AI vendors show up at every conference with marketing material touting how they serve the vast majority of the Vault 100. And then their direct competitor makes the same claim. And so does another product that also bolted on an AI tool. We might have all become lawyers to avoid math, but even we can tell that it all adds up to a lot more than 100 percent.
Because, for Biglaw, exclusivity isn’t necessarily a priority. Veterans of the online legal research wars of the early 2000s remember that the big firms will pay for all the products and the real fight is over capturing the hearts and minds of the junior associates who have to open one program or the other. If that’s once again the field of contest, then vendors who spend their time touting technical benchmarks are fighting the wrong war.
If vendors need to capture the attention of the end user, the technology isn’t as crucial as the experience.
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Lawyers are not prompt engineers. Nor are they all hanging on the latest fad developments out of Silicon Valley. They want a productivity tool that gives them trusted, accurate answers and they’d prefer it in a way that is easy and intuitive. And part of that is building a system that’s not going to fight with the user — in particular, a product that isn’t going to try to take tasks out of the lawyer’s hands that only add more time-consuming, panicked double-checking on the back end.
That’s the ongoing divide between AI’s vibecheck and hard data. Lawyers have mostly come around to the idea that AI improves efficiency. And yet, nearly 60 percent of in-house counsel told ACC and Everlaw they hadn’t noticed savings from outside counsel using generative AI. 8am’s financial health report, drawn from several million bills, found hours per case going up in nearly every practice area tracked. Bloomberg Industry Group Chief Revenue Officer Kara DelVecchio described a Bloomberg Law event bringing in-house lawyers together with outside counsel to talk AI, with the client side all asking some version of “my bills went up 10%, where’s the efficiency?”
A lot of that efficiency is eaten up by lawyers haphazardly throwing AI at problems. DelVecchio explained that Bloomberg’s approach to AI has focused on constructing workflows that make sense for the industry. Citing the sentiment of a Biglaw CIO, she explained the firms want pre-built workflows — “here are the three things litigation attorneys do most” — rather than a model that lawyers can poke around trying to prompt. Armed with thousands of data points on attorney behavior, content usage, and sequencing, Bloomberg Law can construct the process that takes prompt engineering off the lawyer’s hands.
The conversation underscored that the legal AI conversation keeps creeping from the tools, to the context, and then to process. Every vendor resides somewhere different on that continuum, but as AI talk matures, it seems to move from “look what our tech can do” to “the tech is secondary to the context that we can provide” to “we build the processes that work for you.”
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You might say it’s more about being a consultant than a tech provider. Or you might say it’s the inevitable triumph of the user experience. It’s a bit of both.
Users come at the process point from different perspectives. We’ve seen small law clamor for bespoke solutions that can deliver AI power to the firm’s idiosyncratic approach. Big firms can’t countenance every lawyer building an individual solution. In fact, one CIO asked DelVecchio “how do I teach people to do the thinking we want them to do?” — a reminder that as AI takes over tasks, it’s also becoming the lens through which juniors learn the law.
But in both cases, the lawyers want processes more than tech. That’s not as exciting to the private equity investors throwing cash at AI development in a quest to build artificial general intelligence and finally replace the meat sacks cutting into their profits. Lawyers don’t have to care about that, they just need their teams to get answers without hallucinating all over the place.
Earning those lawyer eyeballs relies in part on a smooth experience. That’s not just a matter of a substantively sound outcome — though that’s critical — or a single-pane model that avoids constant toggling between tools — though the universe of plug-ins and connections will deliver that — but it’s an aesthetic that foregrounds a pleasant user experience.
Software has ethos too, and a good experience tells the user that the vendor built a quality product that they can open up and it won’t fight them. Building that into the product is going to be the key to long-term viability. Because lawyers are going to vote with their clicks and getting in the door isn’t going to matter if attorneys aren’t choosing to use the product.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.