Sam Oh
CEO & Co-Founder
Why tech changes law forever
As AI systems and other technologies continue to evolve and become more commonplace, lawyers are understandably investigating how these developments will impact their practice. Legal tech is reshaping how legal work is organized, who creates value, and what clients expect from their lawyers. What follows are specific developments that are crucial to the future of the industry.
Law is moving from documents to systems
Historically, legal practice centered on documents. Legal tech is shifting the unit of work from the document to the workflow. Drafting, review, filing, and analysis are increasingly structured, repeatable, and connected. This reduces errors, improves consistency, and makes work easier to scale across matters and teams.
Automation is eliminating busy work, not legal judgment
Modern tools automate repetitive tasks like first drafts, formatting, issue spotting, and document review. The result is that lawyers spend more time on analysis and advocacy and less time on mechanical tasks that add little strategic value. This allows lawyers to hone their craft by spending time on what matters.
Small teams can now operate at scale
Legal tech acts as a force multiplier. Lean firms and boutiques can handle more matters, respond faster, and deliver high-quality work without adding headcount. This is changing competitive dynamics: clients increasingly choose firms based on expertise and responsiveness rather than size alone, and large firms face pressure on traditional leverage models.
Knowledge is becoming institutional rather than individual
Instead of legal knowledge living in partners’ heads, scattered folders, or old emails, it’s increasingly captured in centralized, searchable systems. Prior work can be reused and improved over time. As a result, firms become smarter as organizations, with faster onboarding and less disruptive departures.
AI is influencing how lawyers think, not just what they write
Beyond drafting, AI tools are being used to analyze patterns across cases, test arguments, flag inconsistencies, and compare strategies. This encourages more deliberate reasoning, stronger narrative coherence, and better-supported positions across filings and matters as lawyers engage with these tools critically.
Client expectations are rising
As speed, transparency, and predictability become technically possible, they become expected. Clients want faster turnaround, clearer communication, visibility into status, and fewer billing surprises. Legal tech enables this shift and makes it hard to justify the old way of working.
Although these developments are changing the nature of legal work, legal tech isn’t replacing lawyers. Rather, it works to compress timelines, raise baseline quality, and shift value away from raw labor and toward strategy. Firms that adapt get leverage; firms that don’t feel increasingly outdated.
