The Real Reason Legal Tech Finally Has Lawyers' Attention
This post may seem cynical, so let’s get the most controversial statement out of the way: lawyers don't give a crap about technology.
I know is a brutal opener for those of us who work in legal tech, so let us step through what we are observing in legal services.
What Lawyers Actually Care About
Lawyers care about one thing: delivering results to their clients.
Technology is just a means to an end. For private pratice lawyers, let’s assume the end is making money.
As much as we want to romanticize the legal profession, private practice lawyers are running businesses. (the rest of this blog post will focus on only private practice lawyers)
Think about some examples of what lawyers actually need to do.
A transactional lawyer needs to negotiate favorable outcomes and draft airtight documents.
A litigator needs to prepare compelling submissions and tell a winning story to the judge or jury.
An advisory lawyer needs to interpret the law correctly, spot exceptions, and research exhaustively to ensure there are no loopholes.
It's all about delivering an output that solves the client's problem. So when you break it down, lawyers in private practice care about solving client problems in order to satisfy the underlying revenue needs of their businesses:
How do I not lose my client?
How do I win more work from my client?
How do I win the next client?
That's it. That's the whole game, commercially speaking.
The Relationship Economy
Here's the thing about winning clients in law: the market is incredibly fragmented, which means most buyers don't know where to look for a lawyer. Clients don't Google "best M&A attorney near me." They ask someone they trust.
Legal work is won through relationships and referrals. When someone needs legal help, they turn to the expert in their life and say, "Hey, I need help with this." And that person says, "You need to talk to this lawyer."
Much as it sounds like a scene from The Godfather, it may very well a good approximation. The mafia is a microcosm of how social circles work. Building and maintaining that network is what matters first and foremost to the successful lawyer. Technology is not part of the revenue side of the equation.
So, when technologists approach lawyers with their shiny new tools, nine times out of ten (or maybe 99 times out of 100), a lawyer is simply going to say, "I don't care." This is because technology does not win relationships. Technology is a cost.
The Traditional Leverage Model
But here's what lawyers at law firms have historically cared about on the cost side of the equation: associates.
Associates were the most important resource in a law firm. They were probably the most expensive thing law firms ever paid for, and they were essential. These junior and mid-level lawyers were the brains, hands, feet, and body of the operation. They did the grunt work - the document review, the initial drafts, the research, the due diligence. They were the leverage at law firms.
The business model of law firms was built on leverage: partners would win the work, associates would do most of it, and the firm would bill for all those hours at rates that generated healthy margins. Firms could flex up and down by hiring or firing associates based on demand.
This was always the case… until recently.
The Slow March of Automation
Technology started creeping into legal work even before generative AI showed up in ChatGPT in November 2022. Automation could save time on routine tasks. We saw this with in-house legal teams, where they built systems that let the commercial teams self-serve on basic questions, leaving only the difficult legal problems to be triaged to lawyers. Private practice adopted technology too: document assembly tools that could generate first drafts from templates, knowledge management systems, and project workflow platforms.
These earlier eras of technology did not really spark lawyers' imaginations. IT and Innovation teams at law firms had always struggled to get lawyers to adopt any technologies. Change was friction, and the benefits did not appear to offset the effort required.
Before November 2022, most lawyers did not give a crap about technology.
Then Something Changed
Generative AI arrived, and suddenly, lawyers' imaginations were sparked.
There was suddenly FOMO, and perhaps other fears. There was perhaps the fear that if you don't adopt generative AI, it's going to replace you: “AI can do it.”
Lawyers grappled with this concept for a while. Frankly, they're still grappling with it in 2025.
But here's what became obvious very quickly: despite the jagged frontier of quality and capability, generative AI can do a lot of the grunt work that junior associates used to do.
The accessibility to this new era of technology changes everything.
The New Leverage Equation
Now there's a different equation on the cost side. The leverage doesn't come just from associates and more bodies being thrown at solving a client’s problem. The new leverage potentially comes from using AI to replace some of that work.
Law firms have two things they can flex up and down with relative ease and low transformation costs: people and AI.
Since, often, firms complain about being short-staffed; and since, often, firms complain about how expensive humans are, AI was explored in law firms. Quietly, and sometimes unspokenly, a question was being asked, “is AI ready to replace people?”
The answer is that we are already seeing this happen at the fringes at many law firms. Partners who previously would ask junior lawyers to do document reviews or prepare initial drafts are now going directly to the IT team or innovation team, asking them to use "AI magic" to do the work that associates used to do. Then, the partner reviews the AI outputs themselves.
This was a subtle change in habits, a transformation happening in real time.
Four Ways to Get Work Done
Think about it this way: the legal work has to be done by someone or something. Client generally don’t care how work is done, as long as it is done well.
Law firms have four options:
The partner does it themselves (expensive, doesn't scale)
A junior lawyer does it (the traditional solution, but expensive and you need to recruit and train them)
Outsource to an ALSP or legal service provider (cheaper, but there are quality concerns)
AI does it (potentially cheap, potentially scalable, but we are still figuring it out)
The transformation is already happening, but what's uncertain is the new equilibrium. Nobody knows the full extent of what AI can reliably do, yet. So, the boundaries are being tested.
Now, Law Firms Pay Attention
This all comes back full circle: partners don't give two craps about technology per se, but partners care that there is a new way to deliver work to their clients.
The harsh truth is that generative AI can RELATIVELY EASILY be a replacement for human capital.
That's why AI is different from other legal tech innovation that came before it. This era of AI is not just a tool to help lawyers work faster or better - it is a potential replacement for the most expensive and important resource in the traditional law firm model.
Can generative AI reliably do this yet? As at October 2025, not yet.
Does it feel like there's a real solution on the horizon? Absolutely!
And that's why so much money is being poured into legal tech. That's why lawyers, who are notoriously resistant to change, are actually paying attention this time. Lawyers can feel the change.
In our view, the law firms to crack the formula on how to leverage AI properly, to scale it, to win more work from clients, and to scale AI nearly infinitely (replacing things that historically needed expensive human capital)… these law firms are going to be the winners in the next generation of legal services.
The $100 billion question is: What do law firms need to do to reach that point? That's an open question we're going to answer another time.
