On the first day of Legalweek, a conference where thousands of lawyers gather to hobnob with their peers and explore the latest tech, Max Junestrand, clad in a black overcoat that highlighted his 6-foot-3-inch stature, stepped out of his hotel, ready to seize the day.
Long viewed as Luddites, law firms and corporate lawyers have begun to adopt artificial intelligence to deliver better service faster and cheaper. This has led to a Cambrian explosion of startups trying to sell tools for drafting contracts and tracking billable hours. Junestrand’s startup, Legora, helps legal professionals work smarter with a digital workspace built on top of large language models.
Earlier in the day, Legora jacked up its battle with a chief competitor by announcing in the trade papers that it had signed Goodwin, a leading law firm for tech deals, as a client. It also opened a new office in New York City, the Swedish-born company’s first outpost outside Europe. Later in the day, Junestrand would join his employees in Times Square to watch Legora’s logo light up the iconic Nasdaq MarketSite screen.
“We don’t build Legora so law firms can check the box on doing AI,” Junestrand said, sitting at Legora’s event booth. “We want to transform and rethink what it means to do great legal work.”
‘Lawyers are dinosaurs’
At Legalweek at the New York Hilton Midtown, artificial intelligence was on trial, scrutinized with the precision of a shark litigator. Behind closed doors, lawyers spoke on panels about the coming “death of legal busywork” and the costs of fake legal cases making their way into real briefs. In the exhibition hall, software engineers wearing slacks and pencil skirts tried to woo lawyers with promises to shave off hours of work without killing the billable hour.
I learned that Junestrand, the Legora founder, has an uphill battle ahead of him. Selling software to lawyers isn’t the same as shilling to sales reps or programmers. Lawyers work mostly out of documents. Before the arrival of large-scale language models, software wasn’t very good at extracting data from text. So the tools weren’t all that useful.
Junestrand said the advent of large models trained mostly on textual data changed everything. Now, these models can parse and understand complex legal documents, streamlining tasks like legal research and contract review. But for all the hype around virtual paralegals at Legalweek, numerous lawyers said the adoption of the tech has been slow.
“Lawyers are dinosaurs,” an employment lawyer said over a catered lunch of beet salad and deli sandwiches. The Philadelphia attorney said when she gets a contract by email, she likes to print it and mark it up with a pen. When she’s done, she files it away. That’s how she’s been doing things since the dictaphone.
Tech savants want to work with lawyers like them
Later in the week, dozens of attendees poured into a dimly lit conference room for a panel discussion on how legal teams can start using artificial intelligence. Panelist Amy Sellars, an attorney at the business law firm Gunster, told lawyers to ask vendors for demos and make it easy for people in their firms to experiment with new tools.
“Lawyers need to wake up,” said Todd Itami, an attorney at the large legal defense firm Covington & Burling, saying that learning to use artificial intelligence was “imperative” for their success.
Younger lawyers may be more receptive to Itami’s call to action. Aaron Crews, a partner at the global law firm Holland & Knight, places lawyers on a bell curve with early adopters and laggards on the far ends and the rest in the middle. Law students and junior associates often try new products before most others.
The tech-savvy standouts in their programs, according to Crews, are likelier to want to work for firms that take a friendlier stance toward new tech. This means the top firms won’t be sought after for long if they fall behind the times.
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