And now the fourth and final part of Artificial Lawyer’s predictions for 2025, which include: Helena Hallgarn at VQ, Noah Waisberg of Zuva, Cem Ucan at Leya, Catriona Wolfenden at Weightmans, Zach Abramowitz of Killer Whale Strategies, James Quinn of Clarilis, Matthew Leopold from LexisNexis, Paul Walker at iManage, Eric Laughlin at Agiloft, and Cristin Traylor at Relativity.
There’s a lot of positive energy here to take us into the year ahead. Enjoy!
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Cem Ucan, Legal Engineer, Leya
Product sophistication will increase: As the industry matures, legal tech products – especially those in Legal AI – will continue to evolve. Increased engineering and design resources will lead to more robust, feature-rich platforms. In 2025, we can expect more efficient iterations of existing products, with faster completion times and expanded use cases.
Legal AI will advance further: The continued development of foundational models will make Legal AI systems even more intelligent and intuitive, with the potential to drive significant improvements in legal processes.
Adoption and utilization challenges: The biggest hurdle to achieving a more accessible, humane, and effective legal industry will remain the slow pace of adoption and utilization of legal tech solutions. While the technology itself will advance, widespread uptake across the industry will take time.
Market growth but gradual change: Although the Legal AI market will grow in 2025, we are still a long way from achieving critical mass. This means that while the potential for transformation is clear, it will take time to see broader systemic changes.
The billable hour challenge: While there’s a lot of buzz around transforming the legal industry, particularly in terms of moving away from the billable hour model in the U.S., we are still a couple of years away from seeing this shift. 2025, much like 2024, will likely be a year of experimentation and noise, but we’re still a few steps away from a major industry-wide transformation.
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Catriona Wolfenden, Innovation Manager, Weightmans
I hope we focus more on the people and process side of innovation, in particular how we use tech and provide solutions to lawyers and clients at their time of need and in a format that they want. I think we need to think a bit harder about just because we can do something from a technological perspective should we and I hope we focus on this in 2025. Should some R&D remain just as that until we’ve overcome being able to more easily scale it or make it more usable in the ‘real’ world, being in a format that users want (should everything be a chatbot?!). Have we really thought hard enough about reviewing and updating processes and the people side of change management and how we upskill our people? Do we need to do more to ensure we explain what tech is good at and crucially what it isn’t so that we can maintain levels of user trust. We underestimate the people side of innovation in 2025 at our peril!
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Helena Hallgarn, Virtual Intelligence VQ
I believe we will see a further transformation of the legal industry in 2025, driven by the following three key predictions:
1. Legal Tech as a Core Component of Business Development
The growing interest in AI within the legal sector will act as a gateway to a broader adoption of legal tech solutions. As generative AI and other technologies demonstrate their ability to optimize workflows, reduce costs, and enhance decision-making, legal tech will become a more natural and integral part of business development strategies across the industry.
2. Increased Access to Affordable and Accessible Legal Services
AI’s transformative power will extend beyond efficiency to fundamentally improve access to legal services. As highlighted in global initiatives such as RocketLawyer and local efforts like Lawrence in Sweden, AI-driven tools will make legal assistance more affordable and widely available. This trend is grounded in the idea that “everything in the legal begins with a conversation,” with AI facilitating better client interactions and service delivery.
3. Integrated Legal Ecosystems and Knowledge Sharing
The concept of an integrated legal ecosystem will gain traction as silos between in-house teams, external counsel, and other stakeholders break down. Initiatives like Sweden’s Legal Transformation Network will lead the way in fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing within the sector. These ecosystems will promote partnerships between law firms and in-house teams, positioning firms as strategic business partners and also accelerate innovation by pooling expertise and insights across organizations.
Such integration will not only enhance efficiency but also enable a more holistic approach to tackling complex legal challenges, ultimately redefining the role of legal professionals.
Conclusion
Considering the greater focus on tech and knowledge sharing, we will at the same time, realise that the human element will remain central. This will ensure that the legal profession continues to deliver value through empathy, creativity, and a forward-thinking mindset.
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James Quinn, CEO, Clarilis
Predicting the future. High risk, given that we only have one year for these to come true. Let’s see if we can pick some winners:
- LLMs and GenAI more generally will remain squarely at the centre of conversations. We will learn more, continue to be fascinated by the possibilities, absorb more vocab. and add to our list of acronyms (some merely to obfuscate the simplicity of what is going on under the hood).
- Deterministic systems will do battle with stochastic systems for your Legal Tech use cases. Many problems that are brought to innovation to be ‘solved by GenAI’ will be better solved by well-established Legal Tech, such as document automation. People will say ‘horses for courses’ a lot in 2025.
- There will be a crisis of ROI in relation to GenAI tools once the, ‘we need some of that GenAI’ phase has passed and initial licence terms expire. This will lead to more focus on specific use cases for GenAI, rather than the Swiss army knife approach.
- Budgets for GenAI (if currently separated out from Legal Tech) will merge into a single Legal Tech/tech budget as an acknowledgement that spend should be directed to solving problems faced by the relevant firm, rather than to deploy a particular category of technology.
- Content and data will once again prove themselves to be king (and queen).
- Differentiating Legal Tech GenAI tools from Microsoft Co-Pilot and law firm LLM wrappers will be key to gaining traction within law firms.
- Legal Tech funding of all types will surge as interest rates fall.
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Noah Waisberg, CEO, Zuva
What I think will happen in legal tech in 2025: Most years (in legal tech, not necessarily in world affairs!) have a lot in common with the one that came before.
In legal tech, I expect to see: even more new companies, more funding, more features, more partnerships, more acquisitions. More hard work pushing adoption at hourly-billing law firms, who will remain mostly ambivalent about efficiency tech.
Something small I would like to see happen in legal tech in 2025: Here’s something achievable: as a community, there is lots more movement towards measuring legal AIs. This is great. But evaluation metrics have a bunch of room to get more sophisticated.
‘Senior lawyer happiness with results’ seems like the most popular measure. Senior lawyer happiness is an appealing measure for a bunch of reasons (including it works as a measure across disparate tasks, and it’s relatively easy to measure) but it seems more like a measure of vibes than reality. For example, senior lawyers who thought their ChatGPT-generated briefs were good when filed in court.
In 2025, it would be great to see continued comparison of legal AIs coupled with progress in how legal AIs get measured. The best measures are those where tech gets tested in lifelike situations, with items like users’ speed and accuracy changes tracked.
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Zach Abramowitz, Founder, Killer Whale Strategies
Legal tech funding doubled in 2024 according to CB Insights. I expect this space to remain red hot and next year the amount invested will again double. Why? Because lawyers have clearly shown heavy appetites for AI adoption, even if the first generation of AI tools have not always lived up to expectations. This combination of readiness to adopt but currently unsatisfied is a golden opportunity for founders to iterate upon what’s already been done in the space, but do it better. This will be legal’s MySpace to Facebook moment.
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Matthew Leopold, Head of Brand, UK, LexisNexis
By 2025, law firms will strike a careful balance between AI investments and a focus on their lawyers. With AI handling the routine and time-consuming work, its real value will start to emerge in the amplification of human expertise, enabling lawyers to channel their energy into empathy, creativity, and strategic thinking.
Training will prioritise emotional intelligence and ethical oversight, shaping lawyers into trusted advisors who can partner seamlessly with AI to deliver human advice quickly and effectively. The firms that thrive will be those that recognise AI not as a substitute for lawyers, but as a tool that amplifies their uniquely human strengths. AI investment will grow, but will be balanced with more investments in talent.
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Paul Walker, Global Solutions Director, iManage
The prompt revolution – this is how enterprises will master generative AI in 2025
In 2024, we watched generative AI evolve in sophistication. Today it can churn out everything from compelling text to intricate images and complex software code. Yet and perhaps curiously, many enterprises find themselves struggling to harness the full potential of tools like Microsoft Copilot, arguably the most advanced and comprehensive generative AI tool available. User error perhaps?
The art of unlocking the full power of generative AI lies in the art of crafting the perfect prompt. The more specific and well-defined the query, the more useful the output. Prompts are truly the last mile connections linking employees to the knowledge residing in the organisation for informed and faster decision-making.
Recognising the need for this critical link between the technology and the user, prompt engineering and prompt management will emerge as a generative AI best practice in 2025. Enterprises will carefully develop and curate prompts running into the 100s and 1000s, covering a wide range of common and specialised queries. This shift towards enterprise-level prompt engineering will transform the way employees interact with AI tools. With a mere click of a button, they will select from a menu of pre-engineered prompts, each tailored to extract specific insights or generate particular types of content.
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Jon Fowler, Managing Director, Data Solutions at Secretariat
AI-generated information will increasingly infiltrate legal reviews. Lawyers must be prepared to identify, evaluate, integrate, and defend the use of AGI in their workflows. This necessitates the ability to distinguish between human and AI-generated content, assess potential biases and inaccuracies in AGI, and navigate the legal and ethical implications of AI usage in legal processes. To effectively adapt, legal professionals must invest in AI education, training, and tool implementation. Prioritizing data privacy and conducting regular reviews and audits of AI systems is essential to ensure compliance and maintain oversight.
Beyond basic summarization, Generative AI models will increasingly be used to tackle more complex tasks like automated timeline generation and drafting legal documents. This will significantly boost efficiency and productivity, freeing legal professionals to focus on strategic work. However, ensuring the accuracy and reliability of AI-generated content will remain paramount. Legal professionals must also navigate the ethical and legal implications of AI in legal practice. By proactively addressing these challenges, the industry can harness the power of generative AI to drive innovation and achieve superior outcomes.
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Eric Laughlin, CEO, Agiloft
In our increasingly polarized world, a new front will emerge which will be a key issue for attracting and retaining top talent… are you committed to remote, or sliding towards office based Job seekers will be increasingly sceptical that ‘hybrid” isn’t just another way of saying “we’ll soon be welcoming you back to the office full-time.”
As CLM systems evolve into the backbone of legal operations and strategic business planning, experienced admins will become worth their weight in gold. With their hands-on expertise, akin to Salesforce admins, they’ll optimize workflows, enhance data management, and drive innovation. Businesses will fiercely compete to recruit and retain that indispensable talent, making 2025 the year of the CLM admin.
AI will become the legal department’s secret weapon to combat burnout and talent attrition. By automating tedious tasks like contract review and document analysis, AI empowers lawyers to focus on the strategic, creative work that truly ignites their passion. This isn’t about efficiency; it’s about improving mental health, work-life balance, and overall job satisfaction. A happier, healthier legal team is a more productive and innovative one. We’ll see even more teams embrace AI as a tool to enhance careers, build a thriving legal department, and retain competitive advantage.
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Cristin Traylor, Senior Director, AI Transformation & Law Firm Strategy at Relativity
The legal sector often lags when adopting new technology, but the e-discovery industry is hungry for change. No lawyer wants to be the first to argue before a judge as to why they should be able to use generative AI for tasks like document review, but these experts are itching to integrate new technology into their daily e-discovery work to simplify and speed up time-consuming processes.
In 2025, validation workflows for e-discovery review and production using generative AI will likely become standard in the industry as legal professionals finally come to some sort of consensus on what this means. It will be even more important for both sides of the “V” to be reasonable in their approach, so that they don’t inadvertently stunt the use of this technology, which would set back efficiency, consistency, and better outcomes for years.
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That’s all folks!
Thanks very much to everyone for sharing their thoughts on what will happen in 2025!
I’ll be sharing some of my own thoughts in a couple of days……
Update: …..in fact, once I got started on setting out my thoughts for the future it started to turn into a massive assortment of ideas and prognostications that are clearly going to need a series of dedicated think pieces for each subject area. In which case, keep a look out for them in 2025!