution, So theremay be edge cases where that matters.
In general, I do agree with theapproach that cloud is generally better.
The real question is what arecustomers actually willing to pay for?
What premium are you willing to payfor this thing that we're gonna have
to basically do for you special?
If there's pattern strength on the need,then it becomes truly a product that
(11:43):
scales, but where customers are outliers,they should expect to pay a premium
for us to basically, effectively forkthe way that we, create our product to
accommodate a very small set of customers.
When it comes to the compute power, thesingle tenancy cloud is where you have
(12:04):
the most throughput . The reason why alot of CTOs like multi-tenancy cloud is
you can scale across a lot of customers,and bring them on, but the workloads
for those customers are throttled.
So the compute power is frankly bestscenarios where you have a large
company that has their own cloudenvironment that's private and it's
secure, and they can throw all theresources they can at single operation.
(12:28):
That's how you really scale.
Also, when it comes to AI, onething that I didn't even appreciate
until six months ago when we weregetting into this, is that it's all
about the large language models.
The LLMs are the digital componentof the AI, and these LLMs have
become much more portable.
You can now deploy themand run them on prem.
That's where the magic happens rightnow, training them is another thing.
(12:51):
There is something that is worthteasing apart, which is basically
the types of models that are goingto run and why this is important for
us to understand and think about.
Increasingly the products that we makeare going to take advantage of long
running machine intelligence processes.
It is not going to be singleprompt back and forth.
(13:14):
It is going to be delegating a contextwindow into basically a compute space
and having these things do real work.
Is there an expectation that thegeneral counsel of legal tech company
can go toe to toe with any productsales person in the organization,
that's how granular and deep yourunderstanding of the product should be?
(13:35):
It takes a special kind of person tobe in legal tech, and that translates
into someone who is intellectuallycurious, willing to experiment, willing
to learn, willing to acknowledge whatyou know and what you don't know.
That does not mean that you haveto be some kind of coder programmer
(13:56):
to be the GC of a legal techcompany or even work in legal tech.
At the same time, it does require anunderstanding of fluency with the language
of technology so that you can speakconfidently with various departments in
your company, whether it be someone on theengineering side, someone on the product
(14:17):
side, someone on the sales side, whathave you, you have to be a connector and
a translator because you as lawyer oftenhas to translate your legal understanding
into something that someone else willunderstand and know what to do with
what the lawyer just said . That oftenmeans that for the GC, you have to have
a degree of being okay with delegatingand utilizing others' expertise, which
(14:40):
historically, sometimes can be tough fora lawyer because lawyers sometimes wanna
be in control of literally everything.
And you have to have acertain level of trust.
That doesn't mean you shouldn'thave understanding, you should,
but you also need trust as well.
We should be able to listen andhear differently than the other
division heads in our company.
(15:01):
When we meet with our clients, weshould be able be to translate much
easier, understand what the clientis saying, and make a big impact.
Bigger than a GC in another kindof company because we should be
hearing those buzz words thatmean something special to us.
(15:27):
All GCs, any in-house lawyers needto really understand the business
to the best of their capabilities.
If they could really understand theproducts and solutions, that's great.
I don't think you necessarily needto be an expert in those solutions.
I can't go toe to toe with ourproduct teams with regard to our
products or even our sales teams.
One thing I have noticed is that thesales folks definitely want to lean
(15:49):
on me to see how they can leverage therelationships I've built over a long
period of time with in-house lawyersat our customers or other companies
or relationships I may have with lawfirms or legal business decision makers.
I think a big value add is if wecan parlay the relationships we
have with legal decision makers.
(16:11):
Our senior business leaders love thatand that's where they want me to be in
terms of uncovering new opportunities.
Are there things that peopleare excited about for next year
or concerned about in any way?
I've spoken with lawfirm partners about this.
How are we going to train thenext generation of lawyers?
(16:31):
Everyone on this call has probably lookedthrough Iron Mountain boxes, looked
through documents, printed things out.
They're not doing some of this becausethey don't have to, because the AI will
do that baseline work that nobody wantsto do that's sort of painful sometimes.
So I'm very curious to understandhow we will train them.
(16:53):
The training will look different.
There's going to need to be ashift of some kind because just
skipping it is not the answer.
The key question is not that AI's changinglaw, it's changing how they make money.
What's changing is the leverage basedmodel that they've made money on for
years of billing out associates waymore than they're worth, and them not
(17:15):
being able to give the associates the"10,000 hours" to make them an expert.
We read through documents in aRedweld at a kitchen table and
learned how to at least look at stuff.
Some firms said AI has really helpedthem create real world simulations that
they never could have built before.
The ability to put all thisdocs, examples, fake stuff,
(17:38):
responses, reverts, redlines.
They couldn't have built thatin the past without thousands
and thousands of man hours.
Now, the AI can build that andjudge them on it and it can change.
It's like a war game.
You respond, it changes another way.
Then they can get judged on that.
AI is making the gap larger betweengood associates and bad associates
because the good associates are alreadygood and now they're just getting
(17:59):
better . Figuring out how to help theother associates is where they need to
be, but they're falling farther behind.
One of the things that's incrediblypowerful about simulations and scenarios
is you're no longer bound by anorganic rate of education and growth.
In the past, you had to have acertain number of deals or cases, and
(18:22):
those had to organically appear, sothe rate at which you could acquire
skills had a fundamental limit.
You were also limited by theamount of feedback that a
partner would actually provide.
This is what I think sits behindwhy you're seeing this divergence.
For some people, it's giving themrocket packs and they're just taking
off and for the people who are reallymotivated, curious, and want to be
(18:43):
on their growth edge, all of a suddenthey have this thing that will stay
awake with them as long as they wantto go and as hard as they want to go.
That is very different.
Then you have other peoplewho came to just grind out
what was put in front of them.
The business used to work like that reallywell for almost all of its existence.
If all of a sudden it turns into Ineed to figure out how I'm gonna go
originate value earlier, then thatreally doesn't work with the old model.
(19:07):
So I remember having thisconversation and it was me and
another person from our shop.
She really loved law firmlockstep promotion as associates.
As long as I stayed around,I was guaranteed to move up.
I said the thing I really hated aboutthe law firm was the lockstep promotion
because no matter how good a jobI did I was basically constrained.
She saw it as a floor andI saw it as this ceiling.
It's time for us to start thinking abouthow we take the lid off and the people
(19:30):
who think like that are going to getamazing outcomes from these things.
All I want from my law firms is to payless money, and I hope they use more AI
tools so they can give me more fixed fees.
I think we're going to see moreand more companies wanting to get
a return on their AI investments.
AI is not cheap, and I thinklarger, midsize in-house legal
teams saying to themselves howcan I get my return on investment?
(19:53):
Maybe that means having feweremployees in my legal department.
Instead of having a team of 10 people fora practice group, if they're embracing AI
tools, maybe you only need eight people.
That's a trend we're gonna see moreof this year and moving forward.
We're going to see some legalteams, year over year, their budgets
(20:14):
may stay flat or they may reduce.
I don't know if you're going to see a lotof legal teams whose budgets are going to
really increase over the next year or two.
Where do you see the legalmarket headed in 2026?
I hope we train the next generation thatthey shouldn't hide behind developing
(20:34):
technical expertise like we mighthave gotten to if we worked at a firm.
You got to put your head down andlearn the mechanics of practicing law
and doing the grunt work to try toteach you that foundation to build on,
and then worry about how to advocate,how to communicate with your clients
(20:55):
who are often in-house counsel, howto develop a reputation as being a
trusted advisor to start connectingthe dots and actually adding value.
I saw a lot of law firm associateshide behind that development of their
expertise in the law, but not how togo to court, not how to win and argue
motion, not how to develop a trustedrelationship with a client, so the client
(21:20):
would call them first and would rely onthem increasingly to help them, muddle
through some of these complexities.
This is an opportunity for the youngerassociates and younger in-house
counsel to start developing thoseskills earlier now that some of
the heavy lift can be done by AI.
Of course, you need to learn your craft,you need to understand the practice
(21:44):
of law, how to be strategic, andadd strategic value to the business.
But that will come sooner than ithas for the previous generation.
So I'm still optimistic, but onlyif we have a group of legal leaders
like us who are willing to go outand message, that's what we need.
Today, we need law firm attorneys tobe able to show up and give us options
(22:13):
that are business friendly, thatmove us forward, not to equivocate,
not to bury us in complexity, notto send us three-page memos by email
that don't get us to an answer.
And in this role, that becomesreally critical because I can't sit
there and revert back to being asecond year, third year and try to
(22:33):
parse through a senior associate'sthree-page memo about this murky area
we're in and help give us guidance.
That's not the jobanymore, if it ever was.
Education is a fundamental issue, but someskills are going to remain foundational,
and some are not going to be skills atall that you need to be an attorney.
(22:57):
We're also seeing therise in the use of ALSPs.
Document review used to bedone by first-year associates.
I think it's been separated out from thelaw firm into document review specialists.
The technology's going to allowfor this kind of bifurcation of
duties between what's done in yourtraditional law firm versus ALSP.
That'll be interesting over the courseof the coming years how the definition
(23:20):
of what is an attorney at a law firmitself changes and maybe some of these
skills go away, but then of course newskills, new competencies get added, and
that definition itself shifts and changeswhat the education paradigm is as well.
Thank you all so very much.
This is awesome.
I hope that you all have wonderfulholidays with your families and I really
(23:40):
appreciate your time and consideration.
Thank you for listening to theReinventing Professionals Podcast.
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.
Welcome to the inaugural Legal TechGeneral Counsel Round Table discussion.
(00:22):
I'm Ari Kaplan.
I am an analyst whocovers the legal industry.
I have been focusing onlegal tech for a long time.
I do an annual general counsel reportthat I've been fortunate to do with
Relativity and FTI for many years now,speaking to general counsel around
the world, and just seem like there'sa connection here in terms of what we
could learn from each other about legaltech and about serving as the leader of
(00:45):
legal for a legal technology company.
So I would ask each of youto do a quick introduction.
Hi I am Beth Kallet-Neuman from Relativity.
Hi, I'm Marla Crawford from Cimplifi.
My name is Dennis Garcia.
I'm a vice president and generalcounsel for Litera, based in Chicago.
My name is Clint Crosier, theGeneral Counsel of iManage.
(01:08):
Hi JP Son, I'm atVerbit based in New York.
John Patzakis, CLO at X1.
Hi everyone.
Colin Levy, General Counsel of Malbek.
Hi.
Jason Barnwell CLO at Agiloft.
Hi I'm Jenny Hamilton.
I'm the GC at Exterro.
Is there something unique aboutbeing the general counsel of
a legal technology company?
(01:31):
I think there is because when you're theGC of a legal tech company, legal becomes
intertwined with so many other facets ofthe company from development, product,
governance, data privacy regulation.
It just a lot of differentareas that kind of converge.
And while I think that this is notnecessarily isolated to legal tech,
(01:55):
I do think that legal tech is in someways uniquely positioned to encounter
these types of issues, particularlygiven how fast legal tech tends to move
and how much faster it can move whenthings like AI become ever-present.
Being part of a legal tech company, yourkey customers are lawyers, law firms,
(02:17):
corporate, in-house legal departments,so I find that my business clients have
a deep appreciation as to what lawyersdo and the value that we provide.
I've also seen instances beingpart of a legal tech company where
our clients are actual lawyers.
They may not be practicing lawyers,and so that could be a good thing
because they hopefully have ahealthy respect for what lawyers do.
(02:40):
But by the same token, sometimes,lawyers may not be the easiest clients
so that's an interesting dynamic.
And being a GC of a legal tech companyprovides all of us with a real opportunity
to serve as ambassadors to our companies.
Our team has been using Litera's products.
We're becoming power users of oursolutions and I want to evangelize to
(03:01):
other corporate, in-house legal teams,how we're using it and hopefully engage
in business development on behalf of Lara.
It is important for us to showcasewhat we make and be ambassadors, but
really show the highest expression ofthe value that can be created by the
products that we make to our customers.
(03:21):
Like Dennis, I'm going to figureout how to run Agiloft legal on
Agiloft, and I'm going to tellstories and show the recipes.
I'm going to give away as much as I can,and in that process of hopefully earning
a little attention from the market, I canthen also influence the product roadmap
to bend that closer to the highest valuecustomer scenarios that are out there,
(03:42):
so that we can keep delivering morevalue to our customers, and ultimately
turn that into a very virtuous cyclewhere we're learning faster the kinds of
problems that we can go after with whatwe make, and turn that into solutions
that are valuable for customers, and sothey feel good about being our customers.
Being a general counsel of a legaltechnology company is a unique experience
(04:07):
because how many general counselsare as familiar as users with the
product that their company is selling.
I was one of the first eDiscovery lawyers.
My career has been in legal technologyand it was just such a natural
progression to then become theGC of a legal technology company.
(04:31):
It allowed me to get started a lot faster.
What's interesting is having that uniqueinsight into your customer persona.
You really understand howthey think and what they want.
And so when it comes to productdevelopment, I can instantly
see where there's a gap, andyou could also instantly see
(04:53):
potential of other use cases.
You really get into themind of your customer.
At other tech companies, I wouldn'tsay I feel as comfortable being in
the mind of the customer becauseit's different understanding that
legal persona and how we think.
(05:13):
The great thing about being a CLOat a legal tech company is that
you also wear an operating hat.
On the product side, I get draggedinto key product development meetings.
The sales team, especiallyon the high end.
Big opportunities wanna bring me into talk to the lawyers on the other
side that are looking to procure asolution, so I feel like I'm really
a dual executive, which is great.
(05:34):
The one thing on a more of astress-related side is that I
have seen courts hold legal techcompanies to a higher standard
when it comes to discovery.
So it's something be aware ofif you get involved litigation.
As a general counsel or chief legalofficer at any company, you're going to
have a very wide view on what's going on.
You're there to connect the dots for yourcolleagues and management in general.
(05:55):
That's heightened even moreat a legal tech company.
You end up being not the issuespotter for the legal compliance
issues, but from the operator'shat as well from your connections
in the business and the industry.
Even just using the legal tech tools andunderstanding where they are, you can
give a guidance that's unique to yourproduct, your R&D, your sales marketing
(06:16):
teams that they may not have, by virtueof you being that subject matter expert.
In this role, it's very important foryou to know the market and know what
your competitors and peers are doingfrom a product standpoint because
you probably see what they're puttingout quicker than most of the people
at your company because you see it.
(06:36):
Jokingly, one of the downsidesis all your friends like to call
you about fixing the product.
Where did you discover anopportunity that stood out that
you're going to carry into 2026?
Or, is there something in particular thatyou felt was transformative in legal?
2025 was definitely the year thatpeople stopped questioning AI.
It's happening.
There's nothing you can do aboutit at this point, and we need to be
(06:58):
prepared on all sides to ensure thatit's done in accordance with the
frameworks and policies that we putout that are nimble enough to change.
Over the last month, I've beenfaced with a fairly large number of
negotiations specifically around,AI, but not necessarily in terms of
(07:21):
capability, although that still ispresent, but more around reliability,
accuracy which does reflect that there'sthis growing acceptance of generative
AI, but now, how do we deal with it?
How do we make use of itin a way that's productive?
There's also a growing realizationof it's here, but we shouldn't
(07:42):
be using it for everything.
But if we can use it, howshould we be using it?
So there's a fair amount of educationon the part of legal tech companies that
has to take place about educating ourcustomers and potential customers about
what we can do and how we can help themthat starts with listening, just having a
conversation with them, and understandingwhat they would like to see on the
(08:03):
basis of what they know and what theywould like to be doing in the future.
2025 is the pivot moment of thechange of our entire legal ecosystem
in terms of who is doing what.
We're seeing different employeecategories taking on new tasks.
(08:28):
We're seeing a shift in the human aspectof who is working on what projects and
that's going to continue to change.
I've been fascinated with alot of developments in AI.
One thing that I've noticed in the pastsix months was a lot of enterprises
not adopting AI, were slow to adopt AI.
(08:50):
AI gets adopted where thedata is already centralized.
A great example is e-discovery.
You gotta collect data.
Put it up stream.
Once it already gets into the reviewplatforms, then of course it makes sense
on that data set to apply AI becauseit's already there, but companies
were reluctant to shift large swathsof their data, for compliance reasons
(09:11):
or for other reasons, because ithas to go offsite, and just too many
security risks, and you don't know howthe models are being trained, and if
there's intermingling, just all thesecurity risks associated with that.
We're seeing a way to address that is tokeep the AI on-prem as much as possible.
For legal tech, I think your solutionat least has to be on-prem capable.
(09:33):
I think on-prem solutions are goingto be a little bit dated because
they will not be able to keep up withcloud, and the progress that's made
in cloud and the security elementsare obviously critical for lawyers.
If you find a solution that is secure,protects privacy, keeps the data where it
should be, no questions about privilege,that's gonna move very quickly in terms
(09:56):
of progress, in terms of getting thekind of technology that's going to keep
things on their edge and moving quickly.
There's two flavors of cloud.
There's the multi-tenancy, whichto simplify it is bolted onto your
Amazon and your clients have toput the data into your environment.
(10:17):
It's hard coded there.
Then there is what's called singleTenancy Cloud, which is more flexible.
You can host it, it can bein your client's private
cloud, or it can be on-prem.
To me it's about the singletenancy, portable cloud, call
it versus the multi-tenancy.
From a practical standpoint, ifwe think that there is going to be
(10:39):
machine intelligence powered workloads,I don't see how those happen in a
conventional on-premises environmentbecause you're just not going to
have the compute infrastructureor capacity that lives there.
I also don't see how any subscaleoperator is going to be able to run
their own, dedicated machine intelligencefocused compute cause supply is limited.
(11:00):
The ability to run the infrastructureat scale is very challenging.
So it is hard for me to see a futurewhere you'll have more machine
intelligence applied to workloadsand it does not trend toward the
future that Beth was talking about.
We've heard from clients and prospectsthat they would value having an on-prem
(11:20):
or an on-device solution, So theremay be edge cases where that matters.
In general, I do agree with theapproach that cloud is generally better.
The real question is what arecustomers actually willing to pay for?
What premium are you willing to payfor this thing that we're gonna have
to basically do for you special?
If there's pattern strength on the need,then it becomes truly a product that
(11:43):
scales, but where customers are outliers,they should expect to pay a premium
for us to basically, effectively forkthe way that we, create our product to
accommodate a very small set of customers.
When it comes to the compute power, thesingle tenancy cloud is where you have
(12:04):
the most throughput . The reason why alot of CTOs like multi-tenancy cloud is
you can scale across a lot of customers,and bring them on, but the workloads
for those customers are throttled.
So the compute power is frankly bestscenarios where you have a large
company that has their own cloudenvironment that's private and it's
secure, and they can throw all theresources they can at single operation.
(12:28):
That's how you really scale.
Also, when it comes to AI, onething that I didn't even appreciate
until six months ago when we weregetting into this, is that it's all
about the large language models.
The LLMs are the digital componentof the AI, and these LLMs have
become much more portable.
You can now deploy themand run them on prem.
That's where the magic happens rightnow, training them is another thing.
(12:51):
There is something that is worthteasing apart, which is basically
the types of models that are goingto run and why this is important for
us to understand and think about.
Increasingly the products that we makeare going to take advantage of long
running machine intelligence processes.
It is not going to be singleprompt back and forth.
(13:14):
It is going to be delegating a contextwindow into basically a compute space
and having these things do real work.
Is there an expectation that thegeneral counsel of legal tech company
can go toe to toe with any productsales person in the organization,
that's how granular and deep yourunderstanding of the product should be?
(13:35):
It takes a special kind of person tobe in legal tech, and that translates
into someone who is intellectuallycurious, willing to experiment, willing
to learn, willing to acknowledge whatyou know and what you don't know.
That does not mean that you haveto be some kind of coder programmer
(13:56):
to be the GC of a legal techcompany or even work in legal tech.
At the same time, it does require anunderstanding of fluency with the language
of technology so that you can speakconfidently with various departments in
your company, whether it be someone on theengineering side, someone on the product
(14:17):
side, someone on the sales side, whathave you, you have to be a connector and
a translator because you as lawyer oftenhas to translate your legal understanding
into something that someone else willunderstand and know what to do with
what the lawyer just said . That oftenmeans that for the GC, you have to have
a degree of being okay with delegatingand utilizing others' expertise, which
(14:40):
historically, sometimes can be tough fora lawyer because lawyers sometimes wanna
be in control of literally everything.
And you have to have acertain level of trust.
That doesn't mean you shouldn'thave understanding, you should,
but you also need trust as well.
We should be able to listen andhear differently than the other
division heads in our company.
(15:01):
When we meet with our clients, weshould be able be to translate much
easier, understand what the clientis saying, and make a big impact.
Bigger than a GC in another kindof company because we should be
hearing those buzz words thatmean something special to us.
(15:27):
All GCs, any in-house lawyers needto really understand the business
to the best of their capabilities.
If they could really understand theproducts and solutions, that's great.
I don't think you necessarily needto be an expert in those solutions.
I can't go toe to toe with ourproduct teams with regard to our
products or even our sales teams.
One thing I have noticed is that thesales folks definitely want to lean
(15:49):
on me to see how they can leverage therelationships I've built over a long
period of time with in-house lawyersat our customers or other companies
or relationships I may have with lawfirms or legal business decision makers.
I think a big value add is if wecan parlay the relationships we
have with legal decision makers.
(16:11):
Our senior business leaders love thatand that's where they want me to be in
terms of uncovering new opportunities.
Are there things that peopleare excited about for next year
or concerned about in any way?
I've spoken with lawfirm partners about this.
How are we going to train thenext generation of lawyers?
(16:31):
Everyone on this call has probably lookedthrough Iron Mountain boxes, looked
through documents, printed things out.
They're not doing some of this becausethey don't have to, because the AI will
do that baseline work that nobody wantsto do that's sort of painful sometimes.
So I'm very curious to understandhow we will train them.
(16:53):
The training will look different.
There's going to need to be ashift of some kind because just
skipping it is not the answer.
The key question is not that AI's changinglaw, it's changing how they make money.
What's changing is the leverage basedmodel that they've made money on for
years of billing out associates waymore than they're worth, and them not
(17:15):
being able to give the associates the"10,000 hours" to make them an expert.
We read through documents in aRedweld at a kitchen table and
learned how to at least look at stuff.
Some firms said AI has really helpedthem create real world simulations that
they never could have built before.
The ability to put all thisdocs, examples, fake stuff,
(17:38):
responses, reverts, redlines.
They couldn't have built thatin the past without thousands
and thousands of man hours.
Now, the AI can build that andjudge them on it and it can change.
It's like a war game.
You respond, it changes another way.
Then they can get judged on that.
AI is making the gap larger betweengood associates and bad associates
because the good associates are alreadygood and now they're just getting
(17:59):
better . Figuring out how to help theother associates is where they need to
be, but they're falling farther behind.
One of the things that's incrediblypowerful about simulations and scenarios
is you're no longer bound by anorganic rate of education and growth.
In the past, you had to have acertain number of deals or cases, and
(18:22):
those had to organically appear, sothe rate at which you could acquire
skills had a fundamental limit.
You were also limited by theamount of feedback that a
partner would actually provide.
This is what I think sits behindwhy you're seeing this divergence.
For some people, it's giving themrocket packs and they're just taking
off and for the people who are reallymotivated, curious, and want to be
(18:43):
on their growth edge, all of a suddenthey have this thing that will stay
awake with them as long as they wantto go and as hard as they want to go.
That is very different.
Then you have other peoplewho came to just grind out
what was put in front of them.
The business used to work like that reallywell for almost all of its existence.
If all of a sudden it turns into Ineed to figure out how I'm gonna go
originate value earlier, then thatreally doesn't work with the old model.
(19:07):
So I remember having thisconversation and it was me and
another person from our shop.
She really loved law firmlockstep promotion as associates.
As long as I stayed around,I was guaranteed to move up.
I said the thing I really hated aboutthe law firm was the lockstep promotion
because no matter how good a jobI did I was basically constrained.
She saw it as a floor andI saw it as this ceiling.
It's time for us to start thinking abouthow we take the lid off and the people
(19:30):
who think like that are going to getamazing outcomes from these things.
All I want from my law firms is to payless money, and I hope they use more AI
tools so they can give me more fixed fees.
I think we're going to see moreand more companies wanting to get
a return on their AI investments.
AI is not cheap, and I thinklarger, midsize in-house legal
teams saying to themselves howcan I get my return on investment?
(19:53):
Maybe that means having feweremployees in my legal department.
Instead of having a team of 10 people fora practice group, if they're embracing AI
tools, maybe you only need eight people.
That's a trend we're gonna see moreof this year and moving forward.
We're going to see some legalteams, year over year, their budgets
(20:14):
may stay flat or they may reduce.
I don't know if you're going to see a lotof legal teams whose budgets are going to
really increase over the next year or two.
Where do you see the legalmarket headed in 2026?
I hope we train the next generation thatthey shouldn't hide behind developing
(20:34):
technical expertise like we mighthave gotten to if we worked at a firm.
You got to put your head down andlearn the mechanics of practicing law
and doing the grunt work to try toteach you that foundation to build on,
and then worry about how to advocate,how to communicate with your clients
(20:55):
who are often in-house counsel, howto develop a reputation as being a
trusted advisor to start connectingthe dots and actually adding value.
I saw a lot of law firm associateshide behind that development of their
expertise in the law, but not how togo to court, not how to win and argue
motion, not how to develop a trustedrelationship with a client, so the client
(21:20):
would call them first and would rely onthem increasingly to help them, muddle
through some of these complexities.
This is an opportunity for the youngerassociates and younger in-house
counsel to start developing thoseskills earlier now that some of
the heavy lift can be done by AI.
Of course, you need to learn your craft,you need to understand the practice
(21:44):
of law, how to be strategic, andadd strategic value to the business.
But that will come sooner than ithas for the previous generation.
So I'm still optimistic, but onlyif we have a group of legal leaders
like us who are willing to go outand message, that's what we need.
Today, we need law firm attorneys tobe able to show up and give us options
(22:13):
that are business friendly, thatmove us forward, not to equivocate,
not to bury us in complexity, notto send us three-page memos by email
that don't get us to an answer.
And in this role, that becomesreally critical because I can't sit
there and revert back to being asecond year, third year and try to
(22:33):
parse through a senior associate'sthree-page memo about this murky area
we're in and help give us guidance.
That's not the jobanymore, if it ever was.
Education is a fundamental issue, but someskills are going to remain foundational,
and some are not going to be skills atall that you need to be an attorney.
(22:57):
We're also seeing therise in the use of ALSPs.
Document review used to bedone by first-year associates.
I think it's been separated out from thelaw firm into document review specialists.
The technology's going to allowfor this kind of bifurcation of
duties between what's done in yourtraditional law firm versus ALSP.
That'll be interesting over the courseof the coming years how the definition
(23:20):
of what is an attorney at a law firmitself changes and maybe some of these
skills go away, but then of course newskills, new competencies get added, and
that definition itself shifts and changeswhat the education paradigm is as well.
Thank you all so very much.
This is awesome.
I hope that you all have wonderfulholidays with your families and I really
(23:40):
appreciate your time and consideration.
Thank you for listening to theReinventing Professionals Podcast.
Visit reinventing professionals.com orari kaplan advisors.com to learn more.
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