Champions and challengers
What are the words on the street for legal geeks right now? I am hearing about champions – the AI champions driving adoption, as well as witnessing what feels like a legal GenAI vendors championship with Harvey and Legora vying for pole position. And there are new challengers too in an AI-first world.
GenAI is creating challengers for legal services and legal tech with new tools, roles and ways of working and for the legal business model with the realisation that firms will have to find new ways to price AI-powered or AI-augmented services. We are seeing challenger legal services models emerging, in the form of AI-first law firms, and there is real evidence that legal AI is ascending the value chain, moving beyond tasks to roles. But let’s not get too carried away with GenAI, as cognitive offloading has also created an annoying new challenge!
AI paralegals
September saw more evidence that GenAI is replacing paralegals and junior associates. Kennedys is redesigning its training for junior lawyers because AI has automated entry-level associate tasks. And it is using Spellbook to support training with simulated scenarios and AI-assisted drafting exercises – which means AI is taking on training roles too. And AI paralegal Wilson, which claims to operate 5x faster than first-year associates at major law firms has seen increased take-up by corporate legal teams. And as Wilson opened up its platform to public access, Freshfields announced a redundancy consultation involving paralegals in Manchester. Without undue anthropomorphisation, this surely raises the question of pricing and whether this type of GenAI assistant – that works as part of a legal team – can be accounted for as headcount rather than as part of IT budget?
Harvey's Reddit debacle
Harvey has been in the news because of a negative Reddit thread! I was puzzled by what I consider an immoderate amount of coverage – including by some respected commentators and publications – of a post by an anonymous Redditor criticising a well-funded, successful company. I wonder whether this is a disgruntled former employee (they say they are ‘just a lawyer’ and Harvey employs a lot of lawyers) or someone who has somehow been impacted negatively by their firm adopting it. Or could it be a sophisticated guerilla marketing campaign, bearing in mind that software development company Astronomer was almost unheard of until its former CEO was caught on the Coldplay kiss cam? Harvey is well-known and regularly in the media, but for a few days it got more news coverage than its arch rival Legora and a lot of support on social media. Even if this was a genuine attempt to tarnish Harvey’s reputation, notwithstanding that it is being used by major law firms, corporations and national institutions, was it necessary for Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg to respond to it on LinkedIn, or was this a novel way of publishing the company’s impressive usage and renewal stats?
Scratchgate
On the topic of tarnished reputations – and surfaces – September’s Apple iPhone 17 launch was unusually low key. Notwithstanding the ultra-thin iPhone Air impressing some, the general feeling of disappointment led to a $112bn drop in Apple’s market value. Although this has now recovered, demand for iPhone 17 is already cooling and according to a UBS survey the iPhone upgrade cycle has reached 35 months in the US. The Technology Express observes that this sharp decline highlighted the market’s sensitivity to product announcements and investor expectations. Could this be reflected in legal tech, which has seen major funding announcements in AI start-ups and scale-ups in recent months?
The most significant disappointment around iPhone 17 related to AI, as Apple delayed its major Siri overhaul until 2026, and was exacerbated by ‘Scratchgate’ – reports that the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max aluminium unibodies are already getting scuffed, which might be a reason not to upgrade if you don’t use a phone case. I am in the market for new AirPods and I am looking forward to testing the Live Translation feature, although this raises questions of what happens to the data. (NB The Live Translation feature is not available for EU Apple accounts).
AI legal platforms?
How come agentic AI platforms Harvey and Legora are racing towards global domination of the legal tech space? While GenAI/agentic AI seems to be everywhere, what differentiates these relative newcomers from other legal tech providers right now (perhaps except legal information giants Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis) is the number of lawyers they are hiring. The lawyer hiring spree could be to balance their exceptional AI prowess with legal expertise, so that their tools address real pain points across a broad range of legal work and continue to lead the market. Equally, it could support a different strategic ambition: eventually to build a platform that provides AI-powered legal services that also have a human in the loop, and they are currently hiring those humans? This would make sense as a next step given that both Anthropic and OpenAI are building contract analysis agents https://openai.com/index/openai-contract-data-agent/
This relates to another emerging trend in the form of a new category of AI-first law firms – law firms that employ human lawyers but are built on an AI platform. Here the UK appears to be leading the way. In May, Garfield Law was the first law firm authorised by the SRA to use AI to provide legal services, which supports legal processes like debt recovery, and September saw the first ever acquisition of a traditional law firm by an AI platform when legaltech platform Lawhive acquired conveyancing firm Woodstock Legal Services, having raised $40 million in Series A funding last December.
Workslop
As more people are using AI, expediency isn’t always leading to productivity. It is, however creating even more terminology and there is now a name for the random AI generated content that nobody loves – Workslop! It may sound like a town in the East Midlands or a derogatory term for lunch in the office canteen, but no, it’s AI generated work content that “masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task”. The term was coined by Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp Labs, whose research found that 40% of respondents had received workslop in the last month. Workslop damages productivity because it “shifts the burden of work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct or redo the work,” which costs time and money and damages workplace and business relationships. Workslop is a fun term, but it highlights the danger of leaning too hard on Copilot, especially when under pressure.
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Written by Joanna Goodman, tech journalist
Photo credit (Joanna): Sam Mardon
